Jon Jarvis: Are Our National Parks Being Set Up To Fail?

Speaker 1 0:00 The following is a production of wild idea media. Bill 0:05 And welcome back to the wild idea podcast, where we are exploring the intersection of human nature and wild nature. And welcome to the show. Once again, my co host not afraid to boast. Hello Anders. Oh, hi, Bill, how are ya I'm great. I am today I'm sitting in Spearfish, South Dakota. It is a beautiful, sunny day. Gonna be 62 so nice day. You ready for today's bonus edition of the pod conversation with John Jarvis, the 18th Director of the National Park Service. I bet you're as ready as Anders Reynolds 0:37 I am. I could not be more excited. This is a really fabulous guest, and I'm ready to dig into some of the current events that we're seeing with him. Absolutely Bill 0:46 before we we dig in with John, I did want to ask you a question. We seem to have this rhythm of asking each other questions. The day you graduated from high school, what were you convinced was your future? Anders Reynolds 0:59 Oh, that's a good question. I'm really curious what your answer is going to be on this Sylvia Plath talks about her life branching out before her like a green fig tree, and every tip of the branch having a fat purple fig on it that represents a different future. And I think I think I was a little bit like that. I think I didn't know where I would end up, you know, I guess I could have told you maybe I would be the first to invent the cyber truck, or maybe I was going to be the first American Pope. But those doors seem closed to me now, and I'm left playing second banana to you, but that was one of the figs. So I'm, I'm pretty happy. What about you? Did they have high school back then? Bill 1:43 Hey, we did have high school back then, absolutely, I was, think you may know this a little bit from like, when I was 10 and my parents first bought a pop up camper, I was convinced that I was going to work in public lands. I didn't know if I was going to wear the flat brim hat or wear the green pickle suit, as they call it for the Forest Service, but I 100% knew that, and when I graduated from high school, that was the trajectory. I was off to the Purdue School of Forestry at Purdue University. And I think you also know the rest that I woke up four years later with a degree in telecommunications and spent 25 years in broadcast media and college sports, and so you never know what you're going to be. But the reason I kind of wanted to ask you that question is I kind of want to bring it to our guest and welcome to the show. John Jarvis, the 18th director of the park service after a 30 year career leading up to that moment, John served as the director from 2009 to 2017 he currently serves as the chair of the board of advisors for the University of California Berkeley's Institute for parks people and biodiversity. John, thanks for joining us. I'm just curious, John, when you graduated from natural bridge High School, Did Did you know that the Park Service was in your future at that point? I did Jon Jarvis 3:00 not, if anything, I knew a lot more about the forest service than the Park Service, because I was a boy scout and our scout master was a Forest Service Ranger, and our house backed up against the George Washington National Forest, where I hunted and fished and and played. So I knew a lot about the Forest Service as public lands. The Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah were not far from me, but I think I knew then that I went to college, got a degree in biology. I wanted to work outside. That was the bottom line. I did not want to be in an office, in a lab or someplace I needed, I needed to be outside, and that ultimately led me to to the Park Service. Bill 3:48 I'm fascinated by your 40 year career in public service, and I love the outline of the 40 plus years with the Park Service. You begin in DC as an interpretive ranger, literally there on the mall, but your career sends you out to these most incredible corners of our country. Wrangle st Elias in Alaska, Craters of the Moon, one of one of the most unique units of the Park Service in Idaho, Mount Rainier. But eventually you come boomerang back to DC and end up as the director of the agency. And I'm just wondering how your time in those beautiful posts in Alaska and Idaho and Washington, and your time sort of leading the Northwest for the park service. How that helped, helped you inform your role as the director and supporting the staff and the places that were under your charge as the Well, I think Jon Jarvis 4:35 you know every park service employee and the agency is made up of career driven employees, mission driven employees, and I was one of those. They all in their heads say, Well, if I was director, this is what I would do. And and then all of a sudden, I was so I had to sort of think about that trajectory of experiences and being responsible. All for a particular park, like Mount Rainier or Bren state Elias. What that meant to those these resources, and how complicated that can be, what it means to the the gateway communities. I mean, it Craters of the Moon. We have little town of arco right outside rural conservative, but they love the park and their economic, economic benefits from being adjacent to the park. There's long traditions of activities and how can the park sort of interact with them. My experiences with the Native community, particularly in Alaska, and the Native Alaskans, there are long, 1000s, 10s of 1000s of years of association with these lands and the role of the Park Service in complicated issues talking about civil rights or civil war or climate change, that the Park Service has, in a sort of weird way, a fearlessness about it. And so when you come back to Washington and you're now dealing with an agency that's in 17 time zones and has 15,000 employees. A lot of it was about being pretty clear that the opportunity and responsibilities sort of are there, and a lot of it is about allowing the agency to be itself, to be to meet its mission, to meet with the public, tell a story, help the public enjoy the place, and to take actions that really preserve the place for the future. Because that's really what it's about. The Park Service has a very or optimistic future thinking mandate. We have to preserve these places unappeared for future generations, and that sort of I know what that meant. I know. I know really what that meant in at the level of detail, having been in the field, Bill 6:49 I don't want to gloss over your career, but it's hard in this time to not just immediately want to jump to you as a voice now for our national parks, now that you're out of public service, you know, recently, you co authored a piece in The Guardian about the current administration's attempt to privatize our national parks, and you lay out that it is clear that the plan is to privatize, to exploit for private profit our country's public lands. Today, we are celebrating a small win, and that the Rules Committee in the House withdrew selling public lands from the budget reconciliation process, but that does nothing to stem the fear of privatizing the operation of public comments. Are we still very much in danger? Am I right about that? Jon Jarvis 7:30 I think you are right about it. You know, I wrote that op ed as a warning to alert the public that the cumulative actions of this administration, from budgetary cuts to firing or forcing the retirement of over 1700 employees of the National Park Service, the proposal to close a lot of our central offices, our regional offices and these sort of field offices, Like the natural resource office in Fort Collins, Colorado, the RIF that is coming, the reduction in force, and then the $900 million cut proposed by the Trump administration. If you look at that cumulatively, you're setting the agency up to fail. And so we're going into summer season. There's no reason to think that another 300 million visitors won't come as they have come in the past. Just as a data point reference, 320 million visitors is more than all of Disney, all of national baseball, basketball, football, soccer and NASCAR combined, you're talking about roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States will come into the parks this summer, and so Secretary burgram has sent out an executive or Secretary order make everything look good facade management, just stop doing all the things that the Park Service normally does, which is stewardship of concert, of natural resources, visitor safety, activities, lots of things in the sort of the back of the house that the public doesn't see. But what the Secretary wants the public to do is to not notice that this is happening, and so you're setting the agency up for failure, and then they can declare victory, and they say, Well, look, the Park Service didn't do its job. So we have no other option, rather than to turn the cash cows, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain and others, over to the management by the private sector. And there's always been an interest out there by certain businesses to take on these cash cows and and turn them into profit centers, the unprofitable parks, which they identified as those that do not meet the national park standard, they'll defund or get. Rid of or theoretically they said, give them to the States, as if the states would actually take them. It's fascinating Anders Reynolds 10:05 hearing about your career, first as a conservationist, as a boy scout, then as a civil servant, and now primarily as an advocate, I wonder if you could speak to the tensions and how those roles relate to each other. You talked earlier about the Park Service's fearlessness and talking about civil rights and climate change, I can imagine that right now, many Park Service employees are balancing their material need to keep their job against the call for a principled dissent on a smaller scale. Well intentioned staff making tough decisions has always been inherent in the system, hasn't it, but it's so pronounced in this moment of time. Don't you think absolutely Jon Jarvis 10:48 This one's unprecedented in my experience. I mean, I worked under every president, starting with Carter, Reagan, the both Bushes, Clinton, Obama didn't work for, obviously, for Trump or Biden. And there were periods when there was at least threats of punishment when you spoke out. And there were directed reassignments of high profile individuals when they didn't, you know, abide by the direction that was coming from a particular administration. But this time it's, it's much more insidious and much more direct, that it has created a atmosphere of fear within the organization. And I mean, you think about, you know, if you're a federal employee, you have a retirement, you have kids in school, you have a spouse that may or may not be working within the local vicinity, you're living, you may own a home, all of that is at risk to an arbitrary decision to fire you because You spoke up about climate change or dei or objecting to a policy memorandum that's going to open up, you know, mining around Chaco or or whatever, putting in a pipeline, you know, lowering the standard for environmental protection, all of those kinds of things. In the past, superintendents have been willing to step up and and and take a hit, and there's classic examples in our history of those. Now it's different. It it's it's really falling on those of us that are kind of invulnerable. There were outside the system were retired, and we're not as as at risk. We're at risk from getting a lot of hate mail, but other than that, we're kind of untouchable. So I feel that the core values are still here for me and many, many of my colleagues who have retired, a lot of them at the coalition to protect America's national parks and MPCA and other organizations are having to speak up on behalf of those who cannot Anders Reynolds 13:04 so Bill brought up the reconciliation bill and the successful effort, effort by advocates and partners of the Park Service to turn back that effort to sell off a sizable chunk of public lands you you kind of anticipated a question we had for you when you were talking about facade management, I noticed that Secretary Burgum, in his testimony in front of the Senate last week called many Interior Department employees redundant. And what he meant there is, you know, there were these, these back office employees who were somehow, you know, less important than those the front line one. But I want to ask you about something else that happened in that testimony, Secretary Burgum was taking questions from senators about which parks were most at risk of being sold off, and his answer was that none of the 63 crown jewel national parks were at risk. But instead, doi was looking at quote, places that have almost no visitors. End quote, and he cited North Dakota's Knife River, Indian villages, National Historic Site. I'll quickly point out that Knife River gets more visitors annually than some of the crown jewel parks do. But then I'll ask, is this the right posture to take? Are some parks more deserving than others? I guess you can hear my skepticism in my tone. You know, numbers can't be a great way to measure this, because, as Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski pointed out, many of the Alaska sites are so remote and difficult to access that the you know, their numbers aren't anywhere as good as knife rivers are. Jon Jarvis 14:32 Visitation is not the right measure by which to determine the value of a unit of the national park system. It's not easy to become a unit of the national park system. It's kind of an exclusive club, right? So you've either got to get an act of Congress or a proclamation by a president to become a unit of the park system. Unfortunate, there's a there's kind of a mishmash of nomenclature. There are actually 19 different titles. There's national monuments, national. Historic battlefields, National Historic Sites, national parks, national recreation areas. You could go down this ad nauseum list those that nomenclature has no meaning. There's nothing implied in policy or statute that they are lesser than any other than a national park in title. It's just whatever Congress decided to call it at the time. And so first of all, if, and I've actually done the analytics on this, and if you bear with me for a second, I've actually taken a look. If you take the list of 430 park units, and you take out the national parks. There's 63, of them that carry that title. And then you take out, let's just say, all of the Alaska units, because they're they're kind of big and a little bit different. And you take out the ICONICS. So the National Mall, Mount Rushmore, independence, the Statue of Liberty. You sort of boil it down, there are around 270 remaining quote, unquote, national park units that do not, I would suggest, meet what burgerum suggested as a national park standard. And then you look at those analytically. So that group of so called, less than important national parks, they hosted 169 million visitors last year. They contributed 12 billion to the American economy in local spending. 150 of those units are in Republican districts, more than there's only 114 of them are in democratic districts. And these drive local economies. I mean, hotels, restaurants, guiding Outfitters, souvenir sales, arts and crafts. You know, all of that stuff is right there in that so this is, this is a distributed economy, not a local economy. Then you look at them as to who that what these parks are. There's a civil war battlefields, the Revolutionary War battlefields, all of the Civil Rights sites, Martin Luther King, Birmingham, Freedom Riders, Harriet Tubman, all of the women's rights sites, all of the African American sites, all of the Native American sites, Mesa Verde, knife, river, Hubble trading post, all of the Japanese American internment sites, Manzanar, Minidoka, tule, Lake, honouliuli, basically, you are gathering up the complete history of America and tossing it out the window, because these are the places. You know, I always say the Smithsonian tells the story of America through stuff. They have a lot of stuff in all of those places. We have the place. Park Service has the ground where American blood was shed to create the country that we have. And we tell that story through place, and if you eliminate those places you are, you're essentially revising the American experience, the American story of the contributions of African Americans and Asian Americans and women in the building of this country. That's a crime. As far as I'm concerned, what Anders Reynolds 18:19 an answer that is data. Bill, I love it. I want to add a little bit more to it, because I've seen reports saying, and we can link to those reports in the show notes, but I've seen reports saying that, if indeed we tried to divest ourselves of national park units in order to meet this $900 million reduction in the President's budget that you mentioned, we'd have to sell off the 310 quote, lowest funded of the 340 units in the system. And that list of 310 includes parks like arches in Utah, Death Valley in California, and Acadia in Maine. That is just an untenable divestment, if you ask me. So Bill 19:00 I'm going to shift from the threat of selling them off to, I guess, I want to help our audience understand and maybe you can help me parse out for audience where the line is between public private partnerships. And I ask this because I have wrestled myself with this line, and if I've ever crossed it, I ran two substantial nonprofits that help steward our nation's wilderness units, and occasionally, I was faced with agency employees wondering out loud if we were replacing a Federal workforce. I know you mentioned in The Guardian piece that there are for profit concessionaires, for example, operating within national parks. Let's help our audience understand the difference between public private partnerships and the outright privatizing our public lands for profit, that's Jon Jarvis 19:43 a good question. Bill. So basically, for the National Park Service, and now I'll speak specifically to to their their work, there are public visitor needs that are best provided by the private sector. People come to. To Yosemite. They want to stay in a hotel, they want to have a good meal, they want to ride a bus so they can park their car and not be jamming up the roads. They want to buy a souvenir. They may want to rent a boat. All of that stuff is better served by the private sector, and so the Park Service has the authority to gather up those activities, bundle them together, and put them out for bid. Private companies bid on those and they pay the Park Service a franchise fee. They take the profit, and the franchise fee is built into the contract. And so on an annual basis, the Park Service gets about, I don't know, roughly 120 to $200 million into the park service from those franchise fees. It's a billion dollar industry, but it's, it's and there's standards, it's activities that are both necessary and appropriate, necessary to provide for the public's enjoyment and appropriate, because there are lots of things the private sector would like to do that are inappropriate in national parks. It's not an amusement park. And so that that that has worked well. And then there's a whole group of partners, as you suggest, Bill with nonprofit organizations. In many cases, parks have a so called friends group that helps with that. But there are also a whole range of organizations that provide a variety of services for the park service. There's guides and outfitter groups. There are people that lead youth groups into the into the wilderness. There can be groups that come in and do trail work, clear the trails after storms, conservation, corps, groups, all of those kinds of things. To me, that's the beauty of it. It's basically taking a federal investment and leveraging it with partners where appropriate to accomplish the mission, and in doing so, particularly with working with public groups and nonprofits, you build a constituency, you introduce young people to the lifestyle, to the to their public lands, all of that's really great. I don't see any hair. What's different about this particular moment in time. Is not allowing the existing concessioners to take over the campground, which was run by the Park Service. This is turning the whole park. This would take the take Yosemite and say, we're going to let Six Flags run Yosemite, though no be any Rangers. They'll be employees of the private sector. I don't really know how that would work, but I can see there are advocates for that approach, and I think it'd be an unmitigated disaster for the both the resource, the park and the public. But I can see where this is headed? Bill 23:01 Yeah, it's interesting. Like, you gave that number sort of off the top 320 million visitors. And in some places I live adjacent to Glacier National Park, the visitation has become a challenge for the park service to be able to leave the park in its unimpaired condition, right? Like you have that long term mandate, and I think that's where the real wall has to go up, is, because if we're doing it for current generation profit, then we'll just start ignoring the leave it in an unimpaired condition, right? Like we won't see too many visitors, and visitors parking in in natural areas, instead of the, you know, the overly full parking lots to we'll just start ignoring that, because we'll see that as just another ticket, another ticket sold. And as opposed to, I think the great work, and I see the debates on mine right, like I, I live in northwest Montana, where some people think glacier belongs to them first, and then the rest of the country after that. And they, they don't understand the, you know, the ticketing system for driving the going to the Sun Road, for example, but, but what I see is the Park Service trying to leave this park for those visitors, kids and grandkids. And I think when you suddenly have a profit motive, a corporation who who has shareholder responsibility, you're gonna, there's no question, you're gonna start to ignore that, you know, leaving this in an unimpaired condition for generations to come. Am I thinking about that? Right? Jon Jarvis 24:23 You are interesting. You know, the Park Service in dealing with visitation, particularly to these highly popular parks, I've taken an example. I led a bunch of my college buddies a few years ago through the Red Rock countries of parks of Utah. We did the mighty five down there. And so we're getting ready to go into arches. And arches had implemented the reservation system to actually get in the gate. You could either do it online well in advance, or you could do it the night before. And I was able to get us a ticket in. I didn't use my influence. Uh, to, I mean, I was retired to to get a ticket to take us in the next day. And so we went in very orderly process of getting in the gate. The traffic was no longer backed all the way out to the highway, which it had been in the past. We get in. We go go in. I stopped in the visitor center. Unfortunately, I got outed spotted by a former employee, and she came over to me and introduced herself, and we were talking, and I said, so how's the new reservation system going? And she said, we no longer have fist fights in the parking lot over parking spaces. It was true. We drove around the park. We found a parking place in every overlook, at every Trailhead. No problem. People were happy. People having a good time, enjoying the park. You know, that's one of the downsides of being an old Ranger, is when you go to the park, you know, everybody's looking at the scenery. I'm looking at the visitors. I'm looking at what are they doing? What are they where are they from? Are they having a good time? Are they being safe? And so the Park Service has systems, and they're putting them in place, sometimes with local resistance, sometimes with political resistance from members of Congress. I mean, one of my favorite stories of going to a hearing Congressman McClintock from outside of Yosemite he says, Mr. Jarvis, how far does a visitor have to walk to get to a get an ice cream cone in Yosemite Valley? I was like, guess it depends on where you start. You know, these are, I mean, you're right that they're our incentive. The Park Services incentive for how we manage visitors is unimpaired for future generations, to err on the side of preservation and then put into place either time entry, transportation systems, physical infrastructure that guides the public to less sensitive sites, all of That's design elements. I mean, you look at the removal of the trails in the Mariposa Grove of gun Giant Sequoias at Yosemite, back it out to allow the public to go in and still experience the big trees. But doing it away that preserves the resource. Private sector is not going to have that incentive. That will be a reverse incentive. They'll they'll want to maximize Bill 27:21 right? So I'm going to hope you'll indulge, indulge my nerd, nerd moment here for a second. We've talked about a lot of heavy, heavy stuff here, because we are in a heavy moment. We're in a sort of a, I guess, a hinge point, maybe when it comes to our public lands. But I want to go back in your career a little bit, and your time at wrangle st Elias, and this is my wilderness nerd moment. I'm curious what that job was like, having the largest park service unit under your care, and for me, also the largest designated wilderness in the National Wilderness Preservation System under your care. How was that? And thank you again for coming on the podcast. I really wanna say thanks. It's been just so great to have you on here. You had some amazing numbers for us and our audience to think about. But could you maybe leave us for with sort of what that being in Alaska, and particularly Wrangell, St Louis, Elias, maybe a place a lot of people haven't heard of. It's a big and it's really, really big. Yeah, so Jon Jarvis 28:16 Wrangell said Elias is 13 million acres. It's about 25,000 square miles, same size as West Virginia, Switzerland, if you want to, you know, give a large comparison. It's mostly wilderness. There are still the native people who have been there for time immemorial and continued their subsistence activities. Ecologically, it's basically the Pleistocene. After the Ice Age pulls back, it's still got all the big mammals, bears and caribou and wolves and and visitations about 30,000 a year. So we're talking about very low visitation, very minimal. There's a small set of communities that we work with. I'll tell a couple Alaska stories. And I mean, one is, when you're managing park that that's big, you would think that's big enough, but salmon come from the Pacific up the Copper River and spawn in the millions in the park, but they go back to the sea. As as Fry, the birds come from the from the lower 48 to nest on the tundra. Caribou migrate in and out. And so you still recognize, no matter how big you are, your boundaries are porous, and so you have to think really think at the ecosystem scale, when you think about managing a place like orangle st Elias, and then you think about the community and the relationships with particularly with the Native Alaskans who. Have been the stewards of these lands for a very, very long time, and have a deep, deep, deep relationship with it and the wildlife upon which they rely. And so you have to become deeply respectful of that and to help that continue, because that's part of what wrangells wrangles is. I'll tell you a wilderness story. I took my son and a buddy, two buddies of mine, we did a backpack trip into wilderness. Was going to be a five day trip in. We were going to hike in for five days and then be picked up by Bucha plane and flow now, and we just happened to pick a route where the last guy that had done this route died. We wanted to go see where he died, Bill 30:44 a little bit on the line there. Jon Jarvis 30:47 So literally, when we we started out, my son was a teenager, we started, it started to rain immediately. We got out of the car, and it rained every day for five days straight, 24 hours a day, it rained. This is Alaska rain, so it's cold and wet and so and also, we probably did a dozen river crossings in the process. So we're it was rain was coming down and walk. We were crossing rivers, you know, up to our waist in some cases. And at the end of five days, or close to the end of the five days, we realized that we were not going to be able to get to the landing zone for this plate. We're gonna have to hike back out. And so as we were coming back, the rivers that we had crossed were all swollen from the rain, so we couldn't cross them. So we decided to go cross country. There's no trails here, so we're up on the side of a mountain. It's heavy, heavy Snowberry and slide alder. There's fresh Brown Bear scat pretty much everywhere. And we break out in on a plateau, on a on a big black water swamp, and we just have to cross it so we're, we're wading through water chest deep, with our packs on our heads, wading through, you know, like some picture out of, you know, the Vietnam War or something. And one of our buddies turns to my son, and he said, just let you know all future backpack trips will be better than this one. But it was a it was a good Alaska experience for him and for all of us. Bit of a bonding exercise. But yeah, yeah, to be in that environment and to see these incredible wild lands still pretty much intact, and they sort of set the bar. I think those of us that have worked up there say you you're never the same if you've worked in Alaska, wow, Bill 32:57 that's, I mean, what a story. I mean, I love Anders, and I talk a lot about, you know, wilderness calls for humility. It also calls for us to have to accept that we're going to be uncomfortable sometimes. And yet it's those uncomfortable moments that burrow deep, deep in our brain and in our psyche and and, you know, just, I can only imagine sort of how many times those stories come back from that story with, you know, that trip with your son, and you're literally following in the steps of a guy who didn't make it back out. I mean, there was a lot on the line on that hike, so thanks for sharing that with us. We've been just so fortunate to have you join us today, John, we've been visiting with John Jarvis. He's chair of the board of advisors at UC Berkeley's Institute for parks people and diversity. But what he really brought to us today was a real clear eyed vision from his time as the 18th director of the United States National Park Service, and his time now as an advocate at this moment and so John, thank you for thank you for illuminating important numbers, Important Facts, important direction that the park service operates under. It's really, I think, helpful for all of us, and I hope everybody's enjoying the conversation, but just thank you for being here today. Anders Reynolds 34:06 John, yeah, in our conversation with Senator Kaine last week, he made a point to say, the best advocates are able to speak both qualitatively and quantitatively, and I think your answers were a great example of that. So thanks for sharing that with us, and thanks for the time today. This was excellent. Yeah, Jon Jarvis 34:21 thanks, Anders. Thank you. Bill was great. Speaker 1 34:25 The wild idea is a production of wild idea media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds. 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