Seven people who influenced our national parks (2024)

In the course of my research and reporting for The Post’s “Field Trip” podcast, I discovered many people whose efforts during more than over 150 years of land management helped change how these fragile and dynamic landscapes will be protected into the future. Out of them, here are seven whose unique contributions captivated me.

One of the first Hispanic park rangers, George Meléndez Wright had studied zoology at the University of California at Berkeley and was appalled at what he saw in Yosemite during the 1920s: The National Park Service was feeding bears from trash cans for visitors’ entertainment. Park employees were also killing mountain lions as part of a broader predator eradication effort across U.S. public lands.

“For him, that was all so completely unnatural and against why national parks were created,” said Jerry Emory, author of the biography “George Meléndez Wright: The Fight for Wildlife and Wilderness in the National Parks.”

Although only in his early 20s, Wright became one of the first major surveyors of wildlife in the national parks. In addition to Yosemite, he traveled across the western United States, using his own money to finance the National Park Service’s first coordinated wildlife survey. He documented those findings in a seminal report called “Fauna No. 1.”

In 1933, the National Park Service appointed Wright the leader of its new Wildlife Division, and he thus also became the first Hispanic person to hold a leadership role within the service. A few years later, at the age of 31, he died in a car accident when leaving what would become Big Bend National Park in Texas.

Despite his brief career, Wright’s recommendations laid the foundation for many of the core wildlife conservation policies the Park Service has adopted.

In many ways, Mardy Murie continued Wright’s efforts, advocating for the National Park Service to make wildlife its central priority and to preserve ecosystems for their own sake.

“In order to be successful in protecting wildlife, you have to protect land,” said Bill Meadows, former president of the Wilderness Society. “And she knew this.”

Murie initially found her way into conservation work through her husband, a prominent wildlife biologist named Olaus Murie who studied the migration of elk and caribou. Together, they became vocal advocates both for adding new areas to the national park system — such as the Grand Tetons — and for redrawing the boundaries of existing national parks to keep whole ecosystems intact.

An expedition the Muries led in 1956 to northeastern Alaska helped convince President Dwight D. Eisenhower to establish what is now called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. After Murie’s husband died in 1963, she began lobbying for legislation — later signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 — that turned enormous parts of Alaska into federally protected lands, doubling the total footprint managed by the National Park Service. And in 1998, at the age of 96, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her decades of work to protect wildlife.

“She was in awe of her husband and those around him,” Meadows said, “and grew to a place where people were in awe of her.”

Many know the work of Ansel Adams and the role his stunning landscape photography played in helping to protect Yosemite National Park, but few people are aware of similar efforts on the other side of the country at around the same time.

George Masa, a Japanese immigrant living in North Carolina during the 1920s, spent years hiking deep into the woods with his large-format cameras and documenting the beauty of the Great Smoky Mountains: storm clouds gathering over an undulating ridgeline of mountains, sunshine glaring off a still lake.

For national park aficionados, Polly Dyer’s name is synonymous with environmental activism in the Pacific Northwest. Starting in the 1950s, she became a central champion of the region’s natural wonders — from its dramatic coastlines to its temperate rainforests to its subalpine meadows.

“Polly was a very strong, articulate, forceful advocate for doing the right thing,” said Destry Jarvis, a former assistant director for the National Park Service. “She was a presence.”

In 1953, Dyer’s powers of persuasion helped end an effort to open part of Olympic National Park to logging. In 1958, she also helped quash a proposal for a road in the park that would have damaged miles of Pacific coastline.

As a founding member of the North Cascades Conservation Council, she convinced members of Congress to create North Cascades National Park in 1968, protecting more than 500,000 acres of mountains, glaciers and alpine forest.

“There was a fair amount of opposition to establishing North Cascades,” Jarvis said. But, he added, “she was extremely persistent.”

There are few pieces of conservation legislation as significant as the Wilderness Act, which created high levels of protection for some of the most pristine areas in the United States. Howard Zahniser envisioned the plan, wrote the legislation and then advocated for it.

Working at the Wilderness Society, Zahniser drafted the bill in 1956 after he had participated in an effort to prevent a dam from being built within Dinosaur National Monument, a landscape of rivers, deserts and canyons on the border between Colorado and Utah. The political struggle convinced him that better legal safeguards should exist to protect land from development.

The road to establishing the Wilderness Act was a long one, though. Zahniser would spend eight years revising the potential bill’s language. He wrote 66 drafts before Congress finally passed it in 1964 — just a few months after his death.

“He didn’t give up,” said Meadows, the former Wilderness Society president. “And he did it through words. Some people call it the most lyrical legislation that’s ever been passed.”

Thanks to the Wilderness Act, more than 100 million acres of land — many of which sit within national parks — are now off-limits to any development, including industrial projects like dams but also basic infrastructure such as visitor centers, roads and even campgrounds.

Designated wilderness areas currently make up more than 80 percent of all land managed by the National Park Service. So even as visitation to the national parks continues to increase, large parts of their ecosystems remain shielded from excessive human impact.

“This has affected the makeup of the Park Service,” Meadows said. “It really put in place the values that parks need to be protected, as well as open to the public.”

Carl Stokes was the mayor of Cleveland, and the first elected Black mayor of a major U.S. city, when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969 because of pollution. A story in Time magazine that summer described the river as “chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.”

The National Park Service manages roughly 400 areas other than the 63 large national parks. They include places that have historical as well as environmental significance, including Montana’s Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument — the site of a famous showdown between the U.S. Army and several tribes of Plains Indians.

For nearly 50 years, it bore the name Custer Battlefield National Monument, commemorating the Army officer and his troops on the losing side of the fight. Then in 1989, Barbara Sutteer became the first Native American superintendent of the site and began the process of changing its name. That work continued under the following superintendent, Gerard Baker, a member of the Mandan-Hidatsa Tribe of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, who oversaw both the official renaming and several additional efforts to make the park unit more inclusive of Indigenous perspectives.