Deny Galvin Receives GMW Award for Excellence

Deny Galvin receiving the GMW Award for Excellence
from GWS Past President Rolf Diamant
photo: Samantha Weber

Former National Park Service Deputy Director Denis P. Galvin received the highest honor of the George Wright Society at a March 14 awards ceremony capping the Society’s biennial Conference on Parks, Protected Areas, and Cultural Sites.  Galvin received  the 2013 George Melendez Wright Award for Excellence for his outstanding lifetime achievements on behalf of America’s national parks as a leader, innovator, and mentor to countless NPS employees.

“If one looks at the history of America’s national parks over the past 40 years,” the Society noted, “Deny’s fingerprints can be found on virtually every advance that has been realized over the period.”  These include seminal roles in creating the Natural Resource Challenge, designing professional development and recruitment programs, and championing national heritage areas, among many other accomplishments. 

The Society’s award citation concludes: “Like George Melendez Wright himself, Deny realizes that our calling is not merely to be managers of parklands.  We are stewards of a priceless heritage, and our stewardship must be informed by the highest ethical and professional standards we can bring to bear.  That is just what Deny did every day of his career.”

At the same event, five other winners in the Society’s “Imagine Excellence” Awards Program received their honors:

·       Vernon C. “Tom” Gilbert received a GWS Special Achievement Award for his ongoing work to support and reinvigorate the system of biosphere reserves in the United States.  Gilbert had a long career in the National Park Service and with UNESCO before retiring, after which he became the founding president of both the George Wright Society and the United States Biosphere Reserve Association.

·       Hugh C. Miller, who retired from the National Park Service in the post of chief historical architect, was recognized with the 2013 GWS Cultural Resource Achievement Award for his career-long achievements in preservation planning and design, which have “helped shape the policies, practices, and techniques that are at the core of modern-day preservation.”

·       Robert Winfree, chief science advisor in the National Park Service’s Alaska Region, was given the 2013 GWS Natural Resource Achievement Award for making scenario planning the centerpiece of NPS’s plans to respond to climate change-related impacts in the Region’s parks, and for boosting effective science communication among his peers inside the agency and elsewhere.

·       Peter Newman won the 2013 GWS Social Science Achievement Award for his cutting-edge research on visitor-related impacts in parks and protected areas while at the same time mentoring future researchers and park managers as associate professor of protected area management at Colorado State University.

·       Charles Jacobi was honored with the 2013 GWS Communication award for his innovative work to promote Leave No Trace principles at Acadia National Park, where he is a resource specialist.  Thanks to Jacobi, over 4,000 visitors are contacted each year and educated about the benefit of low-impact outdoor recreation.

Complete citations for all the awards can be found at http://www.georgewright.org/gws2013_awards.pdf.

World Parks Congress

Our last session of the conference (or a session in the last block of events) focused on the emerging agenda for the World Parks Congress.

• 1962: definitions and standards for representative systems leading to the UN list of PAs;
• 1972: conservation of ecosystems, genesis of World Heritage and Wetlands Conventions;
• 1982: PAs in sustainable development, development assistance in PAs
• 1992: Global change and PAs; PA categories and management effectiveness;
• 2003: Governance, sustainable finance, capacity development, linkages in the landscape and seascape, equity and benefit sharing.
• 
  

Just as the George Wright Conference is the de facto North American Parks Congress, the IUCN World Parks Congress is THE global forum on protected areas. The first World Parks Congress was convened by the US National Park Service over 50 years ago, in Seattle, and the second was held at Yellowstone in 1972. The World Parks Congress has been convened roughly every decade ever since, so the upcoming Congress will be the sixth. As the world’s most influential gathering of people involved in protected area management, it sets the global agenda for the following decade.

Panelists were:

Left to right, Alan Latourelle, Parks Canada; Sally
Barnes, NSW, Australia; Brent Mitchell, GWS president;
Ernesto Enkerlin, WCPA (standing) photo: John Waithaka

Ms. Sally Barnes, Chief Executive, Office of Environment and Heritage, Government of New South Wales, Australia; and as such the host of the next World Parks Congress

Mr. Alan Latourelle, CEO of the Parks Canada Agency. I want to say publicly to Alan that we always value the participation of Parks Canada in the George Wright Conference, but never more so than this year!

Dr. Ernesto Enkerlin, Technical University of Monterrey; former Commissioner of CONANP, the parks agency of Mexico; Last fall Ernesto was elected as chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas. Having just organized this conference, I do not envy the job of putting together the Congress!

Connecting People with Nature

I caught a fascinating session Thursday morning at 8:00am that is central to our conference theme: how to keep parks relevant in a changing world. Alan Latourelle, CEO of Parks Canada, led off. “We are the largest landowner in terms of parks organizations in the world. We were the first parks agency. At our centennial we had a lot of time to reflect.” He set the stage with points we all know but too often lose sight of, “It’s really about hope and inspiration. It’s really about the hearts and minds.”

Alan Latourelle, CEO Parks Canada

Alan described the changing face of Canada: “Almost three-quarters of Canadians live in one of the 33 major cities of Canada, with 40% in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. After Australia we have the second largest immigrant population. New immigrants account for over half of new population growth. Few of our [park] visitors are new Canadians. We are very dependent currently on less than 20% of our population.” Park visitors are increasingly older and more affluent. And he drew the link between visitation and public support for parks.

“We’ve developed a new concept of national park, Rouge National Urban Park, which will be available by transit, ‘the people’s park.’”

Parks Canada has launched the “Learn to Camp” program, partnering with Mountain Equipment Coop, in about 40 parks, targeting urban populations. They give free park passes for grade 8 students, about 400,000 of them. And they are online: “Over the last three years we have become the highest followers on Facebook and Twitter of all federal agencies.” And they are working where they do not have real estate, developing a strategy with provincial parks by August whereby Parks Canada will be participate in provincial park programs near urban areas.

“As we look to the future, there are two key ingredients. We need abundance of wild species, but we need abundance of people in parks. We want Canadians to become the stewards of our special places.”

“If we don’t act quickly park supporters will become the endangered species of the future.”

Alan was followed by two excellent presentations from Australia, Sally Barnes, Chief Executive, Office of Environment and Heritage, Government of New South Wales; and Greg Leaman, Director of Natural and Cultural Heritage, South Australia. Both spoke of programs to connect people with nature, including the dispossessed. “In Australia we have had 200 years of dispossession; it has taken us 200 years to acknowledge their stewardship,” said Sally. She described a variety of programs, from urban parks to lowering the threshold of visitation at sites. She showed several applications of technology. Answering concerns that people, especially young people, spend too much time on electronics and not outside, she said, “We’ve given up! It’s not a war, they won.” She showed an app for crowd-sourcing whale sightings along the coast near Sydney, and WilderQuest an engaging and fun computer program that engages kids, then leads them outside to take photos of their back yard, a local park, and finally a national park.

“If you are too focused on the greater good you can become disconnected. We are trying to become more customer focused.” “People feel disconnected.”

Greg Leaman took a bit more of a philosophical approach. “We often hear that parks are a middle-class construct. They are the ones who can get to parks, afford the equipment to experience them. There is a social justice question. How do we make it possible for others to be able to [benefit from parks]; how to make them relevant to all society? I don’t know the answer but we are starting to ask the question.”

“We should be out there engaging in different sectors … health sectors, mining sector, aboriginal communities….Let’s look at the glass half-full and not half-empty. What are the new paradigms, what should we be doing that is innovative?”

Ernesto Enkerlin, Chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas, spoke both about his native Mexico and from a global perspective. In Mexico’s National Conservation Week “we are recruiting the conservationists of the future.” 

“We sometimes forget that most of the world is different than North America, or different from Australia. ….We need to have people incorporate nature into their lives, maybe not in a recreational way but in their livelihood. “We need to make urban populations understand that people on the land can be the best allies” to conserve the land.

“As WCPA we create ways that the urban population is in the countryside and is in contact with rural life.”

All the presentations and discussions demonstrated excellent examples of efforts to make parks more relevant, and to ensure that both visitors and park agency staff reflect the demographics of each country. But I still detect a basic premise of working to bring people to our perception of parks and nature. I’m not sure we have fully come to terms with a reality that many people simply have a different world view, and different perceptions of nature. Truly understanding the cultural bases of those views and attitudes is more important than ever, and will prepare us for making parks more relevant in the future. But the efforts described in the session left me very hopeful.

Was small “n” a bad thing? Recollections on a conference with 30% attendance.

As a graduate student, I’ve learnt about the problems with a small “n” sample size. Problems include lack of generalizability, risk to study subjects and, arguably, an inefficient use of time and resources.

As a first-time attendee at the George Wright Society (GWS) conference, I also heard concern about a small “n” in attendance. I heard how the conference may have decreased significance, because researchers couldn’t share results with federal managers. I heard how much time is required to arrange travel, prepare presentations and attend the conference. And I heard how attending may not be “as worth it” as if it had had its regular number of attendees.

However, I believe a small “n” may have added some value to this year’s conference. I engaged in thoughtful one-on-one and small group discussions with some of this countries’ leading scientists and policy-makers. I met other like-minded graduate students from a diversity of backgrounds and geographies. I regularly struggled with which concurrent session to attend. I found a few pockets of time to keep up with family back home and not fall behind on school work. These qualities were maintained or even enhanced by a smaller number of attendees than usual.

I know the benefits of a large conference attendance. The last conference I attended in Denver was organized by the Geological Society of America (GSA), and nearly 6,000 people attended. This conference was a significant experience for me, but its significance was easy to achieve. From 8:00AM to 5:30PM each day, an attendee had the option of attending one of twenty-five or more concurrent sessions at any given time. It was impossible not to find something meaningful.

This year’s GWS conference didn’t have the intrinsic benefits of a large attendance. It had 2-6 concurrent sessions at any given time instead of its regular 12-18. But maybe that was okay. 

As a first-time attendee, I’m glad I attended during a low “n” year. My conversations were intimate, my fear of missing out (“FoMO” in conference lingo) was moderate rather than severe, and my memories of people and their ideas were distinct. Perhaps the benefits of events with smaller number of attendees is something that the Society can think about as it strategically brainstorms for the future. Increasing diversity and frequency of offerings may pair well with these benefits of a small “n”.

Wednesday @ GWS

We settled into a full schedule of concurrent and focus sessions today, with content as diverse as:

• Geography, Minority Visitation, and the Accessibility of “America’s Best Idea” in a Multi-cultural Nation
• From Education to Impact: The Effects of Messaging on Environmental Conditions in Acadia National Park
• Connecting Urban Populations to Protected Areas (Rouge National Urban Park)
• Interagency Wilderness Fellows: Post-Graduate Students Assess Wilderness Character
• Protected Areas on Private Land: Shaping the Future of the Park System in Australia
• The Importance of Darkness and the Night Sky to National Park Visitors
• Non-Recognized Tribal Communities Protecting Cultural & Natural Resources
• Shifting the Focus to Results: Ecological Restoration in Canada’s National Parks
• Badlands National Park Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment
• Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and A Land Ethic for Our Time (film)

I spent too much of my day in business meetings, but did catch interesting sessions on protected area databases, both global and US; and on food for and from national parks.

The global protected area network is increasing: for terrestrial sites from 8.8% of global area in 1990 to 12.7% in 2010 (0.9% to 4% marine) according to the World Conservation Monitoring Center. But this is a long way from the goal of 17% terrestrial and 10% marine by 2020 set by the Aichi targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Expanding the extent of protected areas to Aichi targets is estimated at 3-6 times the current running costs.

The protected areas estate is also diversifying rapidly in management arrangements and governance structures, posing a problem for tracking and monitoring. Most data is provided by governments, which most often have no facility for documenting areas protected by indigenous communities or private protected areas.  In a positive development, the Protected Areas Database of the US now accesses the National Conservation Easement Database. Assessing management effectiveness at a global scale is yet more complex, though progress is being made. Protected area data is publicly available on http://www.protectedplanet.net/

Meanwhile, the World Heritage program of IUCN is taking steps to move from a “unremittingly negative” monitoring system to a proactive posture of documenting and providing guidance on best practice for natural sites. The World Heritage Convention, celebrating 40 years, had its genesis in the United States; the US was the first signatory, and both the US and Canada were among the first six sites listed (Yellowstone and Nahanni). In contrast, the US is not a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Parks and Protected Areas Where Farms and Food Matter took a page from Emma Marris’ gardening metaphor, quite literally. The conversation in the round discussed initiatives around the US and the world in which protecting agro-biodiversity, agricultural heritage, historic landscapes, food security, and community support for parks are priorities. Chief among the examples cited was Cuyahoga National Park in Ohio, where farming is being reinstated through a private conservancy, restoring both a local food system and community relations in a park situated between two urban areas.

Much of the discussion centered on connecting traditional agriculture and protected areas, and converting supply chains into value chains, that is, mechanisms to ensure that economics of food systems support environmental and landscape values as well. A central point was that protected landscapes, as defined by global protected areas definitions, can contribute to biodiversity conservation and provide common cause with local communities, particularly in ecoregions such as temperate grasslands that are underrepresented in protected area systems. Such protected landscapes complement other, more familiar and more restrictively protected areas.

Related but distinct for food from parks is work on food for parks led by the Institute at the Golden Gate. The focus is on how concessions and parks are coordinating to make sure that food in the parks is of high quality. After a series of projects and reports, the work has resulted in draft guidelines for 25% of food provided by park concessions to be “healthful and sustainably sourced.” Compliance is a point of market distinction for concessionaires, and results in food served to visitors that is of a quality consistent with the other aspects of the national park visitor experience.

Signs of the Times

Poster reception