Benjamin
Hunter ThompsonBenjamin
Hunter ThompsonBenjamin Hunter Thompson (1904-1997) received the national level Pugsley Medal in 1957 “in recognition of his outstanding, imaginative, dedicated and enthusiastic leadership in the field of park conservation.” He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was one of five children. His father was a pastor of several congregations in the Presbyterian Church. The family moved to Peoria, Arizona, in 1911 and lived on a ranch managed by Thompson’s grandfather. His father worked on the ranch and occasionally conducted Sunday church services. Ben grew up in Peoria and worked on the ranch to assist his father. He went to a two-room schoolhouse for the first eight grades, and subsequently to Peoria High School from which he graduated in 1923. He worked for a year on a survey team in Los Angeles before entering Stanford University in the fall of 1924.
During the summers Thompson worked as a waiter in the Awahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park and developed a life-long love of the national parks during these Yosemite summers. The grandeur of the park and the deep friendship he developed with George Wright (Pugsley Medal 1936), who was an assistant naturalist there at that time, were the origins of that life pursuit.
Thompson graduated with distinction with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Stanford University in 1928 and received a master’s in vertebrate zoology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1932. While at Berkeley, he began working part-time for the National Park Service in the newly established wildlife survey office.
In 1932 Thompson became a full-time employee of the NPS. The first couple of years of his career were divided between being a wildlife survey office biologist and a park ranger–naturalist at Yellowstone. The survey office was created by George Wright (Pugsley Medal 1936) and included Thompson and Joseph S. Dixon. Wright’s purpose in forming the office was to conduct preliminary surveys of the status of wildlife and to identify urgent wildlife problems in the national parks. In each park, effort was made to determine original and present wildlife conditions, identify causes of adverse changes, and recommend actions that would restore park wildlife to its original natural condition, insofar as possible. Most of the national parks and several of the large national monuments then existing were studied in the first three years by members of the survey group. Special attention was devoted to ascertaining what was happening to rare and endangered species, such as the trumpeter swan; the conditions and carrying capacities for park elk and deer winter ranges; the causes of conflict between park visitors and wildlife, notably black and grizzly bears; and what could be done to achieve the desired harmony. The outcome of these efforts was the well-known Fauna of the National Parks series.
The first "Fauna" monograph (which was co-authored by Wright, Thompson, and Dixon), completed in May 1932 and published in 1933, was titled A Preliminary Survey of Faunal Relations in National Parks. The approach taken by this study placed the authors at the cutting edge of ecological research in parks. They advocated such revolutionary practices as fixing park boundaries to include all the habitat required by important vertebrate species, leaving dead trees standing to provide nesting for birds, and discouraging the feeding of animals by visitors–all of which eventually became accepted tenets of park management.
The second "Fauna" monograph, Wildlife Management in the National Parks, was co-authored by Wright and Thompson alone. It was completed in July 1934 and published in 1935. Of special interest in this publication are the two chapters contributed solely by Thompson. In A Wilderness-Use Technique he considers the educational role of wilderness preservation in Yellowstone, how the "secret beauty of wilderness" can be "opened to the people and remain unspoiled"--a "thing so glorious that it threatens to be impossible." Thompson gets at the question through a hypothetical example: What if a new road through the park were proposed, and in its surveyed path lay a nondescript lake, neither spectacular nor uncommon, but important nonetheless as bird habitat. Should the road go ahead and skirt the lake or be re-routed, at considerable expense, away from this sensitive area so that only the most motivated visitors could reach it by foot? Needless to say, Thompson opted for the latter: no small declaration in a time when aesthetic considerations were paramount in the minds of NPS planners.
He extended this line of reasoning in National Parks and Wilderness Use. Decrying the still-prevalent attitude that such predators as cougars ought to be eliminated from the wild to protect favored game species (e.g., deer), Thompson went on to point out that "wild animals know nothing about the arbitrary boundaries which man draws on maps to indicate areas set aside for his different types of wilderness use [the sense here is of wild lands in general]. Animals wander back and forth, as seasons and quest for food dictate, across refuge or hunting ground, park or forest, as the case may be. What affects the deer or cougars in the environs will also affect them in the game sanctuary [e.g., a national park] itself." When cougars are being systematically slaughtered on the Kaibab National Forest (as they were at that time) they will become scarce in Grand Canyon National Park. Obvious though this seems to us now, such considerations were by no means widespread then. The point, Thompson concluded, is that "we cannot stress the value of one animal at the expense of another, for if we do our lopsided vision is reflected in poor management which wrecks the whole organic wilderness. Moreover, acquaintance with, or utilization of, the infinite variety of wilderness processes and creatures has far greater recreational potentialities than any sentimental addiction to a few, obviously harmless, pretty creatures." Here, in the space of two remarkable sentences, Thompson anticipates some thoroughly modern conservation concerns: the holistic functioning of the intact natural community, the spiritual utility of preserving biodiversity, and the move away from anthropomorphizing wildlife.
In 1934, Thompson was transferred to the Washington office to continue the same work. He was appointed assistant to the director from 1935 to1937, when he was selected to head the Land Planning Division. In 1937, Thompson became assistant superintendent at Lake Mead National Recreation Area and remained there until 1947 when he returned to the Washington office as a special assistant to the director.
From 1951 to 1961 he was chief of the Division of Recreation Resource Planning, where he was responsible for the NPS’s programs of national park system planning, recreation surveys, and cooperation with the states. During this time Thompson played a major part in the formulation and promotion of the Mission 66 Program. The National Park System was in a precarious condition brought about by the lag in appropriations during and following World War II. Park facilities and infrastructures were in a state of disrepair and obsolescence. The Mission 66 Program was a ten-year project initiated in 1956, which was designed to upgrade these facilities by 1966, the date of the NPS 50th anniversary. Mission 66 was well-received by President Eisenhower and Congress and resulted in significant annual increases in appropriations for the NPS during its duration. In October 1961 Thompson was promoted to assistant director for resource planning. In December 1963 he was named assistant director in charge of resource studies. In December 1964 Thompson retired from the National Park Service after 35 years of public service.
During his work with the NPS, Thompson wrote numerous articles on national and state park subjects and collaborated or provided oversight on a variety of park and recreation reports and publications. He played an extensive part in the preparation of reports on Recreation Use of Land in the United States and A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem of the United States. However, the most notable and influential of the publications were the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Coasts Recreation Area Surveys, the Alaska Recreation Studies; and the Colorado River Basin Study. These documents and Thompson’s subsequent efforts were major factors that ultimately led to the inclusion in the National Park System of such park units as Cape Cod, Assateague Island, Padre Island, Channel Islands, and Point Reyes national seashores; Pictured Rocks, Sleeping Bear Dunes and Indiana Dunes national lakeshores; Great Basin, Guadalupe Mountains, and Canyonlands national parks; Big Horn National Recreation Area; Ozark National Scenic Riverways; C&O Canal National Historical Park; and St. Gaudens National Historic Site. In previous years, Thompson had played a significant role in the planning and establishment of Everglades, Olympic, Mammoth Cave, Big Bend, Kings Canyon, and Grand Teton national parks, and Sunset Crater and Wupatki national monuments. In addition to his influence in the expansion of the System, Thompson was also responsible, among other things, for the strengthening of the Park Service science program. The scientific analysis and conservation of natural areas were Thompson’s life aim since his college days at Berkeley.
While Thompson was still in the NPS he served with distinction on the Federal Inter-Agency Committee on Recreation, was treasurer and vice president of the National Conference on State Parks (NCSP), and chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Federal Recreation of the National Recreation Association. His extensive work with these organizations over the years resulted in enhanced coordination and cooperation among the NPS, other federal agencies, and the various state park systems.
In 1965, after his retirement from the NPS, Ben was appointed associate executive director of the Hudson River Valley Commission whose chairman was Laurance Rockefeller. In that capacity, he provided oversight in the production of the Report on Historic Sites and Building in the Hudson River Valley. Subsequent actions taken by the commission and the state of New York resulted in greater protection of some of the structures presented in the report.
Upon its completion, Thompson moved on to become executive secretary of the National Conference on State Parks when it amalgamated and became a branch of the National Recreation and Park Association in 1966. He worked part-time in this position until 1969, when he retired for the final time.