National Park System Advisory Board: Committee on Philanthropy

This report, built around the challenges just cited, is an attempt to look afresh at the Park Service; the social, cultural, and political environment within which it operates, and the ways it can serve the American public more effectively. The Advisory Board dearly has made certain assumptions in developing the report. It assumes that our growing population will continue to exert pressures on all park preserves-national, state and local-and that these places will become more special, even precious, in the future. II assumes that Congress's description of the National Park System as cumulative expressions of a single national heritage" has continuing relevance as we think about the evolving purposes of parks and the role of humans in them. It assumes that parks of all kinds can no longer be thought of as islands with little or no connection, cultural or ecological, to their surroundings. And, finally, it assumes that the National Park Service should fulfill, to a much greater degree than at present, the education potential its creators envisioned eighty-five years ago.