National Park Service

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Park Service was born from a single sentence. On the 25th of August, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed a law instructing the new 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." That sentence has guided every decision the agency has made ever since. Today the NPS manages over 85 million acres across every U.S. state, the District of Columbia, and American territories. It employs roughly 20,000 people and draws on more than 279,000 volunteers. But how did the idea of protecting land for public benefit take root? Who pushed for a dedicated federal agency, and what compromises and controversies shaped what it became? And what happens when climate change and political pressure test the limits of a mandate written more than a century ago?

• 2. The Idea Takes Root

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  During an 1832 trip to the Dakotas, artist George Catlin became perhaps the first person to articulate what a national park might be. Indian civilization, wildlife, and wilderness were all in danger, he wrote, 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 wildness and freshness of their nature's beauty!" That vision lay dormant for decades. Yellowstone was created as the first national park in 1872, at a time when Wyoming was still a U.S. territory with no state government to manage it. The federal government stepped in directly, relying in part on the famed African American Buffalo Soldier units to patrol the land. It would take another four decades before anyone organized a serious push for a dedicated federal agency. That push came from business magnate and conservationist Stephen Mather, who teamed with journalist Robert Sterling Yard to run a publicity campaign for the Department of the Interior. Their articles highlighted the scenic and historic qualities of the parks, making the case for educational, inspirational, and recreational value. Their campaign worked. Mather became the first director of the NPS when Wilson signed the Organic Act in 1916.

• 3. A Growing Mandate

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  On the 3rd of March, 1933, President Herbert Hoover signed the Reorganization Act, giving the president power to transfer national monuments between government departments. That summer, new president Franklin D. Roosevelt used this authority after NPS Deputy Director Horace M. Albright suggested that the NPS, not the War Department, should oversee historic Civil War sites. Two executive orders followed, transferring all of the War Department's historic sites to the NPS, along with national monuments previously managed by the Department of Agriculture and parks in and around Washington, D.C. that an independent federal office had run. The parks' popularity surged after World War II, overwhelming what the agency could provide. Conrad Wirth became director in 1951 and began bringing facilities up to public expectations. By 1952, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower's backing, Wirth launched Mission 66, a ten-year effort timed to the NPS's 50th anniversary to upgrade and expand park infrastructure. Then in 1966, as the agency turned 50, Director George Hartzog shifted emphasis from scenery preservation toward public access, creating the National Lakeshores and then National Recreation Areas to bring park land closer to where Americans lived.

• 4. Managing Wild Places

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  A 1963 advisory report, just fourteen pages long, changed how the NPS thought about its own ecosystems. Known as the Leopold Report after its chairman and principal author, A. Starker Leopold, it was prepared for Interior Secretary Stewart Udall by a five-member Wildlife Management board. It was the first unified plan for managing both park visitors and the ecosystems they visited. Among the issues it tackled were elk population pressures in Yellowstone and the threat that "overprotection from natural ground fires" posed to giant sequoia groves in Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks. The report established a historical baseline: park management should aim to preserve, or recreate, the ecological scene as the first European visitors would have seen it. That baseline guided NPS restoration work for nearly half a century. By 2012, National Parks director Jonathan Jarvis convened a twelve-member NPS Advisory Board Science Committee to update Leopold's work. Their 23-page report, "Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks", recommended that parks leadership "manage for change while confronting uncertainty," drawing on conservation biology, global change science, and genomics alongside high-resolution remote sensing. That report mentioned climate change three times, but stopped short of prescribing specific management tactics for dealing with it.

• 5. The RAD Framework

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  By 2020, the gap between mentioning climate change and actually managing for it had become untenable. A report that year, co-authored by ten researchers from the NPS, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey, laid out what it called the "Resist-Accept-Direct" framework. The Executive Summary described a world where "formerly familiar ecological conditions continue to change, bringing novelty, surprise, and uncertainty." The three RAD options gave managers a structured vocabulary for decisions they had long been making intuitively. A manager could resist a change by working to maintain historical conditions; accept a change by letting ecosystems shift on their own; or direct a change by actively steering an ecosystem toward preferred new conditions. The framework had its roots in a 2012 book, "Beyond Naturalness: Rethinking Park and Wilderness Stewardship in an Era of Rapid Change", which proposed an earlier version using the term "guide" rather than "direct." The NPS and partners replaced "guide" with "direct" in 2021 to explicitly acknowledge the possibility of strong intervention. In January 2022, six articles in the journal BioScience ran as a special section on the framework, drawing on eighteen researchers from federal and state agencies and universities. In 2024, the RAD Framework was formally incorporated into an NPS policy memorandum titled "Managing National Parks in an Era of Climate Change."

• 6. What the System Holds

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  Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska covers 13,200,000 acres, making it more than 16 percent of the entire National Park System on its own. At the other extreme, the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial in Pennsylvania occupies just 0.02 acres. The system uses more than 20 different designations. Devils Tower National Monument, established in 1906, was the first national monument. Big Cypress National Preserve and Big Thicket National Preserve were the first national preserves, created in 1974. Cape Hatteras National Seashore was set aside in 1937. The Ozark National Scenic Riverways, established in 1964, protected a free-flowing stream for the first time under the national rivers designation. The four original national military parks, all established in 1890, include Chickamauga and Chattanooga, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Shiloh. Many of these sites preserve Revolutionary War battles and Civil War battlefields, though the NPS also manages the sites where Americans of Japanese descent were forcibly relocated between 1942 and 1946 under President Roosevelt's order. In 2023, the entire system received over 325 million recreation visits. A record 331.9 million visits were recorded in 2024. The top ten percent of parks, which amounts to 43 units, account for more than 64 percent of all visits.

• 7. People and Resources

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  By the mid-1950s, park rangers had become the defining face of the NPS. Their duties were remarkably broad: clearing trash, operating heavy equipment, fighting fires, managing traffic, running museums, performing rescues, flying aircraft, and investigating crime. The Volunteers-In-Parks program was authorized in 1969, and by a 2005 annual report, some 137,000 volunteers were contributing 5.2 million hours of service annually, valued at roughly 91 million dollars based on a private-sector hourly rate of $17.55. By 2012, over 221,000 volunteers were contributing about 6.4 million hours each year. The Student Conservation Association, established in 1957 and the oldest youth group partnered with the NPS, works to develop the next generation of conservation leaders by placing volunteers in more than 350 national park units. The Corps Network, established in 1985 and a direct descendant of the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, represents 136 Service and Conservation Corps operating in 42 states and the District of Columbia. In 2019, the NPS carried an annual budget of $4.085 billion alongside an estimated $12 billion maintenance backlog. The Great American Outdoors Act, signed on the 4th of August, 2020, committed to reducing that backlog by $9.5 billion over a five-year period beginning in fiscal year 2021.

• 8. Recent Pressures

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  On the 14th of February, 2025, more than 1,000 probationary and lower-seniority NPS employees were dismissed in a single event that staff and media quickly called the "Valentine's Day Massacre." Buyouts and early retirements followed for longer-serving rangers and specialists, and a federal hiring freeze prevented most vacant positions from being filled. The National Parks Conservation Association reported that by mid-2025 the agency had lost roughly 25 percent of its permanent workforce since January of that year. A federal government shutdown began in October 2025 when Congress failed to pass appropriations legislation. The Interior Department's contingency plan directed most of the more than 400 NPS units to remain at least partially open, while furloughing roughly 9,200-9,300 employees, about two-thirds of NPS staff, with only limited law enforcement, emergency responders, and dispatchers kept on duty. These cuts came despite a 2011 Michigan State University report, prepared for the NPS, finding that for each dollar invested in the agency, the American public receives four dollars in economic value. In 2011 alone, national parks generated $30.1 billion in economic activity and supported 252,000 jobs nationwide, with $13 billion flowing directly into communities within 60 miles of an NPS unit.