The National Park Service (NPS) is an agency of the United States Department of the Interior. The service manages all national parks; most national monuments; and other natural, historical, and recreational properties, with various title designations. The United States Congress created the agency on August 25, 1916, through the National Park Service Organic Act. Its headquarters is in Washington, D.C., within the main headquarters of the Department of the Interior.
The NPS employs about 20,000 people in 433 units covering over 85 million acres (0.34 million km2) in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. In 2019, the service had more than 279,000 volunteers. The agency is charged with preserving the ecological and historical integrity of the places entrusted to its management and with making them accessible for public use and enjoyment.
Artist George Catlin, during an 1832 trip to the Dakotas, was perhaps the first to suggest the concept of a national park. Indian civilization, wildlife, and wilderness were all in danger, wrote Catlin, unless they could be preserved "by some great protecting policy of government ... in a magnificent park ... A nation's Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild[ness] and freshness of their nature's beauty!" Yellowstone National Park was created as the first national park in the United States. In 1872, there was no state government to manage it (Wyoming was a U.S. territory at that time), so the federal government managed it directly through the army, including the famed African American Buffalo Soldier units.
The movement for an independent agency to oversee these federal lands was spearheaded by business magnate and conservationist Stephen Mather. With the help of journalist Robert Sterling Yard, Mather ran a publicity campaign for the Department of the Interior. They wrote numerous articles that praised the scenic and historic qualities of the parks and their possibilities for educational, inspirational, and recreational benefits.
This campaign resulted in the creation of the NPS. On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act that mandated the agency "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations". Mather became the first director of the newly formed NPS.
On March 3, 1933, President Herbert Hoover signed the Reorganization Act of 1933. The act gave the president the authority to transfer national monuments from one governmental department to another. Later that summer, new president Franklin D. Roosevelt made use of this power after NPS Deputy Director Horace M. Albright suggested that the NPS, rather than the War Department, should manage historic American Civil War sites.
President Roosevelt agreed and issued two executive orders to implement the reorganization. These two executive orders transferred to the NPS all of the War Department's historic sites as well as national monuments that the Department of Agriculture had managed and parks in and around Washington, D.C. that an independent federal office had previously operated.
The popularity of the parks after the end of the World War II left them overburdened with demands that the NPS could not meet. In 1951, Conrad Wirth became director of the NPS and began to bring park facilities up to the standards that the public was expecting. In 1952, with the support of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Wirth began Mission 66, a ten-year effort to upgrade and expand park facilities for the 50th anniversary of the Park Service. New parks were added to preserve unique resources and existing park facilities were upgraded and expanded.
In 1966, as the Park Service turned 50 years old, emphasis began to turn from just saving great and wonderful scenery and unique natural features to making parks accessible to the public. Director George Hartzog began the process with the creation of the National Lakeshores and then National Recreation Areas.
A 1963 report titled "Wildlife Management in the National Parks" was prepared by a five-member advisory board on Wildlife Management, appointed by United States Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. In later years, this report came to be referred to by its chairman and principal author, A. Starker Leopold. The Leopold Report was just fourteen pages in length, but it set forth ecosystem management recommendations that would guide parks policy until it was revisited in 2012.
The Leopold Report was the first concrete plan for managing park visitors and ecosystems under unified principles. Park management issues and controversies addressed in this report included the difficulties of managing elk populations in Yellowstone National Park and how "overprotection from natural ground fires" in California's Sequoia National Park, Kings Canyon National Park, and Yosemite National Park had begun to threaten groves of Giant Sequoia with catastrophic wildfires. The report also established a historical baseline that read, "The goal of managing the national parks and monuments should be to preserve, or where necessary to recreate, the ecologic scene as viewed by the first European visitors." This baseline would guide ecological restoration in national parks until a climate change adaptation policy, "Resist-Adapt-Direct", was later established in 2021.
2012: Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks
National Parks director Jonathan Jarvis charged the twelve-member NPS Advisory Board Science Committee to take a fresh look at the ecological issues and make recommendations for updating the original Leopold Report. The committee published their 23-page report in 2012, titled, "Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks". The report recommended that parks leadership "manage for change while confronting uncertainty."
"... New and emerging scientific disciplines — including conservation biology, global change science, and genomics — along with new technological tools like high-resolution remote sensing can provide significant information for constructing contemporary tactics for NPS stewardship. This knowledge is essential to a National Park Service that is science-informed at all organizational levels and able to respond with contemporary strategies for resource management and ultimately park stewardship."
2021: Resist–Accept–Direct (RAD): A Framework for the 21st-century Natural Resource Manager
The "Revisiting Leopold" report mentioned climate change three times and "climate refugia" once, but it did not prescribe or offer any management tactics that could help park managers with the problems of climate change. Hence, the 2020 NPS-led report specific to the need for climate adaptation: "Resist–Accept–Direct (RAD): A Framework for the 21st-century Natural Resource Manager." This "Natural Resource Report" has ten authors. Among them are four associated with the National Park Service, three with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and two with the US Geological Survey — all of which are government agencies within the US Department of Interior.
The report's Executive Summary, points to "intensifying global change."
"... The convention of using baseline conditions to define goals for today's resource management is increasingly untenable, presenting practical and philosophical challenges for managers. As formerly familiar ecological conditions continue to change, bringing novelty, surprise, and uncertainty, natural resource managers require a new, shared approach to make conservation decisions.... The RAD (Resist–Accept–Direct) decision framework has emerged over the past decade as a simple tool that captures the entire decision space for responding to ecosystems facing the potential for rapid, irreversible ecological change."