How Science Struggled in the National Park Service, 1942–1980

Park Service biologist Lowell Sumner called 1942–1963 a "period of eclipse for biology" in the national parks. By the time he retired in 1967, he was hopeful. This chapter of the Park Service's history of its Inventory & Monitoring program explains what changed — and what didn't.

The eclipse

• War and crowds: World War II starved the parks; after 1946 visits soared — up 75% within a few years — mostly by car, into worn-out facilities. In 1949 Director Newton Drury estimated upgrades would cost $300 million; Congress gave the whole agency $14 million.
• Mission 66: Director Conrad Wirth's ten-year program rebuilt the parks for the automobile — roads, parking, campgrounds, visitor centers — for about $1 billion, on the old theory of "preservation through development": concentrate people in a few developed areas and leave the rest alone.
• No science in it: Chief Biologist Victor Cahalane resigned in 1955 because almost none of Mission 66's $100 million a year went to biology. By the early 1960s the Park Service had four field scientists.

"Get the Facts, and Put Them to Work"

Howard Stagner at Petrified Forest National Park, 1940. NPS/George Grant.

In 1961, Howard Stagner, a naturalist on the Mission 66 staff, wrote an internal report arguing that past research had been piecemeal and crisis-driven. He proposed long-range research plans for each park, done mostly by universities, followed by "periodic inspection" so the Service would always know "what is happening" — an early outline of what would become vital signs monitoring.

Two reports, 1963

Interior Secretary Stewart Udall appointed two committees:

The Robbins committee noted that in 1962 the Park Service spent on research what one campground restroom cost, under 1% of its budget, about one cent per visitor. It listed damage done without science: a canal through bird habitat at Everglades, roads crushing sequoia roots at Yosemite, a useless Mount McKinley water project dubbed the "$90,000 icicle," a campground that ruined Shenandoah's Big Meadow Swamp. It urged a tenfold funding increase, a permanent research unit, and a complete inventory of every park. Parks, it said, "are not pictures on the wall," but dynamic ecosystems.

Stops and starts

• The Service split the work between two divisions. Research plans for six parks were done by 1969, but by 1975 none had actually guided management.
• Superintendents and their wildlife rangers, quicker to act than scientists, kept control; Director Wirth made clear scientists would stay advisory.
• A 1970s reorganization scattered research into regional offices, where money meant for science was diverted — by 1973 leaders could not say where research funds had gone.

Where it worked: people in the right place

• Everglades: a proposed jetport six miles from the park, meant to be bigger than four major airports combined, was stopped in 1969 after a USGS report by Luna Leopold. Assistant Interior Secretary Nathaniel Reed then pushed for the South Florida Research Center (1974), which grew from two scientists to 102 by 1980 and published 67 reports by 1982. Its first management report, by Gary Davis, led Florida in 1984 to make Biscayne Bay a spiny lobster nursery sanctuary.

Grassland rooted up by wild hogs at Gregory Bald, Great Smoky Mountains, 1959. NPS photo.

• Great Smoky Mountains: European wild hogs, escaped from a hunting enclosure in 1920, had grown from about 500 to nearly 2,000 by the early 1980s. Superintendent Boyd Evison opened the Uplands Field Research Laboratory in 1975.

Boyd Evison, 1975. NPS photo.

• Elsewhere: research staffs at Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Sequoia and Redwood, and university Cooperative Park Studies Units — 18 by 1973.

In 1975 inventory and monitoring became a servicewide objective, and 1978 policies said resources should be "monitored to detect any significant changes." But nothing funded it. In 1980, a new internal report and a phone call to Gary Davis would set the next course.

Sources

Based on "I&M Administrative History: Science Struggles," 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 Richard Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, and interviews with Gary Davis.