William R. Lowry, Ph.D., associate professor of political science in Arts and Sciences, was a bit startled last summer when he walked into the visitors center at California's Yosemite National Park and noticed his most recent book for sale.
"It was a great feeling to see my book on display at a park where I used to have a job cleaning the outhouses," said Lowry, a former park ranger who now is one of the nation's leading authorities on the politics of national park management.
Published in 1994 by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution, Lowry's book, "The Capacity for Wonder: Preserving National Parks," has propelled him to the forefront of a debate about how the national parks of the United States and Canada should be managed and preserved for future generations.
The book raises serious concerns about the future of U.S. national parks, arguing that the nation should follow Canada's lead and find ways to prevent politicians from meddling in park management.
A lifelong hiker and camper, Lowry set out in 1991 to see firsthand how the U.S. National Park Service was meeting its twin missions of encouraging the public use of parks while preserving their natural resources for the future. He spent two summers hiking in parks throughout the United States and Canada and soon noticed sharp differences in the morale of park service employees in the two countries.
His research in many respects has been guided by comments and concerns voiced by people who know the national park system best -- park rangers and administrators with whom he held long interviews and campers and fellow hikers with whom he chatted along remote wilderness trails.
Struggling to understand the difference, Lowry began piecing together a detailed historical comparison of national park policies and programs in each country. This research, which provides the theoretical basis for his book, makes clear that political interference can have a disastrous impact on park preservation.
In the last 15 years, contends Lowry, the U.S. National Park Service has become a political football -- subjected to conflicting messages about its mission, micromanaged by members of Congress and political appointees, embroiled in disputes between pro-business interests and environmental groups, and bereft of broad political support.
Canada, once plagued by similar, if not worse, political interference, has managed a dramatic improvement in park policies in the last decade, Lowry said. The Canadian Park Service now has a decentralized structure in which employees are responsible for managing the parks from the ground level -- a system that holds the potential to launch a new era of protection for its sprawling park system.
While Lowry continues to battle for better park preservation in the United States, he recently has turned his attention to international park management. Last summer, he made an extensive tour of parks in Australia and New Zealand and plans a comparative study of park policies there. He also is excited about a new park program in Costa Rica that is attempting to consolidate scattered park holdings into larger blocks representing regional ecosystems and to include a sample of each of the country's ecosystems in its national park system.
He plans, eventually, to use his research on park management policies in various countries to address common political issues, such as whether democratic forms of government can provide effective safeguards for fragile, long-term public goods, such as the ecosystems of national parks.
Lowry joined Washington University as an assistant professor in 1988, shortly after earning a doctorate in political science from Stanford University. He teaches political science courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels -- including a popular interdisciplinary course on the politics of environmental and energy issues -- and has won several teaching awards.
"I've been here eight years, and I like it better each year," Lowry said. "It's a great place to teach because the students are so sharp. And, right now, the interest in environmental issues is huge on this campus."
Lowry contends that Washington University quietly has become one of the nation's leading universities for environmental studies, including a wide range of interdisciplinary research and a wealth of environmental courses. While he is content to boast about the quality of collaborative work on campus, other faculty credit Lowry with helping spur the growth of environmental programs here.
"Lowry has been involved with the Environmental Studies Program since we started it five years ago," said program director Everett L. Shock, Ph.D., associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts and Sciences. "He has been one of the central figures in making environmental studies a success on this campus, and his environmental course is one of the most popular with students in the program."
Daniel Gross, a senior majoring in environmental studies in Arts and Sciences, describes Lowry as one of the most passionate teachers he has had at the University. "Lowry teaches in a way that makes students want to get involved in order to make a difference," Gross said.
Getting students involved is a primary focus of Lowry's work on the Campus Y board of directors. A strong supporter of community service, Lowry takes pride in the Campus Y's role as a clearinghouse for student volunteers, including the thousands of students who worked on sandbag and cleanup crews during the "Great Midwest Flood of 1993."
"Lowry has a reputation among undergraduates for being a nice guy who is very approachable and accessible," said William Nickrent, a senior working on a double major in environmental social science and economics in Arts and Sciences.
His reputation for being accessible also may explain why Lowry serves on a half-dozen campus panels and steering committees on environmental issues. In addition to his work with the Environmental Studies Program, Lowry serves on Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton's advisory committee on environmental issues, which currently is exploring what the University can do to enhance environmental education and research. He also is helping plan a freshman course that brings faculty from various science disciplines together to explore such issues as deforestation and global warming.
Lowry is pleased that the level of environmental interest remains strong on campus, and he contends that students today are actually more conscientious than when he attended school.
Although the environmental movement was in full blossom when Lowry began his freshman year at the University of Oklahoma in 1971, he never thought of it then as a potential career. Unsure of his interests, he began working his way toward a business degree.
"I was one of those kids who had a very hard time trying to figure out what to do with myself," Lowry said. "That's part of the reason I dropped out of school and enlisted in the Navy."
Based out of Norfolk, Va., Lowry spent most of his three years in the U.S. Navy sailing the Mediterranean, Caribbean and North Atlantic oceans as a quartermaster at the helm of a light cruiser, the U.S.S. Biddle. Using the G.I. Bill and a dozen part-time jobs, Lowry then resumed working toward an undergraduate degree -- this time at Indiana University.
But his wanderlust had not been tamed. In 1977, he took a semester off to hitchhike across the country. Driving cabs, mowing grass and cleaning outhouses as a park ranger at Yosemite, he financed a grand hiking tour of the nation's most pristine places. In 1978, he headed north to see the grizzlies in Alaska.
He returned to Indiana University and graduated with a bachelor's degree in business in 1979. He then landed a job as an assistant manager at an Osco Drug Store in Chicago. But before long, he found himself pursuing a master's of business administration degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He earned the MBA in 1983, but then shifted gears again.
Although he had taken only one political science course in his life, he gained admission to the political science doctoral program at Stanford University. Since then, he has dedicated his research to helping the world gain a better understanding of how its national parks and wilderness areas can best be preserved.
The government's study, she said, was a direct response to a series of articles in the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper that had been highly critical of industrial development and pollution in Banff National Park, the 2,500-square-mile crown jewel of the Canadian park system. Lowry's research had been cited in the news articles, along with a tirade of scathing comments by Harvey Locke, president of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, about government mismanagement at Banff.
Lowry received what he describes as his "greatest compliment yet" when he asked the woman if she thought his research had an influence on Canadian park policies. "Are you kidding?" she replied. "Harvey Locke carries a copy of your book around with him and quotes from it in public meetings."
For Lowry, the compliment was more than an ego-reassuring pat-on-the-back. It was confirmation that the poorly marked trail that has been his career path -- sailor, park ranger, drug-store manager -- finally had led him to a job where his labor might make a real difference.
"It's nice to know that the work we do is having an impact on the future of these parks," Lowry said. "I love these parks. These are some of my favorite places in the world. If the work that I do can have an impact on them, then it makes my job very satisfying."
-- Gerry Everding
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