Bleeding green and grey - Building a life with the National Park Service

If you work for the National Park Service for long enough you'll eventually hear a comment that someone "bleeds green and grey". The term is used either as a compliment for someone that devotes their life to the Park Service, or occasionally as a playful insult when a person's life is so integrated with the Park Service that they couldn't go back to the real world if they wanted to.

The saying comes from a book written by Gregory Moss, a career park ranger who published a collection of stories about his life in the service. (Amazon link for anyone who is interested) National Park Ranger, a.k.a. "Bleeding Green & Grey": High Adventure Tales, Humorous Stories, & Deadly Consequences! What Gregory hit on with his title is that the Park Service often attracts a certain kind of person: A person who takes the job because they love the places, the people, and the experiences that living and working in America's best idea provides. People who end up staying with the Park Service for a career are there because they deeply care about being a part of the mission to protect and preserve. So willing in fact, that many give up enormous opportunities outside of the service to stay in the places they love. We give up higher paying jobs, relationships, and whatever else is required in order to stay with the Park Service, and to become a member of the Park Service family.

This is not to say that to join the Park Service you must be willing to give up the "real world" for the rest of your life. There are thousands of jobs in the service that you can work for a single season and move on. You'll get the amazing experience, and the eye catching job on the resume, but you don't have to stay forever if you don't want to.

But, many of us do make the choice to stay in the family, to accept a career of lower pay, for harder work, in more difficult and remote locations. We do it because we love it, because we think it's the best thing we could do with our lives, and because sooner or later you realize that you bleed green and grey, even if you never thought you would.

(Waking up to sights like this every day might help)

Once you realize that you want to spend your life working for the Park Service your perspective shifts. You stop thinking about how much you'll make in your next job, and start thinking about what parks you want to embed yourself in. You stop thinking about moving to get a promotion, and start focusing on the parks that will allow you to pursue your passions. You lose focus on the short term difficulties from day to day and start daydreaming about leaving your legacy.

Part of the amazing experience of working for the Park Service is that the organization has been around for less than 100 years. In fact our centennial isn't even until 2016! While the Park Service is a place of strong tradition and a commitment to stewardship of our national treasures, it is also an organization still in the formation phase. Every year we gain new sites, new people, and new mission goals. And with only 98 years in operation, there simply hasn't been time to do everything that needs to be done. Therein comes the idea of a person's Park Service legacy. For different people it means different things. To some it's a personal mark they can leave behind when they move on. For others it's a new way NPS can serve the visitors who come to see our landscapes and places. It all depends on your passion and what you think the Park Service needs to become a better place.

One example that comes to mind is the work of a dedicated group of interpretive employees. Together with hard work, sweat, tears, and enormous amounts of effort they built the first distance learning program in the Park Service. In the past students would have to come to a National Park location to meet a ranger, to ask questions about the park, and to start to appreciate the work that we do to protect it. With the distance learning setup Park Rangers from Grand Canyon now give programs for kids all over the country, giving students who don't have access to our National Parks the opportunity to see a condor flying overhead, or look at fossils embedded in the red sandstone. Technology like this introduces people to a world they might never have been able to experience before.

Image source: http://arizonahighways.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/grand-canyon-goes-high-tech-to-reach-students-nationwide/

On its own Grand Canyon's distance learning program would have been a "legacy" item. A change made by a group of dedicated people that will continue to serve the Park Service long after they retire. But the program at Grand Canyon was only the beginning! As other parks saw the new technology, and the new opportunities that it can provide to visitors the idea spread. The single distance learning studio has turned into programs at parks across the country, each unique to the park that hosts it, but based on the ideas pioneered by a few dedicated individuals in a single branch, in a single division, at a single park.

The National Park Service now hosts an entire suite of distance learning programs. Information is available at http://www.nps.gov/teachers/distancelearning.htm if anyone who comes across this is interested. How's that for a legacy? Serving thousands or tens of thousands of students per year from all over the U.S. and all over the world.

A legacy doesn't have to be public facing either. For some, the scientific pursuits outweigh the desire to interact with visitors. For a person motivated by the invisible bits of the park service, a legacy might be out of the public eye, but still critical to the mission, such as preservation of an ecosystem, plant, animal, or even mineral that otherwise might be lost without protection.

Leaving a legacy may not be always be glamorous, but each legacy still provides a permanent place in the halls of nearly a century of NPS staff who have given their careers, and occasionally their lives, to protecting the places that America treasures.

~CBD