Tuesday, March 26, 2013

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.

Friday, March 22, 2013

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!


Friday, March 15, 2013

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.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

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, March 13, 2013

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


We miss our federal colleagues


Tuesday, March 12, 2013

The Trouble with Metaphors


Our second plenary session provided a counterpoint to the first, with Emma Marris, author of the Rambunctious Garden, giving arguments for managing nature that provoked much thought for all assembled, and no doubt for those who tuned in online.
The departure point for Ms. Marris’ perspective is that “we can’t go back to [the] Garden of Eden, and it never really existed….The ecosystems of North America that we see as Edenic are a product of our management and mismanagement.” She briefly touched on arguments that landscapes of North America were managed in pre-Colombian time, and were naturally dynamic before the age of man, therefore there can be no valid historical reference point for ecological preservation.  The transition to modern time and the increasing rate of anthropogenic change was not immediately apparent in the author’s description, but perhaps was not a point that needed to be emphasized to a George Wright audience.
If we can’t go home, to the Garden of Eden, what can we do? The old goal was so neat, it was more beautiful back then, it was perfect back then. In referring to “pristine-ish” nature, if we can’t “put it back,” what goal should we use? “Picking a goal does not mean we deny the intrinsic value of nature…. It just might be in a different place.” Different goals is how we pragmatically manage. What is new is a psychological change, that we don’t see interventionist management techniques such as assisted migration and use of surrogates as last-ditch attempts. She enjoined us to be more positive and find joy in this work. “That’s why I use the gardening metaphor. Gardening is like stewardship,” except a steward doesn’t necessarily have to do anything, just keep the keys and make sure nothing bad happens. “A gardener has to get down and get dirty and intervene.”
She spoke of “novel ecosystems.” Think of them “like a weed patch, lots of introduced species that are playing around together,” she said. “Cycling nutrients, making soil” …functionally they look very similar to native ecosystems. Diversity levels in some cases meet or exceed native systems.
She acknowledged that “you can’t just go nuts with this stuff. You can’t do [just] anything. It is arrogant to say that humans can control the earth.” We need to be humble. It is not only virtuous but smart. We are not in control of the earth. It is not a conscious masterminding.
“The scope of our influence is massive. People start throwing around the term Anthropocene.” More traditional conservationists immediately see it as bad. She gave a few examples, including the Ecological Society of America conference and people saying “cities are a cancer on the earth,” and that from her perspective that doesn’t help.
The Anthropocene has to be acknowledged, and has caused moral wrongs. We cannot not act. If we decide not to manage a piece of land, we are making a decision because if we don’t act, all the other forces will act. “I think there has been a cultural prohibition within conservation from talking about any positive change that is anthropogenic.”
“What do we disagree on? I guess it is the metaphor of the garden. I find the metaphor useful.” But she hopes it will hold wild things. She emphasized that she is not talking about planting things in neat little rows; but also argued that places like Yellowstone are already managed as a garden, citing the example of intervention to manage the whitebark pine. “When we go out and remove invasive species, we are already gardening.”
“You can have historical and you can have wild, but you can’t have both at the same time.”
Many arguments of Marris, a journalist, would benefit from more scientific underpinnings. But her central point, that climate change and global human manipulation robs nature conservation of the no-action alternative, is potent. She could have done more to describe the cultural dimensions of our conservation attitudes, but her talk underscores the need to bring multi-disciplinary science to the interventions citizens are already making.


The plenary sessions of Dr. Michael Soulé and Ms. Marris provided very different views, and both will provoke thinking and reflection on the fundamental objectives of our work in parks and protected areas. It is a great example of critical professional debate and food for thought that draws us to meetings and programs of the George Wright Society.

Samples of Monday concurrent sessions


I sat in on an interesting concurrent session on social impact investing and biosphere reserves, led by the first President of the George Wright Society, Vernon (Tom) Gilbert. Tom introduced Shaun Paul, who is working to create a “a biocultural resilience tool, a holistic management tool transforming capital markets to enhance biodiversity and cultural diversity.” Investors love the idea and don’t need a high profit but need to show a return. A rapidly growing number of businesses and investors are ‘sympathetic’ to holistic approaches to people and planet, yet lack data to support ‘the business case.’ “ Inadequate information inhibits understanding of risks and opportunities afforded with a holistic approach to natural resource management…The need is for evidence and stories building long-term investment value.”
The main point is that better information will “unleash pent-up demand for positive social impact investing,” The presentation discussed improvements in standardizing measures of success, with projects like the Ocean Health Index and Miradi, and the US National research Council Committee on Criteria and Procedures for Evaluating Programs to Conserving Biological Diversity.
How do we get investors to think long-term and inter-generationally, the way that traditional societies have always done, to look seven generations ahead?
An afternoon session showcased examples of societies who are acting as intergenerational stewards in the Torngat Mountains of Canada; north-coastal California, and San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Hawk Rosales of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council talked about the use of conservation easements, which can be written to allow traditional land uses but restrict more impactful resource consumption. These easements have been held by non-native land trusts, successfully, but have also contributed to the advent of native-led land trusts, and a Native Land Trust Alliance, with seven member organizations to date. Given their perpetuity, conservation easements represent one of the few tools our modern society has developed that mirror the long-term stewardship of traditional societies.

#GWS2013

It's official! (As if that would matter...) Follow conference tweets on #GWS2013.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Conference statistics from GWS Executive Director Dave Harmon


We do this meeting every two years, so the last one was in 2011.  The total attendance there was 1,140, of whom about 610 were NPS and another 20 were DOI.  I assume virtually all of them were on official travel.    This year, as of the first day of the conference, we have 350 people registered.  Of these, 0 are from the Park Service, 0 from USGS, and 0 from USFWS (in an official capacity).  There are perhaps 10 federal people in attendance in either an official capacity or on their own.  This represents a 70% decrease in overall attendance from 2011 to 2013.

Less quantifiable, but equally important, are the indirect impacts involved in the immense amount of extra planning work that we and our federal partners had to do in anticipation of the possible sequester.  And, perhaps most profound of all, is the cost of the lost opportunities for improved understanding and management of national parks and other protected federal lands and marine areas.  There are literally hundreds of federal employees who were eager to advance their skills and bolster their professional networks at our conference, and the sequester needlessly prevented them from doing that.  If not corrected, over the long term the inability of federal researchers, resource managers, educators, and other professionals to attend scholarly and scientific conferences will do real and permanent damage to our public lands and waters.

Despite all this, let me close by emphasizing that we have a dynamic and engaged crowd of highly committed people who are here for a week of collective learning, with plenty of high-quality sessions on tap.  The spirit and dedication of people who work on behalf of parks, protected areas, and cultural sites is admirable, and it's on full display at GWS2013.

Soulé opens GWS 2013 with passion


Michael Soulé kicked off the conference with a passionate and sometimes emotional plenary speech Monday morning. Dr. Soulé made a strong case for  preservation of wild things and wild places. “Each extinction that occurs now diminishes life.” “Speciation stopped about a decade ago [for larger animals]. Death is one thing, the end of birth is another.” “We need to staunchly defend what’s left and not be nicey-nicey.”
Dr. Soulé drew a sharp contrast between conservation and “new conservation,” or gardening, which he identified strongly with Peter Kareiva, Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy. He gave several good arguments for why a gardening approach to nature is dangerous, detrimental and unsustainable, going so far as to say that it presents the “final solution” for wild nature. He suggested that the objectives of this approach are not conservation but to increase consumption for profit interests. Three times he encouraged the audience to google the board of directors of The Nature Conservancy. More moderately, he described “new conservation” as not conservation but humanitarianism. Nothing wrong with that, “I’m a human,” but 98% of charitable giving goes to humanitarianism, and of the remaining 2% much goes to animal welfare, including domesticated animals. “Probably less than 1%” goes to wild nature.
Dr. Soulé did contradict himself in responding to a question on how to make large-scale conservation corridors possible, stressing that they need to benefit people through recreation, health benefits of exercise, tourism, and outfitting businesses such as REI. Dr. Soulé received a round of applause for replying to a question on population with, “The answer is simple, we need to empower women.”
Dr. Soulé’s talk was webcast, and he fielded several questions from the remote audience. The webcast will be made available through the George Wright Society website. Tomorrow’s plenary by Emma Maris, author of Rambunctious Garden will also be webcast.


You can view Dr. Soulé's bio on http://www.georgewright.org/gws2013_plenaries

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Announcing this blog

Greetings. I have created this weblog as a medium for communicating some of the excitement of the George Wright Conference on Parks and Protected Areas for those unable to participate. I have in mind in particular our colleagues in the National Park Service and other US federal agencies who are barred from participating by restrictive conference limits and ultimately sequestration. We know you are with us in spirit, and lament the lost opportunities for inexpensive, high-value professional development.


If you are participating in Denver and would like to add to this blog, please contact me for editing permissions. We welcome comments on the blog, below.