To witness our new Interior Secretary Sally Jewell in her element, it helps to find her outdoors, whether she’s hiking a trail, paddling a kayak, or climbing a mountain. I know because I’ve gotten to share a number of excursions with her over the eight years she has served on NPCA’s board of trustees, and it’s given me insight into her character.

Last year, for example, Sally was part of a small team of national park enthusiasts on an arduous climb up Mount Rainier. Four of us were climbing up the glaciers, persevering through snow, hail, rain, and fog as we negotiated many crevasses and steep snow ramps, all on a day with high winds and terrible visibility. Sally was focused, observant, exceedingly competent, and willing to make adjustments to our course as the weather (and finally lightning) managed to turn even worse. A good leader knows how to push limits while also listening to people and the surrounding environment to manage the risks and rewards of our decisions. I could not be more impressed with her skill and good judgment that day on the mountain.

For a great leader, however, it’s not always about getting to the top.

On a very different hike last October, a group of NPCA volunteers and staff members spent the afternoon with Sally at Acadia National Park. We started making our way along a trail with a significant drop-off on one side. Normally, the trail would not have been terribly difficult, but on this day, a recent rain had left the path slippery, and a member of our group understandably got nervous. Sally was the first to notice this person’s hesitation, and she immediately offered her arm, walking the hiker back down to a more comfortable spot on the trail. To me, this spoke volumes about Sally’s personality—it showed her sensitivity, her quickness to act, and her dedication to helping others, even if it means changing her own plans to take the most responsible action. It’s no wonder she has made such a successful career out of connecting people with nature—she gets nature and she gets people.

Now that the Senate has officially confirmed Sally as our nation’s next interior secretary, I can say without reservation that she is an ideal choice to oversee the National Park Service as it prepares for its centennial in 2016. Sally has the background and the vision to support America’s most beloved public lands as they enter their next century. As the head of one of our country’s major outdoor retailers, Sally also understands that investing in our national parks means supporting a whole economy of recreational opportunities that improves our health, connects us with nature, strengthens our families, and provides millions of jobs around the country.

Although the bulk of her career has been in the private sector, Sally has spent a great deal of time specifically addressing the needs of national parks—the issue closest to my heart. In addition to her years on NPCA’s board, she has served as a member of the National Parks Second Century Commission convened by NPCA in 2008, where she led efforts to better connect people to parks, reach diverse communities, and build a broad-based network of park and outdoor recreation advocates. She has been a strong supporter of President Obama’s America’s Great Outdoors initiative, and she has worked with former Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on the Bush Administration’s effort to enhance both public and private funding for our national parks.

When President Obama officially announced Sally’s nomination for the cabinet position, she joked with outgoing Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, “I’m going to do my best to fill those big boots of yours, but I think I might get lost in your hat.” It’s true; she has a great legacy to continue, and some sizeable footwear to fill. But I know she will work hard to ensure our public lands are preserved, protected, and more accessible for future generations to enjoy—and that’s something we all can celebrate.

This past weekend marked the one-year anniversary of the National Park Service’s Call to Action report, and a new opportunity to revisit the goals and policies guiding our national parks just four years shy of their centennial in 2016.

What is the Call to Action? Last year, on the 95^th birthday of the founding of the National Park Service, the agency celebrated its own birthday in a unique way. At an event staged at the historic Ford’s Theater in Washington, NPS released a report titled A Call to Action: Preparing for a Second Century of Stewardship and Engagement.

This report was written by the Park Service as a guide for the future of the agency, but also includes an invitation to its partners to commit to actions to move forward towards a shared vision for the parks for 2016 and the second century. Its central stated goal is that NPS “must recommit to the exemplary stewardship and public enjoyment of these places.” The vision for a “second century” Park Service (drawing on the work of the Second Century Commission) is that it will:

• Connect a broader and more diverse audience to the parks to better provide communities with places that protect their natural and cultural heritage;
• Advance the educational mission of the Park Service by strengthening its role in learning and interpretation for the benefit of all of our people from early childhood to seniors;
• Preserve natural and cultural landscapes using the best science, planning, and management practices; and
• Enhance its professional and organizational excellence by recruiting a more diverse and effective workforce that is fully capable of leading change and working with partners through greater innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship.

Park Service Director Jon Jarvis made it clear last year the agency intended to review its progress towards these goals annually and revise the Call to Action each August through 2016. NPCA applauds the Park Service for committing to a meaningful 2016 agenda. Their revisions to this important document, however, were quite modest.

Last summer, NPCA released The State of America’s National Parks, a comprehensive report, outlining the most significant threats to the National Park System. The report identified important priorities to enforce air quality laws; reintroduce native wildlife; monitor and respond to the impacts of climate change; and address the current inadequate level of protection for historic buildings and artifacts.

Recognizing that our national parks face many challenges, NPCA believes there needs to be some significant additions to the Call to Action moving forward. These include:  

• Expanding the “Scaling Up” initiative, which is intended to improve the ecological connectivity of aquatic and terrestrial wildlife and plants in the face of the growing impacts of climate change, energy development, and other threats.
• Drafting a service-wide comprehensive connectivity strategy that prioritizes ecosystem protection across the system so that landscape conservation can be addressed to the greatest degree possible.
• Transferring unrestricted funds annually to begin to fund the second century national park endowment NPS and we believe is necessary for long-term sustainable funding for the park system.

From Acadia to Gettysburg and Yellowstone, the National Park System contains some of our most historically significant sites as well as some of the last wild lands of America. They provide some of the very best wildlife viewing experiences in the country. Visitors can see grizzlies, bison, and mountain goats in the wild; and can experience the historic migration of caribou or pronghorn and see lynx, wolves, and other animals in their native habitat.

The Park Service is on the right path; now we need to build on the “Call to Action” to protect our parks for all Americans to enjoy in their second century and beyond.

Ask someone to explain what a National Heritage Area (NHA) is, exactly, and you’re likely to get a long pause. At least, that’s what happened to me when I asked Annie Harris to fill me in. “It’s always hard to come up with some simple words,” she admits with a laugh.

Now, Harris knows NHAs inside and out. Not only is she vice president for the Alliance for National Heritage Areas, she also helps to manage the Essex NHA in Massachusetts, serving as the executive director for the Essex National Heritage Commission. These heritage areas are tricky to explain, in part, because they fall into a gray area of park management.

There are currently 49 NHAs spanning hundreds of thousands of acres in 32 states, and representing diverse communities and cultures. The Rivers of Steel NHA, for example, shares the steelmaking heritage of southwestern Pennsylvania. The Mormon Pioneer NHA preserves the arts and history of six counties in central Utah that religious leaders settled in the late 1800s. The Freedom’s Frontier NHA documents a violent border war between eastern Kansas and western Missouri that contributed to the rise of the Civil War and the struggle to keep Kansas free from slavery. From the automotive industry in Michigan to the Cane River in Louisiana, the history preserved in these regions is as diverse as the landscapes and people themselves.

NHAs usually contain privately owned or municipal lands that are managed through local partnerships and funded with a small amount of money and assistance from the National Park Service—but they generally remain privately owned and are not officially part of the National Park System. In nearly all cases, every dollar an NHA receives from the Park Service must be matched by other sources. Most NHAs over-match their slim federal funds significantly, averaging $5.50 in matched funds per federal dollar. That’s likely why National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis recently described NHAs as “places where small investments pay huge dividends.”

“I just think this stuff is really engaging,” Harris says about her work with the Essex NHA. “But I think it’s also really important for the quality of life and also for the vitality of this region. … You want to preserve these resources because they’re really cool … but they’re also really important in terms of business climate and the quality of what it’s like to live here.”

Much like national parks, NHAs help revitalize tourism industries and create jobs in gateway communities. Some NHAs also bring needed employment opportunities to abandoned urban centers. And because NHAs are generally created through coalitions of interested local citizens and businesses, they reflect the pride regions have in their own histories and resources.

“If you want to meet the future of the Park Service, it’s got to be in these partnerships,” Harris explains. “When you look at what the Park Service wants to accomplish in the next hundred years … it’s about engaging more diverse audiences, getting into the urban areas, dealing with large, lived-in landscapes, … doing more around education, and using the parks to educate. … They can’t do it by owning, managing, policing, and maintaining all of the land. The key is in the partnerships. The heritage areas are very effective partnerships.”

Right now, a dozen NHAs are facing “sunset clauses” in 2012—meaning, they will lose their federal funding unless Congress acts. The National Heritage Area Act of 2012 is currently pending in Congress. The bill would help establish uniform criteria for creating, funding, managing, and assessing NHAs. It would also increase overall funding to the NHA program and eliminate these sunset clauses. NPCA strongly supports the bill, and encourages Congress to enact it into law. For more information, visit the Alliance of National Heritage Areas.

You can also watch a video of National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis describing the importance of NHAs:

“The best ships in the worst navy”—that’s how one NPS staffer responded when asked to describe history in the National Park Service. Check out a new report by the Organization for American Historians, Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service, to find out why this could be an apt metaphor to describe the state of history research and interpretation in the National Park Service.

As part of a long-standing partnership between the National Park Service and the Organization of American Historians, a team of OAH scholars conducted a comprehensive study of the practice of history in the national parks. The report of their work, including methodology, findings, and recommendations, is now available on the OAH website: http://www.oah.org/programs/nps/Imperiled_Promise.pdf (PDF, 7.2 MB).  The report highlights successful partnerships, innovative interpretation programs, and exciting new research approaches, but it also surfaces serious inadequacies and constraints that prevent the National Park Service from fulfilling its leadership role as “the nation’s largest outdoor history classroom.” Many of the report’s findings and recommendations reflect and elaborate on points made in NPCA’s work with the National Parks Second Century Commission, our report on The State of America’s National Parks, and most recently, at America’s Summit on National Parks. Though some readers might find the size and scope of this 145 -page report daunting, the vision, findings, and recommendations are worth delving into, to appreciate the scope and significance of the Park Service’s mission to serve as stewards for the history of an entire nation.

As one respondent to the study team’s survey said, “history in the NPS is a public promise waiting to be kept.” NPCA is committed to seeing that promise fulfilled. Members of NPCA’s Center for Park Research will be exploring a few of these goals in the coming weeks to shed light on some of the challenges and promising ideas in the report.

Above: NPCA President Tom Kiernan at Yellowstone.

By Tom Kiernan, President of NPCA

Almost exactly three years ago, I flew to Montana late in the day. By the time my plane reached the tiny airport in Bozeman, it was too dark to see the stately, snow-capped mountains that I knew surrounded me. I felt the ten-degree chill as I wandered over to pick up my rental car, then I drove for three hours to my final destination: Yellowstone. Well past midnight, in the frigid January cold, and enveloped by pitch darkness, arriving at the entrance to America’s first national park is still nothing short of inspirational.

I had traveled to Yellowstone to make a presentation to the National Parks Second Century Commission–a group of leading Americans that NPCA had convened to craft a vision for NPS as it approached its 2016 Centennial. Joining me for that presentation was the soon-to-be Director of NPS Jon Jarvis.

Today, we are three years closer to that centennial, and Jon and I are meeting again to craft the “Action Plan” that will implement the vision crafted by the Second Century Commission. This time we’re in Washington, D.C., joining the largest and most diverse gathering of park leaders ever organized at America’s Summit on National Parks. NPCA is partnering with the National Park Foundation and the National Park Hospitality Association to convene this gathering of the leaders of the parks community.

The big difference today is that we are moving from vision to action.

There’s a lot at stake. Last year, the National Park Service released “A Call to Action,” a five-year plan that will serve as a starting point for the summit. Fulfilling this call to action and creating a forward-thinking movement for parks could mean:

• Reaching 25 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren every year through field trips, trainings, classroom materials, online resources, and educational partnerships;
• Promoting large-scale landscape conservation through public-private partnerships in five regions of the country, making strategic land acquisitions that support healthy ecosystems and cultural preservation;
• Developing a $1 billion endowment to ensure the long-term health of the National Park Service; and
• Expanding federally protected park lands to include new ecological regions and cultural areas.

If you think that sounds ambitious, I agree. An opportunity like this only comes around once every hundred years, and with so many parks struggling with underfunding, development, pollution, and other serious threats, the need is urgent. Fortunately, when this many diverse leaders take action together, we create a coalition so strong, we have real political power to make our vision for parks a reality.

That’s why, as I welcome you to our new blog, I hope you will join our efforts, share your vision for the next century for national parks, and along with us make that vision a reality. What motivates you to protect these places we love, and what issues concern you most for their future?