Climate Science in the US National Parks: Scale, Politics, and Contingency

• In Event: Climate Change in Context: Local Use, Creation, and Interaction with Science

Abstract

“America’s Best Idea” is in crisis. Across U.S. National Parks, glaciers are melting, swamps are drying up, and species are shifting beyond protected boundaries or dwindling to extinction. Facing these challenges, President Obama’s National Park Service (NPS) director, Jon Jarvis, ordered the agency to ground management strategies in the “best available science.” But such policy guidance was swiftly rescinded by the Trump administration. How do parks foster research programs that are at once relevant to contingent climate change impacts and sensitive to politics at the local and national scales?

Beneath the choppy waters of national politics, individual parks must contend with climate change in context: Each site has a distinctive management culture and faces impacts unique to its resources and legislated purpose. The dynamics of climate science and politics proceed differently at each park and compared to on the national scale. Thus, parks are at once institutionally tied and independent, each creating, using, and politicking around climate change science in their own setting, while striving to abide by system-wide policies.

To understand how the NPS uses climate science across scales and in uncertain and politically contentious contexts, I performed semi-structured interviews with more than 30 NPS administrators, managers, and researchers. In some instances, boundary organizations have materialized from partnerships among external researchers and parks better connecting research programs to park needs. My data also illuminate conflicts inherent to applications of science where historical value-commitments, some dynamic and others steadfast, intersect with the uncertainty of climate change impacts.

Author

• Michelle Kathleen Sullivan Govani, Arizona State University