January 24- Rolf Diamant

Repositioning America's National Parks and Public Lands in an Era of Uncertainty
Thursday, 4 PM, Aiken Center, Room 102

Rolf Diamant recently retired from a 37-year career with the National Park Service (NPS) where he developed partnership models for national parks and conservation strategies for wild and scenic rivers and national heritage areas. He was the first superintendent of the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, which tells the story of conservation, the evolution of land stewardship and the emergence of a national conservation ethic. The park is home to the NPS Conservation Study Institute-a hub for new conservation thinking and practice. Rolf, trained as a landscape architect, was also the superintendent of the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site where he led the successful effort to conserve and make accessible a vast archive of Olmsted plans and drawings. Rolf, along with Dr. Nora Mitchell, co-founded the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation-the NPS technical center for stewardship of historic landscapes.

In 2012 Rolf was appointed as an adjunct faculty member at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources where he writes and lectures on a wide range of park and conservation issues. He is a contributing author to Envisioning Gateway: Designing the 21st Century National Park, (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011); Twentieth-Century New England Land Conservation: A Heritage of Civic Engagement (Harvard University Press, 2008), Reconstructing Conservation: Finding Common Ground (Island Press, 2003) and Wilderness Comes Home, Re-wilding the Northeast (University Press of New England, 2001.) Rolf is a past president of the George Wright Society and writes a regular column, Letter from Woodstock, on national park issues for the George Wright Forum. Rolf was a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He earned his Masters of Landscape Architecture and a BS in Conservation of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley.

Over the past decade, Rolf worked closely with the National Park System Advisory Board and as a liaison with the National Parks Second Century Commission to help re-think and re-articulate the value and function of national parks in a changing world - the subject of his lecture today.

Last modified January 18 2013 04:32 PM