Former NPS Director Jon Jarvis continues to work on climate change issues as executive director of the Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity/UC Berkeley photo by Jeremy Snowden

Jon Jarvis took a detour from the typical retirement path after his National Park Service career, which he wrapped up with eight years as director of that agency. Instead of traveling for enjoyment and relaxation, he's working to help guide the Park Service's approach to climate change from outside the agency.

"The parks have a perpetuity mission, and with the changes that are happening, they need to be taking action," said Jarvis, who left the Park Service in January 2017 and 10 months later signed on as the first director of the newly created Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity at the University of California-Berkeley. "Certainly, the Trump administration has dialed back a lot of that work we had under way. I felt this was an opportunity to get something back into the hands of park managers, to say, ‘Here’s what you should be working on, here’s what you should be thinking about.’"

The first publicly visible aspect of his efforts is the just issued Parks Stewardship Forum, an online publication that seeks to build on the intellectual and scientific discussion that was the hallmark of the George Wright Forum, an endeavor by the George Wright Society "devoted to interdisciplinary inquiry about parks, protected areas, and cultural sites. We seek to publish critical thinking on all aspects of policy, research, resource management, administration, and education as they relate to parks, protected areas, and cultural sites."

Jarvis sees a void in Park Service leadership when it comes to climate change and how to mitigate it and adapt landscapes to it. There is no Senate-confirmed director of the agency, and there are a great many "acting" positions scattered across the Park Service, from its Washington headquarters out across regional offices.

In a conversation with the Traveler, Jarvis said the Trump administration, under Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and his predecessor, Ryan Zinke, has worked to "suppress" climate change work by the Park Service.

"I think some of the work is still going on, but I would suggest that it’s being kept pretty much under the radar. I think park managers have a responsibility to the American people, to the laws, to the (National Park Service) Organic Act, which is to protect these places unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations, so many of them will continue to do this kind of work," he said from his new base in San Francisco. "But it is being suppressed by the current administration. We know there have been individuals like Maria Caffrey, whose science and research and publication on sea level rise on national parks, there was an attempt to rewrite that, which in my view is a violation of scientific integrity.

"There are other scientists in the National Park Service who have been forced (to), or at least attempted (to be forced) to rewrite their science," added Jarvis. "We don’t see park superintendents or park interpreters talking about climate change like we did. And as published in the Traveler, the sort of 'muzzlement' that came out of the (Interior) Department to tell park superintendents they were not to talk to the press about developments on their boundaries. So I think parks have been told to stay in their park and not speak about these broader issues. I think in order of self-preservation parks have followed those orders, but may still be working on some of these issues within the confines of their park boundaries.”

With those concerns as a backdrop, Jarvis through the Berkeley institute collaborated with the George Wright Society to craft the Parks Stewardship Forum, which for its first edition focused on Climate Change and Protected Places: ADAPTING TO NEW REALITIES. 

An online publication, the forum's inaugural issue addresses a range of climate-related topics. There are articles on the collapse of bird communities in the Mojave Desert, vulnerability assessments some units of the National Park System have undertaken to guide adaptation to climate change, sea-level rise issues faced by Annapolis, Maryland, and St. Augustine, Florida, and a look at the breach Hurricane Sandy back in 2012 carved in the Otis Pike Fire Island High Dune Wilderness and more.

It's a timely, hefty, and in some arenas a controversial topic to kick off the forum. It arrives against the backdrop of massive wildfires in Australia and the move in Glacier National Park in Montana to remove signs that stated the park’s glaciers would be gone by the end of this year, 2020.

"In my view, climate change could be construed as controversial. Certainly it’s debated in the press. But from a scientific standpoint, there’s no controversy about climate change. It’s a reality, it’s highly recognized by the scientific community, there’s an extraordinary amount of research that has been put into it, and so to me it’s time to just start focusing on what we do about it," Jarvis replied when asked why he decided to launch the forum with climate change.

“For parks and protected areas, they could have zero carbon footprint and they would have basically negligible impact on the rising temperatures on the planet. What parks and protected areas have is a different role, one that we fleshed out when I was director. One is to monitor the changes that are going on, and be kind of the canary in the coal mine that says, 'This is what’s going on.' They have a role in public education, about what is happening, and they have a role in adaptation."

In one of the articles in the forum, Jarvis cited Rich Sorkin, a co-founder for a firm that analyzes climate-related risks. “We live in a world designed for an environment that no longer exists,” said Sorkin. Jarvis, however, believes society has the analytical capabilities to redesign that environment.

“I think that we do have some extraordinarily powerful tools at our fingertips. Geographic information systems, the level of detail that we can sort of analyze on-the-ground environments, biological hotspots, future sea level rise, land ownerships, demographics, economics," he said. “You begin to look through all of these lenses at the ground, to say, 'Where are there opportunities to create landscape connectivity?' A lot of the scientists that work on climate change say one of the keys is to create corridors of connectivity, so that species that are forced to move as a result of climate change, have a path.

"And with the analytical capabilities that we have, we can identify where those barriers are to that kind of connectivity," Jarvis went on. "A great example is the Path of the Pronghorn in the Wyoming, Grand Teton area, where ranchers and highway districts and the private landowners all worked together to allow the pronghorn antelope to move from its winter and summer range across multiple landscapes. I think we can take those principles and figure out how to do that on a greater scale."

For Jarvis, moving to Berkeley freed him from the constraints of politics that were a constant in the National Park Service.

"That’s a nice advantage to no longer be working directly for the National Park Service, and working for a university like Berkeley that has a history of being willing to talk about controversial issues," he acknowledged. 

Traveler footnote: Listen to the entire interview with Jon Jarvis on National Parks Traveler Episode 48.