Scientists vs. Superintendents: The Park Service's Search for Clarity in the 1980s

Channel Islands was the exception. Most park managers in the 1980s lacked the science they needed — and some didn't want it. This chapter of the Park Service's history of its Inventory & Monitoring program traces a decade of uncertainty.

No mandate

In 1985, Park Service biologist John Dennis named the core problem: the Park Service's founding Organic Act never mentioned science, leaving endless argument over whether the Service needed it and who should do it. Questions multiplied. Were scientists' findings advice or orders? Were in-house scientists more or less credible than academics? At the 1986 Conference on Science in the National Parks, hydrologist Raymond Herrmann argued research and management must stay separate, because research "cannot remain unbiased" inside management.

Playing God in Yellowstone

Alston Chase's 1986 book attacked Yellowstone's "natural regulation" — letting nature take its course — as philosophy, not science, and cast the park's own biologists as captives of agency dogma. His prime case was the Craighead brothers.

• The study: from 1959 to 1971, John and Frank Craighead pioneered radio-collaring, marking 264 grizzlies — perhaps 30% of the park's bears — and concluded the bears needed a Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, not just the park.
• The dispute: their 1967 management report urged closing the garbage dumps where grizzlies fed gradually. The park, pursuing the Leopold Report's "natural scene," closed them quickly for the 1972 centennial.
• The fallout: the brothers went public; bears and visitors died. The Craigheads left in 1971 rather than let managers review their findings before publication. The grizzly was listed as threatened in 1975, over Park Service opposition.

Chase's remedies included long-term studies of park conditions.

Two sides, no trust

Kate Kitchell, a Canyonlands resource manager, surveyed Rocky Mountain Region superintendents and scientists for her master's thesis:

"No one, it seemed, trusted anyone else to put a park's needs first." Ideas to bridge the gap included tying research to each park's resource management plan and writing mutual accountability into both groups' job evaluations. An Alaska historian summed them up: people "who know that they must work together, but haven't yet found the combination."

Sources

Based on "I&M Administrative History: Searching for Clarity," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. This chapter is part of the Park Service's administrative history of its Inventory & Monitoring Division, researched and written by Alice Wondrak Biel, Writer-Editor, NPS Inventory & Monitoring Division. It draws on Alice Wondrak Biel's Do (Not) Feed the Bears and on Kitchell's survey as reported in Park Science and the George Wright Forum.