- Subject: NPS Morning Report - Wednesday, January 10, 1996
- Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996
MORNING REPORT QUOTES
Release #4
"I earnestly recommend the establishment of a Bureau of National Parks. Such
legislation is essential to the proper management of those wondrous
manifestations of Nature, so startling and so beautiful that everyone
recognizes the obligations of the Government to preserve them for the
edification and recreation of the people...every consideration of patriotism
and love of Nature and of beauty and of art requires us to expend money enough
to bring all of these natural wonders within easy reach of our people. The
first step in that direction is the establishment of a responsible bureau,
which shall take upon itself the burden of supervising the parks and of making
recommendations as to the best method of improving their accessibility and
usefulness."
- William Howard Taft
"There is nothing so American as our national parks. The scenery and wildlife
are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. It is, in brief,
that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for
the enrichment of the lives of all of us. The parks stand as the outward
symbol of this great human principle."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
"The young people of today are the lawmakers, the scientists, the
industrialists, the conservationists, the cattlemen, and the lumbermen of
tomorrow. It is vitally important that they learn today the values of the
national parks, and the principles underlying their preservation. For they
will have the say tomorrow as to what becomes of these properties of the
people."
- Newton B. Drury
Director, 1940-1951
"The Everglades is a test. If we pass it, we get to keep the planet."
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas
"The parks do not belong to one state or to one section. They have become
democratized. The Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon are national
properties in which every citizen has a vested interest; they belong as much
to the man of Massachusetts, of Michigan, of Florida, as they do to the people
of California, of Wyoming, and of Arizona....Who will gainsay that the parks
contain the highest potentialities of national pride, national contentment,
and national health? A visit inspires love of country; begets contentment;
engenders pride of possession; contains the antidote for national
restlessness...He is a better citizen with a keener appreciation of the
privilege of living here who has toured the national parks."
- Stephen Tyng Mather
Director, 1917-1929
"Our primary contribution to national defense lies in the fact that the
great areas of the National Park System inspire in the people a pride of
country and serve in a direct way to crystallize a love of its institutions.
In short, our national shrines rank among the first of the irreplaceable
values that we must defend, for they are America just as are the people who
live around them. Someone has said, in speaking of national parks and
historic sites, that men will die gladly for their country; and there devolves
upon us a singular obligation to preserve a country worth dying for."
- Newton B. Drury
Director, 1940-1951?
"Our national parks system is a national museum. Its purpose is to preserve
forever...certain areas of extraordinary scenic magnificence in a condition of
primitive nature. Its recreational value is also very great, but recreation
is not distinctive of the system. The function which alone distinguishes the
national parks...is the museum function made possible only by the parks'
complete conservation."
- Robert Sterling Yard, 1923
"I do not want to see our National Parks robbed of any of their beauty on the
ground that it must be done in order to secure money sufficient to pay the
expenses of maintaining them. I do not want to see any of the natural
resources taken from them that would in any way mar their beauty. I think it
would be the best money that Congress could spend, to place the parks in a
condition that they can be enjoyed by the people of the United States."
- Senator Reed Smoot (R-Utah)
Addressing the 1916 Conference
on National Parks
"The most valuable asset the Service has ever had is the morale of its
employees. I have said that the Superintendent is a dedicated man; all his
permanent staff and all the temporary rangers and ranger-naturalists are
dedicated men, too...or they would have quit long since. Ever since it was
organized the Service has been able to do its difficult, complex, and highly
expert job with great distinction because it could count on this ardor and
devotion. The forty-hour week means nothing in a national park. Personnel
have always worked sixteen hours a day and seven days a week whenever such
labor was necessary. Superintendent, rangers, engineers, summer staff, fire
lookouts - they all drop their specialties to join a garbage-disposal crew or
a rescue party, to sweep up tourist litter, to clean a defouled spring, to do
anything else that has to be done but can't be paid for. They are the most
courteous and the most patient men in the United States and maybe once a week
several of them get a full night's sleep. If you undermine their morale, you
will destroy the Service."
- Historian Bernard DeVoto, Harpers
Magazine, 1953 [Editor's note: DeVoto
wrote at a time when almost all staff were
in fact men. His perspective in 1995
would undoubtedly be more balanced]
"Policy without funding is just conversation."
- George Hartzog, Director, 1964 - 1972
"Most of the people who visit the parks, whether they realize it or not or
whether they put it into words, are impelled to visit them because of the
quest for a supreme experience. The gleam of glaciers on a mighty mountain;
the shimmering beauty of a lake indescribably blue, resting in the crater of
an extinct volcano; the thunder and mist of water falling over sculptured
granite cliffs; the colorful chapter in the Book of Time revealed by the
strata of a mile-high canyon gashed by a rushing river; the sight of strange
new plants and animals living in natural adaptation to their environment and
to each other; the roar of surf waging its eternal battle with the land; the
silence that hangs over the ruins of the habitations of forgotten peoples; the
lengthening shadows of the towering sequoias - these and a thousand other
vivid impressions are at the heart of the experience that national park
visitors travel many miles to seek. All else that they do or that we do in
the national parks is incidental. If we can remember this, we can remain true
to our high calling as trustees for the greater things of America."
- Newton B. Drury, Director, 1940-1951?
"Most of the people who visit the parks, whether they realize it or not or
whether they put it into words, are impelled to visit them because of the
quest for a supreme experience. The gleam of glaciers on a mighty mountain;
the shimmering beauty of a lake indescribably blue, resting in the crater of
an extinct volcano; the thunder and mist of water falling over sculptured
granite cliffs; the colorful chapter in the Book of Time revealed by the
strata of a mile-high canyon gashed by a rushing river; the sight of strange
new plants and animals living in natural adaptation to their environment and
to each other; the roar of surf waging its eternal battle with the land; the
silence that hangs over the ruins of the habitations of forgotten peoples; the
lengthening shadows of the towering sequoias - these and a thousand other
vivid impressions are at the heart of the experience that national park
visitors travel many miles to seek. All else that they do or that we do in
the national parks is incidental. If we can remember this, we can remain true
to our high calling as trustees for the greater things of America."
- Newton B. Drury, Director, 1940-1951
"Americans have a national treasure in the Yellowstone Park, and they should
guard it jealously. Nature has made her wildest patterns here, has brought
the boiling waters from her greatest depths to the peaks which bear eternal
snow, and set her masterpiece with pools like jewels. Let use respect her
moods, and let the beasts she nurtures in her bosom live, and when the man
from Oshkosh writes his name with a blue pencil on her sacred face, let him
spend six months where the scenery is circumscribed and entirely artificial."
- Frederic Remington, from Pony Tracks,
1898
"Thousands of people go to the national parks because they want the things
which are peculiar to the primeval wilderness and, what is more, peculiar to a
particular wilderness - such as Glacier or Yellowstone or Grand Canyon or some
other one. To make possible the great joy to be found in the infinite variety
of the wilderness - not to thwart the desire to discover more and more of its
ways - and the moral obligation to leave it unimpaired for new discoveries
tomorrow, these are the functions of the national parks in our general scheme
of wilderness use. Our national parks are a great philosophical venture in
which we are attempting to pry open for ourselves the intricate and delicately
balanced system of wilderness values essential to full and intelligent
enjoyment of the wilderness. The success of the venture is going to hinge
largely upon our understanding of the values at stake, our knowledge of
recreational psychology, and our ability to meet the biological requirements
of wilderness management."
- Ben Thompson, "Fauna of the National
Parks of the United States", 1935
"The abiding purpose of a national park is to bring man and his environment
into closer harmony. The ultimate hope that a delicate balance between
preservation and use can be maintained will depend upon the ability of the
Park Service to promote, and the willingness of the visitor to accept,
perception as the highest form of park use. Every visitor reacts to the
beauty of the natural scene or the stirring drama of the historical past, if
only passively. Salvation for the parks lies in the hope that the park
visitor can be actively stimulated, by the immediacy of his surroundings and
the substance of the interpretive programs, to perceive and treasure the
natural and historical processes through which the land and all living things
have achieved their form and by which they maintain their dependent
existence."
- William C. Everhart, "The National
Park Service", 1972?
"We who work for historical agencies do not own the sites. We are trustees
for them. They are ours to restore and manage and interpret because earlier
generations saved them for us; so we, in turn, have an obligation to future
generations who have an equal claim to that heritage, Our trusteeship places
upon us an ethical commitment to accuracy in restoration, truth in
interpretation, and protection for the next generation. The financial support
we receive from the public in gifts, admission fees, tax exemptions and
government payments reinforces our obligations to the people. We do not meet
that obligation just by saving and restoring a historic site. Only when the
essential meaning of the site and of the people and events associated with it
is communicated to the visitor can we truly say that we have met our
responsibilities."
- William Alderson and Shirley Payne
Low, "Interpretation of Historic Sites,",
1976
"Ever since I have been old enough to be cynical I have been visiting national
parks, and they are a cure for cynicism...They were cooked in the same alembic
as other land laws...but they came out as someting different. Absolutely
American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our
worst. Without them, millions of American lives, including mine, would have
been poorer. The world would have been poorer."
- Author Wallace Stegner
"Privatization of parklands is not the way to reform park management....The
economic difficulties...convinced even the godfather of capitalism that
privatization of parks is a bad idea. Adam Smith wrote, 'Lands for the
purpose of pleasure and magnificence - parks, gardens, public walks, etc.,
possessions which are everywhere considered as causes of expense, not as
sources of revenue - seem to be the only lands which, in a great and civilised
monarchy, ought to belong to the crown.'"
- William R. Lowery, "The Capacity for
Wonder: Preserving National Parks"
"The problem of maintaining the standards of the national park system is ever
present, and while all sites that qualify should be brought in, those that
don't should be left out...The matter of standards is inevitably personal, and
at times geographical. An area that seems superbly qualified for national
park status east of the Mississippi, in a region heavily populated, might seem
less significant in one of the Western states. Congressmen have been known to
recommend areas containing scenery that at best could be described as anemic,
and local boosters constantly push for legislation to establish some minor
curiosities as national parks purely for the financial bonanza of having the
National Park Service designation on the Esso road map...Claims are often made
for historic sites, ranging from the purely insignificant to the hilarious,
most of which are clearly worthy of oblivion...Probably the greatest danger to
the integrity of the national park system is not, however, the occasional
substandard area that somehow slips through. Those that aren't quite good
enough present the gravest problem. If the park system began to include these
areas, which are pleasant and moderately attractive, the distinction between
truly national significance on the one hand and local pride on the other would
be increasingly blurred, and the original idea of national parks would
steadily erode toward mediocrity."
- NPS historian William C. Everhart,
from "The National Park Service", 1972?
"In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms
change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground
for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and
generations that know us not and we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and
by whom great things were suffered, and done for them, shall come to this
deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! the shadow of the mighty
presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into
their souls."
- General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,
Gettysburg, October 3, 1889
"I have always thought of our Service as an institution, more than any other
bureau, engaged in a field essentially of morality - the aim of man to rise
above himself, and to choose the option of quality rather than material
superfluity."
- Freeman Tilden to George B.
Hartzog, Jr., ca. 1971
"An urgent need of the Park Service [in its early years] was to develop a
capable and professional ranger force. At his first national parks conference,
Mather had been disappointed with the caliber of the superintendents, many of
whom were politically appointed lightweights, unmoved by his idealism.
Rangers and superintendents were not under civil service, and predictably the
parks were crippled by vigorous application of the spoils system. When a new
administration took office in Washington, the faces of new superintendents
appeared in the parks, for appointments to many jobs were prerogatives of
local congressmen. A story is told, which has the ring of truth, that one
such ranger appointee in Glacier National Park had to be assigned patrol duty
along the railroad tracks so that he wouldn't get lost in the woods.
Postponing entry into civil service, the Park Service thoroughly cleaned house.
It unloaded misfits and shifted jobs around and was highly successful in
finding good men, many of whom were attracted from other agencies.
Fortunately, from its beginnings, the Park Service has been able to attract a
different type of individual. A group of men from unlikely backgrounds have
somehow been assembled who combine a cultivated disregard for standard
operating procedures with an unorthodox ability to get the job done. For the
special flavor that such men have imparted to the agency, the Park Service has
been grateful - generally."
- William C. Everhart, "The National
Park Service", 1972
"Interpretation is considered to be the most important function of the
National Park Service, at least by those gifted employees who have devoted
their careers to an activity that the Park Service can take credit for
pioneering. It is not education, although it was originally so called, but a
distinctive refinement of - and one is tempted to say improvement on - the
classroom variety of the learning process. Its origination, shortly after the
Park Service was established, supplied an essential ingredient required if
people were to appreciate the meaning of national parks...The word
'interpretation' came gradually to replace the term 'education,' in part no
doubt to avoid any suggestion that the modest appetite for knowledge that the
average visitor carries with him while on vacation would be promptly submerged
in a tide of completely accurate but exquisitely boring facts. But
interpretation also seemed a better term to describe the function of dealing
with subjects that for most people were unfamiliar - geology, biology, botany.
It was almost like learning a new language. The process of translating this
language, the language of the earth, suggested the term 'interpretation'...The
interpreter's task...is to fulfill the charge of Charles Darwin: 'We must see
with the eye of the mind.' Interpretation, concludes Freeman Tilden, is
'mindsight.'"
- William C. Everhart, "The National
Park Service", 1972?
"The ultimate purposes for which parks are managed have spiritual overtones.
To some degree, each of the bountiful elements of the parks - plant or tree or
bird, historic building or artifact, seashell or pot shard - helps a person to
find his place in the universe. The function of a national park might be
considered as contributing insight into those sovereign questions that human
knowledge derived from practical experience finds so difficult to answer: Who
are we, where are we, and why?"
- William C. Everhart, "The National
Park Service", 1972
"The biggest problem has been, and will continue to be, convincing the public
of the need for sound management, protection and preservation. But I believe
in complete openness before the public. If we fail to make Americans aware of
the problems facing the national parks, and to involve them in choosing the
right solutions to these problems, then we are failing in our responsibility
as stewards of these public lands."
- Russ Dickenson, Director, 1980-
1985
"The most important reason for preserving historic sites and buildings is not
primarily economic. If they are to be preserved, our people must believe in
the value of continuity in the life of the community, linking past generations
with the present generation and with the generations yet to come. They must
believe that tradition is an essential part of community and national life.
They must believe in the worthwhileness of remembering and preserving the best
of the creative achievements of our ancestors."
- Hillory A. Tolson, Assistant
Director, NPS, 1933-1963
"Establishing a national park, the highest form of land protection in the
United States, does not, in itself, insure that the resources within the park
will be preserved in perpetuity. The fact is that the future of many units of
our national park system is more in the hands of state and local agencies and
political leaders...than (in the hands of) the managers and policy makers that
govern our national parks."
- Robert S. Chandler, former
superintendent, Everglades, 1992
"If we are going to succeed in preserving the greatness of the national parks,
they must be held inviolate. They represent the last stand of primitive
America. If we are going to whittle away at them we should recognize, at the
very beginning, that all such whittlings are cumulative and that the end
result will be mediocrity. Greatness will be gone."
- Newton B. Drury, Director, 1940-1951
"The problem of the (Indiana) Dunes is a symbol of the crisis that faces all
America. It is as though we were standing on the last acre, faced with a
decision as to how it should be used. In actuality, it is the last acre, the
last acre of its kind; in essence it foreshadows the time not too far removed
when we will, in all truth, be standing on the last unused, unprotected acre,
wondering which way to go. Have we the courage to stand up and place physical
limits on the constant relentless march of industrialization?"
- Senator Paul H. Douglas (Illinois),
May 26, 1958 ?
"The battlefields at Petersburg were the scenes of memorable struggles and
heroic sacrifices....Manassas was, in the largest sense, the beginning of the
war; Gettysburg was high tide of hostilities on both sides, but Petersburg was
the final field where the fratricidal struggle was fought to a finish. There,
if anywhere, should be a permanent memorial to a restored peace between the
States. Such a memorial, in the form of a park, would commemorate the highest
ideals and exploits of American valor and strategy, without the taint of
bitterness or shame to either side."
- U.S. House of Representatives, 69th
Congress, Report No. 887, April 15, 1926
"The greatest resource of all is space - space for wandering, space for
solitude and a sense of discovery. For 300 years Americans have benefitted
from such space, with its opportunities to go forth to wilderness adventure.
First beyond the Appalachians, then the Missouri and the Rockies, then to
Alaska. This is the last of it. Combined with neighboring Noatak, big,
beautiful, beckoning wild landscapes stretch no farther under the United
States flag."
- Adapted from John Kauffmann,
excerpted from Bill Brown's "This Last
Treasure"
"Here are no lofty peaks seeking the sky, no mighty glaciers or rushing
streams wearing away the uplifted land. Here is land, tranquil in its quiet
beauty, serving not as the source of water but as the last receiver of it. To
its natural abundance we owe this spectacular plant and animal life that
distinguishes this place from all others in our country."
- President Harry S. Truman, talking
about the Everglades, 1947
"(The National Park Service) probably will never find a sense of mission as
coherent, with such visionary appeal, or as successful a strategic guide as
the one Mather and Albright fashioned for it. The forces of emerging modern
society in the early twentieth century and the notion of progress which
accompanied it had the power and charm to give the era a uniquely coherent
vision of the good life, and it was on this vision that the agency's original
sense of mission was founded. We are not likely to see such a coherent and
persuasive vision again, but this need not condemn the Park Service to relic
status as an agency which has outlived its usefulness. Exactly the contrary
is the case. A creative Park Service with equal dedication to experimentation
in meeting new social demands, to a tough pragmatism in evaluating these
experiments, and to protecting the integrity of the System entrusted to its
care would remain an important part of the federal government and would ensure
that the national parks remain an important part of American life."
- Ronald Foresta, "America's National
Parks and Their Keepers", 1984
"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find
out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity;
and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of
timber and irrigating rivers but as fountains of life."
- John Muir, "Our National Parks"?
"Preservation of the future may be the most important instinct in the fabric
of life on earth. It is certainly the most beautiful. Somehow we must
nurture the diminishing instinct to protect the generations to come, bringing
it to the conference rooms of power and politics and industry. For if we
thoughtlessly barter away the lives and futures of our children and
grandchildren for more convenience, we will have made the most shameful
bargain in the history of man."
- Jacques Cousteau, 1977
"In this letter, perhaps one of my last official statements to you, let me
urge you to be aggressive and vigorous in the fulfillment of your
administrative duties. The National Park Service, from its beginning, has
been an outstanding organization because its leaders, both in Washington and
out in the field, worked increasingly and with high public spirit to carry out
the noble policies and maintain the lofty ideals of the service as expressed
in law and executive pronouncement. Do not let the service become 'just
another Government bureau;' keep it youthful, vigorous, clean and strong. We
are not here to simply protect what we have been given so far; we are here to
try to be the future guardians of those areas as well as to sweep our
protective arms around the vast lands which may well need us as man and his
industrial world expand and encroach on the last bastions of wilderness.
"I hope that particular attention will be accorded always to that mandate in
the National Park Service Act of 1916 and in many organic acts of the
individual parks which enjoin us to keep our great parks in their natural
condition. Oppose with all your strength and power all proposals to penetrate
your wilderness regions with motorways and other symbols of modern
mechanization. Keep large sections of primitive country free from the
influence of destructive civilization. Keep these bits of primitive America
for those who seek peace and rest in the silent places; keep them for the
hardy climbers of the crags and peaks; keep them for the horseman and the pack
train; keep them for the scientist and student of nature; keep them for all
who would use their minds and hearts to know what God had created. Remember,
once opened, they can never be wholly restored to primeval charm and grandeur.
"I also urge you to be ever on the alert to detect and defeat attempts to
exploit commercially the resources of the national parks. Often projects will
be formulated and come to you 'sugar-coated' with an alluring argument that
the park will be benefitted by its adoption. We National Park men and women
know that nature's work as expressed in the world-famous regions in our charge
cannot be improved upon by man.
"Beware, too, of innovation in making the parks accessible. For a half
century, elevators, cableways, electric railways and similar contrivances have
been proposed from time to time and have been uniformly rejected. The
airplane, while now an accepted means of transportation, should not be
permitted to land in our primitive areas.
"Park usefulness and popularity should not be measured in terms of mere
numbers of visitors. Some precious park areas can easily be destroyed by the
concentration of too many visitors. We should be interested in the quality of
park patronage, not by the quantity. The parks, while theoretically for
everyone to use and enjoy, should be so managed what only those numbers of
visitors that can enjoy them while at the same time not overuse and harm them
would be admitted at a given time. We must keep elements of our crowded
civilization to a minimum in our parks. Certain comforts, such as safe roads,
sanitary facilities, water, food and modest lodging, should be available.
Also extra care must be taken for the children, the elderly and the
incapacitated to enjoy the beauty of the parks.?
"We have been compared to the military forces because of our dedication and
esprit de corps. In a sense this is true. We do act as guardians of our
country's land. Our National Park Service uniform which we wear with pride
does command the respect of our fellow citizens. We have the spirit of
fighters, not as a destructive force, but as a power for good. With this
spirit, each of us is an integral part of the preservation of the magnificent
heritage we have been given, so that centuries from now people of our world,
or perhaps of other worlds, may see and understand what is unique to our earth,
never changing, eternal."
- Farewell message to the Service,
Horace M. Albright, 1933
"The external threats issue is a problem of competing values. The parks have
so many different meanings and, consequently, values for so many different
people, and we as a nation have valued our public lands for so many different
things, that it is difficult to imagine the formation of a single coalition to
protect the parks. Yet that is the goal. If we can come together in our love
for the parks, then the external threats issue might be resolved."
- John C. Freemuth, "Islands Under
Seige: National Parks and the Politics of
External Threats"
"Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last
analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern
who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered
what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic,
that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that
all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to
which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable
scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why raw wilderness
give definition and meaning to the human enterprise."
- Aldo Leopold, "A Sand County
Almanac"
"The national parks represent our belief that certain lands are more valuable
to us in their preserved state. We have always acknowledged, though, that
activities not allowed in the parks were more than allowable and even
encouraged elsewhere. Only recently have we seen that these same activities
may threaten the parks we thought were preserved for all time."
- John C. Freemuth, "Islands Under
Siege: National Parks and the Politics of
External Threats"
"I think we all agree that a national park is not merely scenery. A national
park embodies something that cannot be found everywhere - it embodies history,
a way of life, primitive experience, early environment. It has the elements
capable of providing that lifting of the spirit for which modern civilization
is willing to pay so much. A national park is specifically dedicated to these
intangible and imponderable qualities."
- Conservationist Olaus J. Murie,
1889-1963
"It would be folly to set aside such large quantities of land and water for
recreation that the ability of the people of the country to make a decent
livelihood would be curtailed; it would similarly be folly to develop our
resouces for economic use beyond genuine need and to the detriment of our
opportunities to enjoy our fair share of mental and spiritual satisfaction -
those experiences which lift us above the beasts of the field."
- Newton B. Drury, Director, 1940-1951?
"If the time ever comes when we cannot sit down and commune with our soul and
our God among the beauties of such places as our national parks, we are going
to be in a pretty bad way. We are materialistic enough as it is - whether by
necessity or choice."
- J.W. Rupley, Bureau of the Budget
"RESOLVED, That the American Association for the Advancement of Science
recognizes the National Parks as the means of preserving unique
representations of the primitive and majestic in nature, and wishes to record
its protests against additions to the National Park System, or change in
policy, which may tend to lessen in fact or in public estimation their present
high value as natural museums, their complete conservation from industrial
uses, and their effectiveness as a national education institution."
- Resolution, AAAS, December, 1925
"We have a big stake in what you see around you here at Yellowstone. It's a
part of what I call our common ground. And we should not do anything this
year - anything - to weaken our ability to protect the quality of our land,
our water, our food, the diversity of our wildlife and the sanctity of our
natural treasures. We can balance the budget without doing any of that, and
that's the commitment all of us ought to make today on this anniversary of the
National Park Service."
- President William Clinton, August 26, 1995
"There's an old Native American saying that goes: In all our deliberations we
must take into account the well-being of the seventh generation to follow.
The wisdom of those words has come alive to me during my family's Wyoming
vacation...I'm more grateful than ever that those who came before us saw fit
to preserve this land for the enjoyment of future generations of Americans.
That was the intent of Congress when it established the National Park Service
79 years ago today. I can think of few things that mean more to the national
life of our country than our national parks...
"[If] we want to maintain our national heritage for our children and our
grandchildren, we have to do more than preserve our national parks; we've got
to preserve our environment...For a long time now, the American people have
stood together on common ground to preserve our environment. At the beginning
of this century, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, began a fervent call for
conservation. In 1905, he said, 'There can be nothing in the world more
beautiful than a Yosemite, the groves of giant Sequoias and Redwoods, the
Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of Yellowstone, its three Tetons. And our
people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their
children's children forever.'
"Well, I second that emotion. And after spending the last week in Wyoming, I
have an even deeper commitment to fulfilling it. So let's end this century by
meeting the challenge Teddy Roosevelt set for us at the beginning. We've made
a lot of progress in the protection of our environment and our national
heritage. But the future can be even brighter.
"Do we need reforms? Yes. Should we reverse course? Not on your life. It's
up to us."
- President William Clinton, August 26, 1995?
"I recognize the fact that National Park Service programs stand out among the
activities directed toward the attainment of citizen appreciation of our
national heritage, and I agree that the national parks occupany an
advantageous position in our social scheme, a position which makes them
especially available as an aid in developing a national perspective in native
values and democratic ways."
- Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of
Interior, 1933-1946
"The founders of the national park system acted wisely when they had the first
national park 'set apart.' Not set apart to be uselessly hoarded as a miser
hoards his idle gold, but set apart for definite, prescribed uses; to work for
the nation's welfare, just as properly invested capital works and accrues
benefits for the investor."
- Arno B. Cammerer, Director, 1933-1940
"One of the great ironies of the American park system is that it was assembled
without benefit of a blueprint. What we enjoy today has been stitched
together over more than a century like a giant quilt - park by park - by the
loving hands of thousands of people who wanted to save something precious for
their children and grandchildren."
- Stewart L. Udall, in Dwight Rettie's
"Our National Park System: Caring for
America's Greatest Natural and Historic
Treasures"
"It is no longer a question of whether this great United States can afford to
dedicate a portion of its land to such (NPS) purposes, but rather one of
whether or not the eighty-five hundredths of one per cent of the land area of
the United States contained within the National Park System, together with the
areas under other Federal and state agencies, are adequate to protect that
portion of the Nation's heritage which should logically be devoted to parks
and recreation."
- Newton B. Drury, Director, 1940-1951
"The term 'National Park' ought to be like the word 'sterling' is to silver.
It ought to indicate outstanding merit."
- Congressman Louis C. Cramton
"We should be as prophetic in foreseeing park needs and as generous in
satisfying them as we can, for the longer the waiting, the more difficult and
costly the task will be."
- Harold A. Caparn
"The national parks are charged with the obligation of preserving superlative
natural regions, including wilderness areas, for the benefit of posterity.
Attentiveness to the pleasure and comfort of the people is essential, but it
cannot mean catering to absolutely unlimited numbers unless the second
function is to destroy the first. In a theater, when the seats in the house
have been sold out and the available standing room also has been pre-empted,
the management does not jeopardize the main event by allowing still more
onlookers to crowd upon the stage and impede the unfolding of the drama."
- C. F. Brockman?
"I would like to think that all park men, whatever segment of the field may be
their particular concern, might see that this continuing battle against
debasing the finest of our scenic and scientific and historic possessions is
their battle, too...park folk are people of standing in their communities, in
the States and in the Nation; they can wield a powerful influence in behalf of
the people of today and of generations still far in the future."
- Conrad L. Wirth, Director, 1952-1964
"For a nation that grows more metropolitan and industrialized every year, the
experience of solitude, even the simple fact of quiet, has become
inestimable...It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness
untouched, so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its
curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on
uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew
in their nerves and blood."
- Historian Bernard DeVoto
"Our concern is not to see that each and every part of the country has a
National Park System installation. It is to see that all areas of national
significance which are worthy of preservation of their scenery, their
historical associations, their recreational opportunities, or their scientific
interest are preserved."
- Wayne Aspinall, former chairman,
House Interior and Insular Affairs
Committee
"In no other way is the upward trend of our modern civilization so well
exemplified as in the establishment, development, and increasing use of our
National Park and Monument System .... Where once the best scenery, as well as
in everything else, was reserved for the use of those most favored, and for
the pleasure of kings and princes, today every American citizen or visitor to
our shores may enjoy the most priceless offerings of nature. Democracy is
believed to be still in the experimental stage, but surely any system that
institutes and makes successful such a magnificent experiment cannot fail of
its ultimate
purpose."
- Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the
Interior, 1929 - 1933
"Growth and development of national park and reserve programs throughout the
world are important to the welfare of the people of every nation. We must
have places where we can find release from the tensions of an increasingly
industrialized civilization, where we can have personal contact with the
natural environment which sustains us. To this end, permanent preservation of
the outstanding scenic and scientific assets, of every country, and of the
magnificent and varied wildlife which can be so easily endangered by human
activity, is imperative. National parks and reserves are an integral aspect
of intelligent use of natural resources. It is the course of wisdom to set
aside an ample portion of our national resources as national and reserves,
thus ensuring that future generations may know the majesty of the earth as we
know it today."
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy, First World
Conference on National Parks, 1962
"In Nature's ennobling and boundless scenes, the hateful boundary lines and
the forts and flags and prejudices of nations are forgotten. Nature is
universal. The supreme triumph of parks is humanity....Sometime it may be
that an immortal pine will be the flag of a united and peaceful world."
- Enos Mills, "Your National Parks", 1916?
"National parks are not playgrounds, nor theme parks, but sanctuaries, meant
to be forever; they are priceless time capsules for tomorrow that we are
privileged to know and enjoy today. By that I mean a national park is ideally
suited to exercise the body in a test with nature, stimulate the mind with new
learning, and challenge the spirit, the spirit of the individual to connect
with something larger than himself or herself, and more lasting than all the
mechanization of life and work at home."
- Dr. Michael Frome, from presentation
given at Northwest Wilderness and Parks
Conference
"It cannot be escaped that environmental management to perpetuate the Nation's
park and recreation lands provides the action crucible for public involvement
in the larger across-the-land environmental reform movement...Only if the
public sees the Nation's park and recreation lands as the first line of
defense against general environmental decay, gets involved at the action level
to save them, and begins to see the local, regional, and national implications
in such saving - only then will environmental communications begin to mean
something. The statement that park and recreation lands are the first line of
defense against general environmental decay deserves analysis: It is because
environmental quality is so finely balanced that quality environments are so
vulnerable. It is just because the struggle for life in degraded urban
environments is so hard that park and recreation areas tend toward
expendability."
- William E. Brown, "Islands of Hope:
Parks and Recreation in Environmental
Crisis," 1971
"The national parks ... should be looked upon as open books of nature,
repositories of knowledge, on which every plant, herb, tree, animal, bird,
insect and reptile forms a page. Life histories, habits and behavior of
animals and birds should be completed in these parks, and not solely within
the four walls of schools and colleges."
- M. A. Badshah, wildlife officer,
India, First World Conference on National
Parks, 1962
"Although the major burdens of historic preservation have been borne and major
efforts initiated by private agencies and individuals, and both should
continue to play a vital role, it is nevertheless necessary and appropriate
for the Federal Government to acccelerate its historic preservation programs
and actities, to give maximum encouragement to agencies and individuals
undertaking preservation by private means, and to assist State and local
governments and the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United
States to expand and accelerate their historic preservation programs and
activities."
- Preamble, National Historic
Preservation Act of 1966
"Perhaps second only to liberty itself, the national park idea is the finest
contribution of the United States to world culture. These parklands are more
than physical resources. They are the delicate strands of nature and culture
that bond generation to generation. They are, moreover, the benchmarks of our
heritage by which we may chart a new course of human and corporate behavior in
our nation so essential to the restoration of quality in our daily lives and
of a sense of community in our society."
- Director George Hartzog, "Battling
for the National Parks", 1988?
"Parks are an attribute of sovereignty and, of course, were known for hundreds
of years prior to the establishment of America's first national park. Always
those parks belonged to the sovereign - the king, the queen, (or) the
emperor...In the United States, the people are the sovereign. America's
national parks are the special creations of the people through their elected
representatives in the Congress...A myth endures that the park service alone
preserves the national parks. That is its aspiration, but not the reality.
If one reads the journals of the citizen conservation organizations, one may
conclude that they preserve the parks. That is their objective, but not the
reality. There are even some romanticists who suggest that the park service
and the citizen conservation organizations, together, preserve the parks.
That, certainly, is their endeavor, but not the reality. The reality is that
the people through their elected representatives in the Congress preserve the
parks - or destroy them."
- Director George Hartzog, "Battling
for the National Parks", 1988
"Years ago, coal miners carried canaries with them into the mines to detect
lethal gases. Today, our national parks are our ecological canaries."
- Director George Hartzog, "Battling
for the National Parks", 1988
"The pressures of a growing population, self-interest, and shortness of vision
are now the greatest enemies of the national park idea."
- Photographer Ansel Adams, cited in
George Hartzog, "Battling for the National
Parks", 1988
"It is hard to imagine more dedicated people than those who run the parks. I
have never met a single one whom I would not be glad to meet again, and I have
invariable regretted the time to say goodbye. The range of their interests,
their high intelligence, their devotion, make them a separate and wonderful
breed."
- Publisher Alfred Knopf, chairman,
Secretary's Advisory Board on National
Parks
"The old mystique is nearly dormant...The energy and idealism that have
characterized the park service for so long have not vanished, but they do seem
to be the victims of a slight recession."
- NPS historian William C. Everhart
"The National Park Service is operated with three levels of management: the
director's office in Washington, which is responsible for translating the
secretary's objectives into action; regional offices [sic]...are responsible
for coordination of field management; and the parks, each in the charge of a
superintendent, responsible for on-site accomplishment of the service mission,
namely: preserve the park resources and serve the visitor. The operation is
not nearly as smooth as the outlines of the organization chart. Park people
are intensely committed to their mission, hard working, strong-willed and
fiercely independent. Dr. Stanley Cain, a former assistant secretary and a
former chairman of the secretary's Advisory Board on National Parks, once
likened the director's job to that of a university president. 'They each,' he
said, 'have a job that requires the skill to herd wild hogs on ice.'"
- Director George Hartzog, "Battling
for the National Parks", 1988?
"In the Rio Grande Valley, (an) elder from Zuni pueblo listened to a Bureau of
Land Management official describe the agency's latest fiscal budget and how it
would affect public land policy in the West. 'Any questions?' he asked. The
elder raised his hand and said, 'Sir I'd like to know what your short-term
fiscal plans are - for the next 500 years.'
- Terry Tempest Williams, "Utne
Reader", July-August 1995
"The preservation of historic sites for the public benefit, together with
their proper interpretation, tends to enhance the respect and love of the
citizen for the institutions of his country, as well as strengthen his
resolution to defend unselfishly the hallowed traditions and high ideals of
America."
- President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
writing in support of historic sites
legislation, 1935
"The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It
requires citizens to practice the hardest of all virtues - self-restraint."
- Edwin Way Teale, American naturalist,
author and photographer
"The hotly contested question of vehicle use in the parks...is not an issue of
transportation, but of pace. Intensity of concentration on the natural scene
and attentiveness to detail are simply less likely to occur at forty miles an
hour. For this reason it is appropriate to discourage motorized travel. Such
a policy would not militate against all road building in reserved parklands.
We need reasonable access to the various areas of very large parks. And
because reserved lands should affirmatively be made enticing to as wide a
spectrum of the public as possible, including newcomers who need a taste of
the opportunities the land offers, it makes sense to have - as we do in many
parks - a highway designed to provide an introduction for those who are
deciding whether they want to come back for more. The purpose of reserving
natural areas, however, is not to keep people in their cars, but to lure them
out; to encourage a close look at the infinite detail and variety that the
natural scene provides; to expose, rather than to insulate..."
- Joseph L. Sax, "Mountains Without
Handrails", 1980
"You are certainly right when you say 'us natives' can do what you like with
your scenery. But the National Parks and Monuments happen not to be your
scenery. They are our scenery. They do not belong to Colorado or the West,
they belong to the people of the United States, including the miserable
unfortunates who have to live east of the Allegheny hillocks. And, podner, as
one Westerner to another, let me give you one small piece of advice before you
start shooting again. Don't shoot those unfortunates too loudly or too
obnoxiously. You might make them so mad that they would stop paying for your
water developments."
- Historian Bernard DeVoto, from a
1950 letter objecting to an editorial
advocating that Coloradans were the
appropriate people to determine whether or
not bo build dams inside Dinosaur National
Monument
"The more you come to know the national parks, the more the hidden assets
begin to appear. You never come to the end of them. They are seldom the
things the eye first sees; they are nearly never the things avowedly sought."
- Freeman Tilden?
"The hour is late, the opportunities diminish with each passing year, and we
must establish here a Common Market of conservation knowledge which will
enable us to achieve our highest goals and broadest purposes. With each day
that passes, the natural world shrinks as we exert greater artificial control
over our environment."
- Stewart L. Udall, Secretary of the
Interior
"...when a society or a civilization perishes, one condition may always be
found. They forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what brought
them along. The hard beginnings were forgotten and the struggles farther
along. They became satisfied with themselves. Unity and common understanding
there had been, enough to overcome rot and dissolution, enough to break
through their obstacles. But the mockers came. And the deniers were heard.
And vision and hope faded. And the custom of greeting became 'What's the
use?' And men whose forefathers would go anywhere, holding nothing impossible
in the genius of man, joined the mockers and deniers. They forgot where they
came from. They lost sight of what brought them along."
- Poet Carl Sandburg
"If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt,
we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a
glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through
with it."
- President Lyndon B. Johnson, upon
the signing of the Wilderness Act, 1964
"As one reflects on the dimensions of the park system today, it is useful to
remember that the concept of a system of places and structures to embrace the
national patrimony is a relatively new idea. In the beginning the primary
object was to set aside the greatest of the majestic 'wonders' of the nation.
Today that concept embraces a wide spectrum of resources - natural, historical,
and recreational - that taken together share a remarkable similarity to the
geographic and ethnic pluralism of our culture. It is hard to imagine how
even a conscious plan could have achieved so much so well."
- Director Russell Dickenson, from the
forward to "The National Park Service,"
1983
"Yet despite these problems, I became aware of a rare attitude in the visitors.
These were their parks, a part of their heritage, and they felt fiercely
protective of them. I found that to harm or threaten a national park is to
touch a sensitive nerve in the American public. Many visitors as well as park
employees seemed to live by a set of values rarely seen elsewhere, and that
they themselves might not live by outside the park. They appreciated the
natural beauty around them - the land, the plants, the birds, the animals.
And what's more, they showed a regard for other peoples chance to share the
park experience. They seemed to feel they were part of a whole natural system,
and most of them behaved as if they did not want to leave that system any
worse than they found it, so that others and even future generations could
enjoy and share it."
- Robert Cahn, "National Parks in
Crisis", 1980?
"(C)laimed conflicts are often less intractable than they appear at first
view...by forcing alternatives explicitly into the open, and by pursuing the
facts behind the claims, we can often resolve concrete cases without having to
weigh competing values in the abstract. The tension between service of
conventional recreation and the preservation of national parks will never
wholly disappear, but the problem is not aided by posing questions such as:
How many acres of wilderness are enough? Like the question of how many books
a library should have, or how many Brahms symphonies are sufficient, these are
empty canards. If the public accedes to the preservationist position, the
task will be to hold on to as much national parkland as other irresistible
public demands will tolerate. In dealing with conflict, one must always have
a starting point. If the goal is to encourage contemplative recreation in the
parks, the way to do it is diligently to look for ways to meet other
recreational demands more effectively at existing sites, and to scrutinize
more carefully claims of need and demand. The strategy is to increase the
burden of proof that there is no alternative except the use of parklands..."
- Joseph Sax, "National Parks in
Crisis", 1980
"Public appreciation and support are the salvation of protected areas.
Interpretation is potentially the foremost tool for engendering a loyal
advocacy...In its vision statement, the (NPS) has stressed the absolute
necessity for reinvigorating its educational and interpretive program efforts.
This strategy obviously is aimed at broadening the base of public support for
parks and open space. Park and protected areas staff must acknowledge the
need for interpretive involvement in the important task of helping parks to
survive. It is critical that interpreters become the activists of the park
movement, not merely its academic observers. Interpretation cannot continue
to be a passenger. It must become a driver."
- James Thompson and James Mack, "The
George Wright Forum", Volume 12, Number 2,
1995
"National parks constitute a gallery of American treasures. They are more
than destinations; they are a way of travel. In an era of growing population
and shrinking space, they become ever more valuable. The future of the
national parks, however, depends on awareness, concern, and sense of custody
of the public they serve. In a democracy, we get what we deserve and leave a
legacy that reflects ourselves and our time."
- Michael Frome, "National Parks in
Crisis", 1981
"The American experience has been the confrontation by old peoples and
cultures of a world as new as if it has just risen from the sea. That gave us
our hope and our excitement, and the hope and excitement can be passed on to
newer Americans, Americans who never saw any phase of the frontier, but only
so long as we keep the remainder of our wild as a reserve and a promise - a
sort of wilderness bank...We simply need that wild country available to us,
even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a
means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the
geography of hope."
- Wallace Stegner, from a 1960 letter
to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review
Commission?
"The national park idea represents a far-reaching cultural achievement, for
here we raise our thoughts above the average, and enter a sphere in which the
intangible values of the human heart and spirit take precedent. Freedom
prevails. The foxes are free to dig burrows where they will; to hunt
ptarmigan, ground squirrels and mice as the spirit moves. The grizzlies
wander over their ancestral home unmolested; dig roots and ground squirrels,
graze grass, and harvest berries according to whatever menu appeals to them.
The 'bad' wolf seeks an honest living as of yore. He is a respected citizen,
morally on par with everyone else. Our task is to perpetuate this freedom and
purity of nature, this ebb and flow of life."
- Conservationist Adolph Murie
"I say to you that unless we keep the stream of the past with living
significance for the present, we not only have no past, we have no present.
Tradition is not a barren pride in a dead glory; tradition is something that
provides refreshment for the spirit. It is something that gives us deep
assurance and a sense of destiny and a determination to hold on fast to the
great things that have been done through valor and imagination by those who
have gone before us."
- Justice Felix Frankfurter
"Parks are first-aid - also prevention. They prevent more law-breaking than
policemen; cure more than physicians, give more ideas than sermons; more
development than schools. The pace and pressure of modern life, its daily
duties and examinations, require that everyone must be steadily refreshed, and
for this sustaining and ever-invoking refreshment nature is a perennial,
cheering source. Nature takes mind and body and puts them at their best.
Here one comes to know himself and to be the self he would like to be. Nature
is the lifesaver of the race; the great out-of-doors is the lifesaving station
of the nation. Probably the best way to delay death, the best medicine to
lengthen life, is to take to the woods. This life-sustaining prescription is
most effective as a preventive and should be regularly used. Like a sermon,
it should be taken once in a while whether needed or not. It is Mother
Nature's cure-all, and there are no substitutes just as good..."
- Enos Mills, "father" of Rocky
Mountain NP, ca. 1920
"There are certain values in our landscape that ought to be sustained against
destruction or impairment, though their worth cannot be expressed in money
terms. They are essential to our 'life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness;'
this nation of ours is not so rich it can afford to lose them; it is still
rich enough to afford to preserve them."
- Newton B. Drury, Director, 1940-1951