—National Park System Advisory Board

Each edition of Year in Review attempts to recap and reflect upon the events of the year that affected the natural resources of our national parks. In 2001 there were several major forces at work, as well as the events of September 11, that made this year more than business as usual.

The first major force was political transition. Because President Bush had voiced support for the Natural Resource Challenge in his campaign, and Secretary Norton was familiar with it even before she was confirmed, the aggressive natural resource program embodied in the Challenge has fared very well during the transition of administrations. In March we had an extraordinary opportunity in the form of a congressional hearing on the Challenge. There was great interest among members of Congress in the natural resources of national parks and the idea that the National Park Service is moving ahead to be a credible authority on the issues that challenge the long-term preservation of our national parks. In June, President Bush nominated Fran Mainella as our new Director, and she has continued to rally support for the Natural Resource Challenge as we look toward FY 2003.

Another extraordinary event was the release of the National Park System Advisory Board report Rethinking the National Parks for the 21st Century. In the chapter “Protecting nature, protecting ourselves,” there are strong recommendations for a more representative reflection, especially in the marine environment, of the nation's natural heritage in the National Park System. There is also an overriding theme of reaching the American public to connect them with that heritage. We hope this report and those themes will catalyze a new public interest in the roles that national parks could play in our society's future. Throughout the Year in Review you will find brief excerpts from that report and a brief analysis of its implications for natural resource management into the future.

Nearly everything was eclipsed on September 11. There is no way to comprehend the implications of those events for a modern technological society. For many, there were unmistakable—sometimes direct—implications, especially in the parks of New York City. For our staff in Washington, that sense was heightened by evacuations, irradiated-to-crumbling mail, and other security measures. After a year of planning, our division and the Administration Division moved on September 17 from the main Interior building to an office building at 18th and G Streets to accommodate the upcoming renovation of main Interior. At midday we were told to stop unpacking. Our new offices (and furniture) had been requested (for security reasons) by the White House. The next day we were back in main Interior to empty offices with no phones. We are still here. All employees received the Associate Director's Resilience Award.

The year closed with a shutdown of the Department of the Interior's public Internet access related to long-standing issues of Indian Trust revenues and recent litigation. It was another lesson in precarious dependency on technological advances. Our automated research permit system and our Sabbatical-in-the-Parks Program, among others, were heavily impacted. We hope our constituencies were able to remember the old ways to reach us.

The best surprise was the emergent properties of the network concept applied primarily to monitoring park natural resources. There is growing evidence that networks of parks with similar resources are finding great advantages to working together to solve common issues. Although the network idea has been used to implement biotic inventories, as reported in this publication, it was initially developed as a more efficient approach to monitoring. The infrastructure and the increased sharing of resources represented by the park vital signs networks will, we think, last indefinitely—providing expertise, monitoring designs, and a growing body of resource information that benefit all parks beyond what they could achieve alone. The future challenge for the National Park Service will then be to forge that information into a functional understanding of how the resources of each network and each park work. The attainment of a real understanding of the natural processes that govern park resources will be of immense value not only to the management of parks but also to the communities and regions to which they are inextricably connected.

The year 2001 was very interesting.

Michael A. Soukup