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George Melendez Wright And The National Park Idea

National Park News

Monday, May 18, 2009

With the arrival of the Serviceâs centennial anniversary in 2016, the George Wright Society has launched a series of essays in its magazine in which writers are looking at the agencyâs future through âserious reflection on critical park-related issues across the entire spectrum of cultural and natural resource disciplines.â

In September, 2007, InsideNPS carried a summary and link to the first essay in the series, an article by retired NPS chief historian Dwight T. Pitcaithley entitled âOn the Brink of Greatness: National Parks and the Next Century.â This was followed by:

An article by the late Yale historian Robin Winks on the evolution and meaning of the Organic Act (December, 2007).
An essay on civic engagement by Edward T. Linenthal, professor of history at Indiana University and editor of the Journal of American History (May, 2008).
An article on âreassessing the Service and the Systemâ by Janet McDonnell, the NPS bureau historian from 2000 to 2007 (September, 2008).
An article on caring for coastal parks and ocean wildlife by Gary Davis, retired NPS marine scientist (January, 2009).

Here is a key passage from Duncanâs article on George Wrightâs influence and impacts:

âIn this pantheon of park heroes, George Melendez Wright deserves a larger niche than most. His fingerprints can be found in a number of parks. Ernest Coe and Marjory Stoneman Douglas rightly deserve top billing for Everglades National Park, but Wright gave the movement a crucial boost by urgently reporting, âUnless this area is quickly established as a national park, the wildlife there will become extinct.â Laurance Rockefeller may have personally made Virgin Islands National Park possible in 1956, but Wright had called for its creation twenty years earlier. Without Wright, the trumpeter swans might not have found refuge at Red Rock Lakes and instead joined the passenger pigeon in the mournful list of vanished species. If Big Bend ever becomes part of an international park, extending across both sides of the Rio Grande, weâll have Wright to thank for initiating the idea.

âBut his major contribution was showing that, in order to thrive and evolve, the park idea has relied on the commitment of individuals even within the agency specifically created to preserve it. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., challenging the nation to apply the tenets of the Declaration of Independence and finally admit that âall men are created equal,â Wright challenged the Park Service to live up to its founding document and apply the injunction of âunimpairedâ preservation to animals within park borders, whether they had previously been treated as pets to be pampered or pests to be eliminated. We take both menâs views for granted now, sometimes forgetting how courageously revolutionary they wereâand how long it took for their dreams to take hold. As former park superintendent Ernest Ortega told us, Wright âwas the savior of wildlife in Americaâs national parks, but more importantly, George Melendez Wright is the savior of the national park ideal.ââ

Duncanâs article can be found in this edition of the George Wright Forum. The link is http://www.georgewright.org/nps2016.html#Anchor-The-35882. You can click on either HTML or PDF versions, and can also find links to the previous essays there.