The “Vision Thing.” — We’ve all heard that said many times. And, frankly, I’ve come to believe that without placing an importance on it, the National Park Service will not be successful. All the world-class organizations are driven by three critical factors:

• Clear vision and direction championed by top management
• Trained and equipped people focused on implementation of the agreed-upon vision and direction
• Established recognition and positive consequence systems that sustain the behaviors and performance that the vision and direction require

Vision and direction are essential for greatness. In world-class organizations, everyone has a clear sense of where the enterprise is going. Only when the NPS leaders know that we understand the agreed-upon vision and direction can they attend to strengthening the Service’s ability to deliver on this vision.

The second step in the process of building a world-class organization — implementation — is training, preparing and equipping people throughout the organization to live according to the vision and accomplish the desired goals.

If we do not do that, our employees will never take care of each other and our visitors.

After vision and direction get things started and people are trained, equipped and committed to success, the question becomes, “What do you do to keep all this going?” World-class organizations establish recognition and positive consequence systems that fuel the implementation of the vision and direction, and they make sure those standards are met or exceeded on an ongoing basis. These practices communicate a basic understanding about people: recognition is a universal need. People everywhere want to be appreciated for their good efforts, and redirected and coached for any inappropriate behavior.

Although the greatest impact on performance — ongoing and future — comes from training and equipping people and establishing positive recognition and consequence systems, unless vision and direction are communicated and well understood by everyone, the NPS won’t even be in the game. Why?

Vision helps our employees make smart choices because their decisions are being made with the end result in mind. As goals are accomplished, the answer to “what next?” becomes clear. Vision takes into account a larger picture than the immediate goal. Martin Luther King Jr. described his vision of a world where people live together in mutual respect. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, he described a world where his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” He created powerful and specific images from the values of brotherhood, respect and freedom for all — values that resonate with the founding values of the United States. King’s vision has passed a crucial test: it continues to mobilize and guide people beyond his lifetime. Vision allows for a long-term proactive stance — creating what we want—rather than a short-term reactive stance — getting rid of what we don’t want.

Without a clear vision, we become a self-serving bureaucracy. The top managers begin to think “the sheep are there for the benefit of the shepherd.” All the money, recognition, power and status move up the hierarchy, away from the people closest to the customers, and leadership begins to serve the leaders and not the organization’s larger purpose and goals. The results of this type of behavior have been all too evident recently at Enron, WorldCom and other companies.

Once the vision is clarified and shared, NPS leaders can focus on serving and being responsive to the needs of the people. The greatest leaders have mobilized others by coalescing people around a shared vision. Sometimes leaders don’t get it at first, but the great ones eventually do.

When people share and believe in a vision of what the organization can be, they generate tremendous energy, excitement and passion. They feel they are making a difference. They know what they are doing and why. There is a strong sense of trust and respect. Managers don’t try to control. They let others assume responsibility because they know everyone shares the vision and is clear about their goals and direction. Everyone assumes responsibility for their own actions. They take charge of their future rather than passively waiting for it to happen. There is room for creativity and risk taking. People can make their contributions in their own way, and their differences are respected because people know they are in the same boat together — all part of a larger whole going “full steam ahead!”

Our vision can call us to be truly great. Our magnificent vision should articulate peoples’ hopes and dreams, touch their hearts and spirits, and help them see how they can contribute. It starts everything in the right direction and — if followed up by effective implementation, positive consequence and sustainability strategies — will keep things going in that right direction. Vision is the difference between business as usual and a world-class organization.

Interpretation

Our Legislative Teeth — Recently a colleague remarked to me that interpretation seems not to demand the attention of legislators in the way that other National Park Service disciplines do. There is a certain degree of legislative might behind environmental regulations that put resource management on the congressional radar screen. Homeland security has recently begun to dominate the protection function. The maintenance backlog in the parks was a big campaign issue and a plethora of initiatives ranging from GPRA to competitive sourcing perennially tax park administrators. But where does interpretation fit into the mix — from where do we derive our authority to interpret and how is Congress challenging us?

As it turns out, a variety of congressional mandates authorize the National Park Service to provide interpretive and educational services in parks. Some, like the Organic Act, are obvious. Other legislation requires diving into subparagraphs and subordinate clauses of legalese to find the references to interpretation. But Congress clearly believes interpretation to be important and worthwhile since they went to such pains to include educational activities into a highly disparate mix of legislation.

Some legislation is quite old, like the Historic Sites, Buildings, Objects and Antiquities Act enacted in 1935. The act deals mainly with the minutiae of recording and protecting historic and prehistoric resources. One must wade all the way through to subsection (j) before finding that the act also provides for the development of “an educational program and service for the purpose of making available to the public facts and information pertaining to American historic and archaeologic sites, buildings and properties of national significance.” It seems that even in 1935, it was recognized that education and preservation go hand in hand.

Some legislation is more obvious in its relevance to the NPS. The National Parks Omnibus Management Act of 1998 not only reiterates a congressional commitment to interpretation but charges the Secretary of the Interior to provide for “state-of-the-art . . . interpretation . . . of the resources of the National Park System.”

Even legislation seemingly unrelated to interpretation may have interpretive components. The National Environmental Policy Act which famously governs much of the environmental compliance process in parks has an interpretive component. The Natural Resource Challenge also promotes reaching out to the public to promote stewardship and pride through resource education. A web search of the United States Code reveals many of other places where legislators explicitly target interpretation and education on public lands.

Perhaps the most significant charge to interpret the resources of a national park site may be found in the unit’s enabling legislation. Not only does the enabling legislation explicitly outline why a park is nationally significant and worthy of protection (which should be fodder for interpretation), but Congress may also nestle a specific interpretive or educational mandate into the language of the legislation. For instance, the California Desert Protection Act of 1994 which created my new duty station, Death Valley (as well as Joshua Tree and Mojave) calls on the NPS to “protect and interpret ecological and geological features and historic, paleontological and archeological sites . . . .and promote public understanding and appreciation of the California Desert.” It is especially refreshing when the discipline of interpretation and the act of providing for outdoor recreation are not mistaken for the same activity?

Clearly, Congress has made provisions for providing interpretive services to park visitors for the purposes of resource protection and visitor understanding and appreciation, and has been doing so for quite some time. And though interpretation is not currently in the limelight like other NPS program areas, perhaps someday a “No Visitor Left Behind” initiative will make interpretation a significant sociocultural entitlement that the American people will expect as a birthright, much like Social Security and Medicare. Or perhaps not.

Maintenance

Operational Funding — I was reviewing the last three articles I wrote for ANPR and realized there was a general theme about them. They centered around how tough it is for maintenance operations in the parks today. Shortages of staff and funds, increased administrative requirements for compliance, old facilities, more and more mandated work control and management programs and reporting requirements, safety concerns. Those and more have contributed to making the job of taking care of our parks increasingly difficult and challenging. Of course all of these things are true and I also tried to talk about how well parks and their maintenance staff are coping with these challenges and succeeding even with shortages in staff and funding. But the question I continue to hear most often is when will the field get significant increases in funding for operations?

Parks have seen tremendous funding increases in the construction programs over the last seven or eight years resulting in significant improvements to park facilities and infrastructure. This continuing emphasis on reducing the deferred maintenance backlog through the Line Item, Repair/Rehabilitation and Fee Demonstration programs has not only been successful, it has been the right thing to do. Before any significant effort or initiative to increase operational funding can be supported and be successful it must be obvious to everyone what the benefits will be. Because of the success of the enhanced construction programs over the years, parks, for the first time in decades, are able to point to new or rehabilitated facilities and demonstrate the need for funds to take care of them. Some might believe that improved facilities require less maintenance, not more. But when you consider that the deterioration of facilities is directly tied to a longstanding lack of staff and operational funds to provide routine, cyclic and preventive maintenance, you begin to understand how the deferred maintenance backlog was created. Combine this with basic life cycle replacement requirements of facilities built in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s and the priority to reduce that deferred maintenance backlog over funding operational shortfalls in maintenance is a little easier to understand.

The transition from construction to operations as a funding priority for the National Park Service will be difficult. It is easier to demonstrate to the public we are taking care of the parks by rehabilitating or constructing new facilities. It is something the public can see and touch when visiting the parks and this adds political support to funding the construction programs. Less obvious to the public are maintenance staff who are overworked or even non-existent to provide critical basic maintenance for park facilities and visitor services. But this is changing.

With the success of the expanded construction programs, the public, Congress, NPS management and staffs have all begun to put more effort into supporting the clearly documented need to increase operational funding at the park level. The critical funding shortfalls for law enforcement and visitor safety operations is an important issue right now and likely to produce significant funding increases so desperately needed for officer safety and resource protection programs. This effort will lead to additional funding support of other critical NPS operations, including maintenance.

Moving from funding construction programs to operational programs won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. Those of us at the park level must make every effort to continue to demonstrate and document the need for operational increases. In maintenance, this requires a continued and concerted effort to implement and use the FMSS program to capture work needs and operational deficiencies. Waving our arms in the air to proclaim the sky is falling will only weaken our requests. Only by continuing to express our operational shortfalls in a professional, justifiable format like FMSS, will we be ready for the question, “How much do you need?”

Protection

Fully Knowing The Hazards — September-October of this past year was another difficult time for the Park Service family, particularly rangers and firefighters. Once again, we had to bury two of our own . . . two of our finest. Yet another sobering reminder that our jobs often place us in harm’s way.

Ranger Suzi Roberts was killed in the line of duty Sept. 14 by falling rock in Haleakala while she was clearing a previous rockslide’s debris from Hana Road. She was 36 years old.

Barely two weeks later, on Oct. 2, Arrowhead Hotshot Daniel Holmes was also killed in the line of duty. During a prescribed burn in Kings Canyon, Danny was struck by a burning treetop as it fell to the ground. His fellow crew members were there by his side when it happened. Some saw it happen. Danny was 26.

Two more of our best and brightest are gone. Gone in their youth, in their prime.

At least in both of these cases there are no accusatory fingers to point. There is no one to blame. Nobody did anything wrong this time. What happened to Suzi and Danny could have happened to any one of us. They died doing the jobs we all do every day. Somewhere in our national parks a rock or a tree falls every day, and there is no preventing that. It just so happened that on these two days, a ranger and a firefighter were standing in the fall line.

Some will surely ask, “How can we prevent this from happening again?” The answer is we cannot — unless we quit going to work, and neither Suzi nor Danny would approve of that. The hard reality is as long as we carry out the rigorous duties that we do amidst the magnificent — but wild — landscapes of national parks, we shall continue to be in harm’s way.

Suzi and Danny knew this, and the telling thing is that they went to work anyway. Just as we do every day. They accepted the risks, “fully knowing the hazards of our chosen profession,” to paraphrase the U.S. Army Ranger Creed. Just as we do every day.

This is exactly why we should all congratulate every retired law enforcement officer, firefighter and other emergency services worker we meet. We should congratulate them not just for a successful career, but for living through it.

It’s quite the wake-up call to realize that living through our careers — and for that matter, our next shift — is not at all a given. If it was, we would not have walls all over our country memorializing those who have fallen in action, especially those with blank space waiting for new names.

But that’s precisely what makes what we do for a living such a beautiful and sacred thing —we band together in answering a higher calling that often tempers our bonds amidst difficult circumstances. We don our uniforms every day and radio 10-8 in a line of work that requires us to answer harrowing calls, to face the fiery dragon’s breath, to give of ourselves oftentimes “that others may live.”

And on many occasions, we place our own welfare in the hands of our brothers and sisters. We enjoy in our line of work a rare and sweet camaraderie that can only be forged through shared adversity. We are a band of brothers and sisters, and the glue that holds our band together is the ever-present knowledge that we have all “been there, done that.” We have all responded to some pretty hairy calls, and we know that any given shift could be our last. In short, we can relate to one another the way no one else can.

In a profession historically punctuated with line-of-duty-deaths, we are mindful to never take for granted the time we have with our brothers and sisters. Again, that gold watch and pension are not a given for us. Suzi and Danny remind us of that. Of course we do all we can to work safely — we look up, look down, look all around, but we can never remove the dangers 100 percent. If we did, it wouldn’t be rangering. It wouldn’t be firefighting.

I’m not saying we should acquiesce, throw caution to the wind and surrender ourselves to the attitude of “if we die today, oh well, then we die today.” Of course not. I’m simply saying we cannot send firefighters, law enforcement officers and rescue professionals into their respective arenas and expect that line-of-duty deaths will never happen. Sooner or later, they will. And when they do, we remember our fallen. We pay tribute to them. We honor them.

We most recently sought to honor Suzi and Danny. We graced their caskets with our national colors, we rendered crisp salutes as they passed by one last time, we played sorrowful ballads on the pipes, and we shall engrave their names on our walls.

But we can honor them best by picking up their rifle, by picking up their Pulaski and carrying on where they left off. We go back to work doing the same work that snuffed out their light so tragically early. And we do it because we know they would have done the same for us. They were our sister and our brother.

Suzi and Danny died doing what they loved. They died serving their country. And they died with their boots on.

~ Kevin Moses, Big South Fork

Resource Management

I and other members of the George Wright Society note with sadness the recent death of Robert M. “Bob” Linn, co-founder of the society and a former chief scientist of the National Park Service. Linn devoted much of his retirement time to the society, serving as its executive director from 1990-1998.

Long after, he continued to serve in other roles, helping boost membership and planning the biennial conferences that have become what I believe to be the best attended national conference of NPS scientists, resource specialists and senior managers.

The organization Linn helped start promotes the acquisition and application of science and knowledge to the preservation of natural and cultural resources in parks and other reserves. Its namesake, George Wright, is arguably to resource managers as Harry Yount is to rangers. Wright was a park naturalist from California who became concerned about the plight of wildlife species and the scarcity of information available to manage and protect them in parks. In 1929 he used his own money to initiate animal studies, resulting in a series of reports on “Fauna of the National Parks,” and he eventually became the first chief of an NPS wildlife division.

Historian Dick Sellars, in Preserving Nature in the National Parks, documents Wright’s effect on prompting Director Horace Albright to develop the NPS’ own scientific expertise, as it had in engineering, landscape architecture — and rangering. Sellars also discusses the conflicts that developed between resource biologists and other, more established, professionals in the Service. In the case of field rangers, he points out that “traditional” management efforts implemented by rangers — predator and insect control programs, fish stocking, fire-fighting — frequently were contraindicated by the new work of Wright and his fellow scientists. In the case of NPS leadership, the biologists’ ecologically based recommendations often called into question policies and activities designed to improve roads and facilities, thus increasing tourism. One might ask whether much is different today.

Sadly, after Wright was killed in an automobile accident in 1936, momentum for continued research declined. Sellars and others build a case that NPS resource management programs have been playing catch-up, inconsistently, ever since. Anyone who hasn’t read his book should. And in reading, examine how each of us, in the face of ever-increasing job duties, expectations and specializations, should and can maintain or improve our contribution to our mission goals for resource protection and education.

For more information about the George Wright Society, see www.georgewright.org. Or attend their conference (next one’s in March in Philadelphia). I try to participate in both these and Ranger Rendezvous whenever I can.

~ Sue Consolo Murphy, Grand Teton