George
Melendez WrightGeorge
Melendez WrightGeorge Melendez Wright (1904-1936) received the Pugsley Bronze Medal posthumously in 1936. He was born into a wealthy San Francisco family. As a boy he showed an unusually strong interest in the natural history of the San Francisco Bay area. Because of his knowledge of plants and animals he served as natural history instructor for two seasons in a Boy Scout summer camp, when he was 14 and 15 years old. At about that age he backpacked alone through largely undeveloped country along the coast from San Francisco to the northern boundary of California.
At the University of California in Berkeley he majored in forestry under Professor Walter Mulford and minored in vertebrate zoology under Dr. Joseph Grinnell, graduating in 1925. In the summer of 1926 he and Joseph S. Dixon, Economic Mammalogist on Dr. Grinnell's staff, spent 72 days collecting birds and mammals and making life history studies in Mount McKinley National Park, Alaska. There Wright found a surf bird (one of the shore birds) nesting on a rocky ridge 1,000 feet above timberline. This was the first record in the annals of ornithology of a surf bird's nest, and Wright's discovery was widely reported in scientific publications.
Joining the National Park Service in 1927, Wright was assigned to Yosemite as Assistant Park Naturalist. He assisted in the development of the museum in Yosemite Valley. He and Park Naturalist Carl P. Russell often discussed wildlife conservation and the presentation of park wildlife to the public. Deer in Yosemite Valley were too abundant and tame. Cougars and other large predators in the Park were believed to be very scarce or nonexistent. Black bears raided campgrounds for food and were fed garbage each evening several miles down the Valley from the village and lodges. A small remnant of the Tule elk, native in the San Joaquin Valley, were kept in a paddock in Yosemite Valley, as an emergency conservation measure. Hunting and trapping along the boundaries were believed to affect park wildlife adversely. But the NPS had no fulltime staff or program devoted to the necessary field research on which better wildlife conservation and presentation could be based.
Wright was independently wealthy and in 1929, concerned about an almost complete absence of scientific data to inform park management, he proposed that there be established a wildlife survey office and program for the NPS. It was to be funded by him until the program's value could be demonstrated and the program provided for as a regular part of the NPS budget, which occurred in 1933. Director Horace M. Albright approved the proposal and strongly supported it. Wright's personal expenditures on this project were well over $20,000. Preliminary surveys of the status of wildlife and the identification of urgent wildlife problems in the national parks began in 1929. With extraordinary energy, Wright and his associates covered all the western parks and monuments. In each park, an effort was made to determine original and present wildlife conditions, to identify causes of adverse changes, and to recommend actions that would restore park wildlife to its original natural condition insofar as possible. Special attention was devoted to ascertaining what was happening to rare and endangered species, such as the trumpeter swan; what were the conditions and carrying capacities of park elk and deer winter ranges; and what were the causes of conflict between park visitors and park wildlife, notably black and grizzly bears, and what should be done to achieve the desired harmony?
In 1933, the wildlife survey team under Wright published a landmark report on the Survey's preliminary findings and recommendations, entitled, Fauna of the National Parks of the United States, a Preliminary Survey of Faunal Relations in National Parks, the first of the Fauna series. The survey marked the NPS's first sustained scientific research in support of natural resource management.
In 1934, NPS director Arno Cammerer declared the Fauna recommendations to be official policy. As official management policy aimed at the preservation and restoration of natural resources by a government bureau, and applicable to an entire system of public lands, Fauna No. 1's recommendations were unprecedented in the history of national parks-and, indeed, in the history of American public land management.
The Fauna No. 1 policies differed considerably from previous NPS policies. Wright had begun his career during the era of Stephen T. Mather, the first Park Service director (1916-1929), a time when national park management policies required no scientific understanding. Instead, policies focused on extensive manipulation of natural resources such as bison, bear, fish, and forests-manipulation that was aimed not at preserving natural conditions but rather at presenting the touring public with idealized versions of scenic nature. National park management under Mather was typified by the major policy statement of the era, the 1918 "Lane Letter," a development-oriented document that placed heavy emphasis on accommodating the public and ensuring their enjoyment of the parks' majestic scenery.
In 1934, Wright spent several months in Washington, DC, working with Assistant Director Harold C. Bryant to strengthen the wildlife research program. By that time it was being supported almost wholly by public funds and was designated as the Wildlife Division, in the Branch of Research and Education, with Wright as its chief. This marked the beginning of a period of substantial scientific activity within the national parks.
After a December 1934 reconnaissance of St. John Island in the Virgin Islands, Wright and his family returned to his home in Berkeley to continue the work of the Wildlife Division, then headquartered in Hilgard Hall on the University of California campus. But by the summer of 1935, the Service's wildlife studies program had increased to the point that it was desirable to have the Division's chief in Washington, DC.
George Wright's efforts began a new era in National Park Service history. In effect, the wildlife biologists under Wright's leadership reinterpreted the 1916 congressional mandate that the Park Service must leave the parks "unimpaired." In their view, the Park Service's mandate required not only preserving scenery and ensuring public enjoyment, but also applying scientific research to ensure that the parks were left as ecologically intact as possible, given public use of the areas. From Wright's time on, the persistent tension between management for aesthetic purposes and management for ecological purposes has been a dominant factor in national park history.
The biologists' new perspectives on natural resources provided new options for park management that challenged traditional assumptions and practices. Becoming a kind of "minority opposition party" within the Park Service, the wildlife biologists under Wright raised serious questions about the NPS's utilitarian, recreational emphasis in park management. Specific to the biologists' concerns for ecological preservation and restoration in the parks were recommendations for scientific research, protection of predators and endangered species, reduction or eradication of non-native species, and acquisition of more ecologically complete wildlife habitats.
Wright, and the biologists brought into the NPS during his time, especially feared the ecological consequences of President Roosevelt's New Deal programs, with their varied and well-funded national park development projects that emphasized intensive recreational use. At times, the biologists harshly criticized the NPS. They asserted, for instance, that although the NPS ought to be the leader in nature preservation, through extensive park development, it had been "more at fault than many other agencies" in destroying natural values. Improved park roads they described as "infections" that stimulated incremental development along road corridors, such as campgrounds, restaurants, parking lots, maintenance yards, ranger stations, and other administrative facilities. The biologists warned against exceeding the "recreational saturation" point in the parks by building more roads and trails and facilities for winter sports and other activities. And, in what seemed like a particularly alarming policy to traditional NPS managers and foresters, the biologists accepted forest fire as a natural ecological element. They even argued, that, in a park maintained in a natural condition, a forest blackened by a naturally caused fire is just as valuable as a green forest. Inspired by Wright, the biologists brought these and other radical new perspectives into the Park Service.
Yet the NPS failed to live up to the Fauna policies that Director Cammerer had proclaimed official in 1934. During the New Deal, the NPS aggressively sought national park development for public use, along with the growth and diversification of NPS responsibilities in national recreation programs. Thus, the emergence of ecological attitudes that Wright promoted was overwhelmed by the New Deal's emphasis on recreational tourism and park development. For example, at the time of Wright's death in 1936, the NPS employed approximately 27 wildlife biologists. But by the late 1930s, and without Wright's leadership, the number of biological positions had dwindled to nine. At that time, in contrast to the biologists' situation, the NPS employed approximately 400 landscape architects to help undertake New Deal development activity. Moreover, in 1940, through a bureaucratic reorganization by President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, the wildlife biologists were transferred to another Interior bureau, the Biological Survey-an administrative separation from the Park Service that symbolized the diminished influence of biological science in national park management. The biologists were returned to the NPS after World War II-but only about six of them were left by that time.
In February 1936, Wright was designated as a member of a "Commission to represent the United States in conferences with a Mexican Commission to formulate policies and plans for the establishment and development of international parks, forest reserves and wildlife refuges along the international boundary between Mexico and the United States…" Near Deming, New Mexico, after the commission left Big Bend National Park in Texas, an oncoming car blew a tire and crashed head-on into the car in which Roger Toll (Superintendent of Yellowstone Park) and Wright were riding. They were both killed. At his death, Wright was only 31 years of ago; his worthy efforts to improve wildlife management had been tragically cut short. He is remembered by two mountains named after him, one in Denali National Park, and another in Big Bend National Park.
The automobile accident that took Wright's life truly marked a turning point in NPS history. Under his leadership, the biologists had gained strength and influence in national park management. Beyond Wright's administrative skills and his founding of an important national park program (the only major management program in Park Service history to be established with private funds), it is very likely that his personal fortune gave him direct access to the highest levels of NPS management. Had this accident not claimed his life, his influence would surely have continued to increase.
George Wright was a visionary-a biologist whose concepts of scientifically based natural resource management in the National Park System were far ahead of their time. His ideas had flourished briefly in the 1930s, but were soon shoved aside to accommodate other priorities. Yet, as the environmental era began to impact NPS thinking in the 1960s, Wright's ideas (modified in accord with contemporary ecological knowledge) experienced a resurgence, and they have since gained an increasingly greater influence in national park management.
Today, Wright is widely recognized as the founder of scientific natural resource management in the NPS. He had provided the vision, inspiration, funding, and leadership. His untimely death-as well as NPS reluctance to alter its traditional management practices-brought about the decline of the biologists' influence. Still, for the few biologists remaining in the NPS during the post-World War II years and up to the 1960s, Fauna No. 1-the initial product of Wright's wildlife management program-remained, as one biologist recalled, the "bible" for wildlife management, giving the biologists guidance and inspiration at a time when their programs had been eclipsed.
The George Wright Society, founded in Wright's honor in 1980 and dedicated to the preservation and protection of national parks and equivalent preserves around the world, has become a major influence in efforts to attain ecologically attuned national park management. The Society enjoys strong support from NPS leadership, scientists, and other professionals, thereby ensuring the perpetuation of George Wright's early visionary aspirations for national park management.
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