To those of us in America who love the outdoors, who relish the opportunities for discovery and recreation offered by one of the best things the Zeitgeist of the nation has ever created – the National Park System, who think the nation would be a less place ecologically, historically, and spiritually without the vast tracts of shared public lands we hold in common as a citizenry, the present time is one of great trepidation. I’ll not belabor the threats posed to these lands and the legacy that brought about their conservation; any regular reader of this website certainly already knows them full well. The question is, “What can be done to prevent them from being lost, and our nation as well as our society being made lesser as a result?”
Fortunately, contemporary leaders are beginning to step forward to offer guidance in these troubled time. Two of these, Gary Machlis, university professor of environmental sustainability at Clemson University and former science advisor to the director of the National Park Service (a position that appears to be at present, like so many other, unfilled), and Jonathan Jarvis, eighteenth director of the National Park Service (2009–2017) and currently the executive director of the Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity at the University of California, Berkeley, have joined together to provide a possible course of action to follow: The Future of Conservation in America; a Chart for Rough Water.
Describing a “unified vision of conservation that binds nature protection, historical preservation, sustainability, public health, civil rights and social justice, and science into common cause—and offer real-world strategies for progress” this remarkably short book seeks to bring together many of the disparate and divided groups in America into a single purpose, the result of which, if successful, will be to the betterment of us all; both individually and as a society.
