Administration

Got your new government I.D.? — When I began to think of what in the administrative world has been changed since Sept. 11, 2001, I thought of the changes in security we have to administer. An ongoing administrative logistics problem in the National Park Service is ensuring that all federal permanent, term and now those hired as Student Career Experience Program employees are issued a standard identification card.

On Aug. 27, 2004, the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 was signed into law establishing “a mandatory, governmentwide standard for secure and reliable forms of identification issued by the federal government to its employees and contractors (including contractor employees).”

The primary objectives of the directive were to eliminate “wide variations in the quality and security of forms of identification used to gain access to secure federal and other facilities where there is potential for terrorist attacks” and “to enhance security, increase government efficiency, reduce identity fraud, and protect personal privacy.” Where it has been practical and could be supported by information technology, these new identification cards are also used for logging onto government computers.

This declaration has proven to be a challenge to implement, especially for the remote park units. I recall getting my new identification card three years ago once the station was set up in Tucson. I am one of the “lucky” ones since my park is located near a major metropolitan area and has several other government agencies in the community.

Now I am due to get my card recertified and will soon prepare to make the appointment to do so. As I prepare to get recertified, I know there are other folks in the NPS who are just now getting their first identification card because of the logistics of working in a remote park.

Remote parks have been at the mercy of decision makers who had to best locate enrollment facilities. For some parks this could mean petitioning to host a station on site and for others it means at least a two-hour drive to the nearest enrollment station. Issuing the access cards to such a NPS diverse workforce has been another challenge. For now the implementation has been limited to permanent, term and SCEP employees. Can you imagine the complexity and cost if and when it expands to seasonal employees?

For now I will continue to send an updated list of permanent, SCEP and term employees from my park to our region’s access card administrator. These employees then receive an email informing them they have been sponsored by Homeland Security and will need to make an appointment at a facility that may or not be near them. Employees may be looking at the loss of an hour of their work day up to a full day or two depending on how far they need to travel.

How many of us lament the old days of in-house picture taking (when it was OK to smile at the camera), then trimming the picture to fit the ID card that was signed by your park superintendent and hoping that the do-it-yourself lamination would come out crease-free?

Of course, those were the days before Homeland Security was a department and HSPD-12 became law. I know that we are working toward a secure workforce and hope that it goes a bit smoother for those remote parks.

I must admit that I will still have a fond place for the old laminated ID I once carried. The new ID is hard plastic to protect the embedded microchip. I use it as an ID and look forward to the day when I can use it to log onto a government computer. Maybe I won’t have to change my password every 30 days. One can only hope!

Interpretation

“But not with the mere recitation of facts. Not with the names of things, but by exposing the soul of things — those truths that lie behind what you are showing your visitor. Nor yet sermonizing; nor yet by lecturing; not by instruction but by provocation.”
— Freeman Tilden

Have you ever met a park ranger who wanted to be an interpreter more than anything else? I had the rare honor of meeting such a person once. This person didn’t accept a job as an interpreter because it was seen as a means to go elsewhere in the National Park Service.

This person became an interpreter because of passion for helping visitors connect to the meanings of the park. This person studied the art, science and philosophy of interpretation in college.

After college, this person took the profession of interpretation seriously by participating in the Interpretive Development Program without being asked by a supervisor. This person recognized the importance of peer review certification as a means for creating a professional culture of evaluation. Most importantly, this person was a joy to be with on interpretive programs. This person comfortably interacted with visitors and never tired of learning about the natural and cultural history of the park.

I want to emphasize that this type of person with interpretive knowledge, skills and talents is rare. Most front-line interpreters I’ve met stumble upon the field of interpretation by accident. I’m one of those people. In my first summer as a seasonal “interpreter,” I had a vague notion that interpretation was sharing information with a naïve hope that visitors would be interested. Someone mentioned Freeman Tilden but I didn’t take much notice that summer.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but I have doubts that most NPS employees who call themselves interpreters have read the basic literature on the foundations of interpretation, such as Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage. Where is the passion? I worked in one large park (average visitation: 24 million) where the passion for interpretation was missing. The passion for information was there, but not for the art of interpretation. If interpretive walks and talks occurred in a meaningful, relevant and provocative manner, it was an accident. In this same park, when I proposed that we send some of the frontline “interpretive staff” to the annual National Association for Interpretation Workshop, I was told that only interpretive managers attended the workshop. As long as this “trickle-down” form of interpretative management occurs in parks, the passion we seek will be rare.

Sadly, the park ranger I met with the passion for interpretation passed away recently. To simply say that this is a great loss to both the NPS and the profession of interpretation is not enough. The best way to honor this person’s life is by critically examining the level of passion for our own work as professional interpreters and taking more risks to ensure that our walks and talks are intensely provocative.

Let the visitor sense that interpretation is in your blood.

Protection

Triaging the competing roles of the emergency responder — It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since 9/11. So much to reflect on, all of it staggering, especially when viewed through the eyes of an emergency responder.

When the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, emergency workers arrived on scene to find utter chaos on an extreme scale. The same was true for those responding to the Pennsylvania field where United Flight 93 crashed, and for the scene at the Pentagon. For those at Ground Zero, an already unimaginable scene was exacerbated to “beyond comprehensible” in a matter of seconds when the towers came crashing down.

Like any emergency responder who has arrived at smaller-scale emergency scenes and struggled with the “what do I do first” dilemma, it’s hard to imagine the mental strain the 9/11 responders dealt with on that fateful morning.

So many vital tasks had to be attended to, most of them with an urgency that was through the roof:
• Scene safety, the safety of themselves and that of their fellow rescuers
• Preservation of human life — triaging and treating the wounded
• Accessing those who were trapped and treating them once they were extricated
• Apprehending suspicious persons who might continue to be a threat
• Preservation of evidence
• Initiating an investigation of the incident
• Searching for those suspected of being trapped and/or buried
• Communications
• Acquiring specialized tools and teams to aid in SAR operations;
• Battling with the painul knowledge that some of the victims were personal friends or colleagues of the responders
• Battling with the unavoidable emotional stress caused by such a horrific scene

Prior to 9/11 the United States didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security, Hurricane Katrina and all of its lessons had not yet occurred, emergency support functions did not exist. In many ways, the first responders to the disaster scenes of 9/11 were “flying blind.”

America certainly had other mass casualty incidents to help us prepare for disasters, such as bad wildfire and hurricane seasons, the Oklahoma City bombing, the incident in Waco, Texas, and school shootings, but nothing had fully prepared us for the sheer magnitude of 9/11.

How did emergency responders do it all? What did they do first?

The answer, at least in part, is triage, a French word meaning “to sort.” I don’t mean the actual triaging of the wounded, although that in itself is one of the tasks needing a priority assignment. I mean the triaging of the myriad tasks facing emergency responders as they arrive at such a scene.

No one responder is capable of doing it all. For that matter, neither is a single team of folks, trained or not. All the first folks could do was attend to the most urgent tasks first, leaving the rest of it to those arriving in later stages.

The problem is that this is easier said than done.

For instance, take a smaller incident requiring multiple tasks, all of which seem to be highly urgent: a fatal motor vehicle accident involving multiple patients, one who’s deceased, three others seriously injured (one entrapped and needing extrication); multiple vehicles, one on fire and the other over an embankment, on a heavily traveled highway; a medevac helicopter requesting latitude/longitude coordinates; reduced light; adverse weather conditions; and at least some element of criminal conduct, such as a stolen car or DUI.

Sound unlikely? Park rangers deal with this type of incident fairly often. To compound our difficulty of triaging the priority of work, as rangers, we’re not only law enforcement officers but usually emergency medical responders.

We can’t just “pass the buck” of EMS to the ambulance personnel and focus solely on law enforcement aspects of the incident. We must remember what comes first in task triage: scene safety and the preservation of human life, which means we might have to treat the injured first until higher-qualified EMS arrives.

An incident at my home park involved an intoxicated man who had ridden his horse over a cliff and landed partially submerged in a river with an open head wound, pneumothorax and other injuries. While rangers, deputies and ambulance personnel worked to stabilize, package and lift the patient via a technical litter raising system, another intoxicated person rode her horse back and forth over the ropes being used to haul the patient.

This woman needed to be arrested. The problem was that all the rangers and deputies were committed to the rescue and unable to break away to go hands-on with her. Fortunately, a ranger staffing the belay line ordered the woman out of the area and she complied.

This is a perfect example of triaging the most important tasks first. We’ll make that arrest soon enough, and the offender will earn herself a warrant. What mattered most that night was the safety of the patient and the responders over the edge.

That’s what mattered most on 9/11, too.

The safety of emergency responders, patients and bystanders is the single most important priority at any emergency scene, regardless of any other factors.

Remember this! When all seems to be chaos, we can only help others by first providing for our own safety and that of our team.

Remember 9/11. Strength and honor.

The director’s recent Flat Hat Chat, available online at Inside NPS, talks of his tasking a group of distinguished scientists to re-examine the Leopold Report about whether or how it should contribute to a “new paradigm” for the management of parks’ natural and cultural resources in the 21st century. The report is due to be completed over the next year, and I hope it presents the opportunity for conversation among not only the 14-member panel but park managers and resource specialists across the NPS.

As this group undertakes its task, I encourage NPS employees in all professions to (re-) familiarize themselves with what was known officially as The Secretary of the Interior’s Report on Wildlife Management in the National Parks. Commissioned by Stewart Udall and written by Starker Leopold (son of Aldo), Stanley Cain, Clarence Cottam, Ira Gabrielson and Thomas Kimball, the report set into motion groundbreaking policy changes for the NPS, which, I think it’s fair to say, have sometimes been mischaracterized inside and outside the agency. The Leopold Report did not, as is often summarized, advocate completely hands-off practices with regard to resource management. And, quite appropriately, it was not literally turned into NPS policy directive. I find it thought-provoking to revisit periodically what the NPS has or has not incorporated into its culture in the decades since.

Leopold and all did recommend that the NPS acknowledge complex ecological communities, emphasize native plants and animals, and minimize “artificiality in any form” (such as artificial feeding of wildlife) — a lesson the NPS has long embraced. They cautioned that “the factor of human use of the parks is subject only to regulation, not elimination. Exotic plants, animals and diseases are here to stay . . . yet . . . the goal . . . a reasonable illusion of primitive America could be recreated, using the utmost in skill, judgment and ecological sensitivity.”

The committee also wrote that rebuilding damaged biota “will not be done by passive protection alone,” and that “where animal populations get out of balance with their habitat . . . population control becomes essential.”

In this complex set of guidelines I suggest the NPS has achieved some successes, but perhaps more increasing frustrations (with the growth in proliferation of non-native species and attempts at population control.) I smile to re-read that they saw “the most dangerous tool of all is the road grader” and urged that the “maintenance of naturalness should prevail.” (You be the judge.)

The committee also strongly advocated for research as the basis for all management programs — historical research into what biotic associations originally occurred in each locale, research on plant-animal relationships leading to hypotheses, experimentation to test those theses, and application of tested management methods. They also encouraged sharing of research and test results with the public “thereby eliminating possible misunderstanding and friction.” (Ah, if only it was so simple.)

Numerous reports and commissions since the Leopold group have encouraged a sound program of studies to guide NPS managers, and we’ve surely seen some successes. However, the struggle to build or maintain basic research, inventory and monitoring programs, and outreach with the public — despite the boost of the natural resource specialist training programs, the Natural Resource Challenge, the (newly renamed) Natural Resource Program Center, I&M Networks, and Research/Science Learning Centers — continues. To one who spends significant time promoting, reading, managing and incorporating science into actions, I still hear the question too often for my liking: “Why do we need that research anyway?”