The National Park Service has dealt with controversy over issues ranging from climbing access to land-use, but when news broke that agency director Jonathan Jarvis halted a plan to ban single-use plastic bottles in the Grand Canyon, hackles were raised—both inside and outside the agency. Jarvis, an NPS careerist, has led the agency since an appointment by President Obama in 2009. We spoke with him about his decision on the bottle ban, the agency's climate change initiatives, and the policing of public lands.

Stephen Martin, the architect of a plan to ban the sale of single-use water bottles at the Grand Canyon, told the New York Times he believed the halt of the ban was due to the NPS being “influenced unduly by business”—specifically Coca-Cola, which sells Dasani bottled water and is a major donor to the National Park Foundation. You’ve denied this, saying you’re concerned with the park's visitors having easy access to water, given the desert landscape. How was that concern addressed?
The role of the director of the National Park Service is to provide oversight over the broader National Park system. We have 397 units of this system—some of them are quite small, actually most of them are quite small, we have a lot of medium-sized parks, and then we have a few large, iconic parks like Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Everglades, and a few others.

So my intervention with respect to the Grand Canyon water bottle issue was because the Grand Canyon…has a tendency to set a precedent service-wide. We didn't really have any service-wide guidance on how to approach this. The Canyon has the financial resources to be able to install alternative water resources in a number of areas all over the park. Other parks don't have those kinds of resources. So what I wanted to do was to say, “Okay, hold on Grand Canyon, let’s step back.” Let's take the chance to develop service-wide policies that can guide parks across the country. We issued these policies in December, giving the opportunity for basically all the parks out there to ban water bottles, but in more of a comprehensive approach to overall sustainability.

I think Grand Canyon will go forward and execute a ban, and I'm perfectly comfortable with that, as I will be with other parks as well. [Editor's Note February 7: Intermountain Regional (IMR) Director John Wessels approved the Grand Canyon's petition to ban the sale of individual-use water bottles.]

How do parks manage how much water they need to make available?
In my policy, each park, as it goes down this path of consideration of elimination of water bottles being sold, they must do an analysis of water availability. The old days of running a garden house out there, off your spigot, and letting visitors take that water, are gone. We need to ensure, through public health surveys, that the water is tested, that the water is potable, that we're not pushing the public into drinking water from sources that might result in them getting Giardia or any other kind of contaminant. So the park superintendents in the field are the best [people] to do that, but the National Park Service also has a public health service that helps us with our water testing to ensure the water is safe. I think that is something each park has to do before they eliminate the sale of water bottles.

Can you tell me a bit about specific programs the National Park Service has adopted to adapt to a changing climate?
Within many units of the National Park System we're already seeing the effects of climate change. Whether it's the glaciers melting in Mount Rainier or rain-on-snow events in the Cascades, the intensity and length of fire seasons in the Sierras, storm surges on the coastal systems, what we’re facing is a higher degree of variability in climate. We've been able to live a long time with a fairly predictable climate and that is all being changed. So the Park Service is going through four focus areas within our overall climate [change] response, and one of those is adaptation.

Within adaptation it's really to begin to do vulnerability assessments in terms of critical resources that may be lost or impacted as a result of climate change, for example through sea level rise. Say you're in a coastal park; we have expectations of sea level rise in the foreseeable future. What resources might wind up being under water? It could be a cultural resource, such as an archeological site, or a pictograph, or it could be man-constructed site like Fort Jefferson down at the tip of the Florida Keys. We're doing scenario planning based on that to figure out how we're going to adjust our activities and our investments, and even our surveys for certain species.

I characterize it in very simple terms, in terms of sea level rise: look uphill from where you are today, because you may have a salt marsh—an incredibly important coastal ecosystem and we might have blocked the next area uphill from that which might become the next salt marsh, as sea level rises. So adaptation, scenario planning, and building into the system resilience and redundancies so we can ensure that these ecosystems persist through the climate change we expect.