Easy to Love, Hard to Manage Keeping National Parks Ready for Future Generations By Lael Gilbert Most every person can tell you their national park—the red-walled canyon they road-tripped to as a kid, a campground they prowled during college, a mossy canoe lake they visited on 22 separate occasions with scouts, or the high mountain meadow that settled into their soul one formative and splendid spring.
Although he has great memories at some of the “rock star” parks—Glacier, Saguaro, and Arches— Mark Brunson tends to connect to the smaller ones—Fossil Butte, Tonto, and Fort Bowie. Brunson is one of several experts from the S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources whose research informs the U.S. National Park Service. Modest national monuments and national historic parks were often set aside for historical or archeological significance rather than for scenic bling, he says. “What makes me love them even more is that often there’s hardly anyone there. It’s easier to appreciate what a gift the national park system is,” he says. National parks are easy to love—they are harder to take care of. It isn’t a matter of wanting to protect these natural treasures; most people do. It’s the on-the-ground knowledge—understanding how to manage, maintain, and repair these chronically underfunded, intricate ecological and social systems—that’s harder to accomplish. What happens, for instance, when your remote backcountry campsite goes digitally viral? What repercussions will a boundary change have on the wildlife? How does the ecology of a site change when crowds get too loud, messy, or big?
“Our parks confront so many challenges these days from increasing visitation to aging infrastructure to external pressures like air pollution and climate change and encroaching development, that make it harder to protect the natural and cultural features that the parks were created in order to conserve,” says Brunson. “To be a manager in the national park service you have to, by definition, be resilient,” says Christopher Monz, professor of recreation resources management in the Department of Environment and Society (ENVS). Managers address whack-a-mole issues that surface when millions of people load cars, pitch tents, hit trails, and conquer peaks in places that don’t have adequate funding but do have delicate ecosystems. These are complex places, after all, where ecology meets history meets social adoration and occasional ignorance. National parks in the United States have a mandate that seems paradoxical—to conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wildlife, and to provide for the enjoyment of such as will leave them unimpaired for future generations. In other words, to have their cake and eat it too … plus save a piece for the grandkids. But Monz sees it as a challenge, not an irreconcilable charge.
The scenic Sonoran Desert as seen from a cliff dwelling in Tonto National Monument. Photo courtesy of Mark Brunson.
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