Richard Sellars Delivers the Inaugural Randy Jones Lecture

Past, Perfect? Preservation in the National Park System

By Kurt Gutjahr

Richard Sellars, a historian with the National Park Service and the author of Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History, delivered the first in The Randy Jones Memorial Lecture Series. This series was created by the Center of the American West, in collaboration with Rocky Mountain National Park, as a tribute to former National Park Service Deputy Director Randy Jones. Patty Limerick explained, "We want the lecture series named in his honor to widen and deepen the ways in which the Center of the American West can be useful to public officials, giving them a sounding board and a sense of their larger place in history. Dick Sellars's long record of thinking affectionately and critically about the parks and their management makes him the perfect speaker to launch this series."

In his talk, Sellars focused on the complex issues that lie at the heart of cultural preservation, involving the audience in a discussion about the power of interpretation and engaging them in the kind of issues that both the National Park Service and the public at large must consider when deciding how and why to preserve a cultural site.

Back to main newsletter page