Former NPS Head On Zinke's "Idiotic" Policies, Years That We Are Losing On Climate Implosion
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What's it like inside the agency when you have that kind of upheaval?
The DOI and the secretary have this responsibility for stewardship, but also development. Those two sides of the same coin oftentimes conflict. Every time there's a change in administration, generally from a Democrat to Republican, there's a shift inside the building to which side of the coin gets the priority. It's difficult to be sort of whipsawed. It's very frustrating if you're inside the agency and sort of right up there against that political interface where one day you're at the table and the next day you're out in the hall and you know what you're supposed to be protecting is being given away. That's the agony.
There's still no confirmed NPS director. What's the effect?
I think it leaves the Park Service adrift. That the agency, it does OK, the parks are still open. They'll do fine, but there's no direction, the agency is rudderless in terms of where it's going. In many ways, that's tragic. We just came out of the centennial where we were focused on climate adaptation, getting kids into parks, we had priorities around building the next generation of conservationists. A lot of that stuff going on is really driven out of Washington. And there's nobody back there to push back. So Zinke rolls out his idiotic ideas of increasing the fees without ever consulting the Park Service. There's no director back there to say that's a really bad idea.
Could a new secretary quickly revive the climate effort you once enacted?
A new secretary under a new administration that makes climate change [a priority] could reassemble it. But each year you lose ground. You look at the science, the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports, we're not on a flat line, we're on a curve. Each year that we don't take action reduces our flexibility. That's the tragedy. The new secretary could come in and restart a lot of this work, but he will have lost a few years.
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Where did you see the strongest signs of warming in the parks?
Probably most powerfully at Mount Rainier National Park, where I was superintendent. Glaciers in and around Rainier were receding significantly. More importantly, what we saw was a climatic shift between what had historically been in the fall, it would get cold and snow on the mountain, and we'd get rain in the spring. What we saw was a climatic shift to what was rain on the snow in the fall. We had really significant flooding that took out roads, picnic areas and restrooms, all these different infrastructure of the park that had been there for 100 years and never had anything like that happen. All of a sudden, they were just scoured down to bedrock from fall floods driven by climate change.
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