For this Member Highlight, the Coalition's Virginia State Lead, Pat Calvert, interviews Kyle Hart, Mid-Atlantic Program Manager at National Parks Conservation Association. Their edited conversation follows.
What city and state is your organization based in? What area (local, regional, statewide) do you serve/work in?
NPCA is a nationwide non-profit, we work in DC in the halls of Congress, and across the country. I support NPCA's work in the Mid-Atlantic region, which encompasses Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Washington DC, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. My work focuses mostly on Virginia and Maryland.
Tell us about your organization and your mission.
NPCA's mission is to protect and enhance America's national parks for present and future generations. There are 431 distinct units of the National Park Service. Of course, there are the classic National Park sites like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Shenandoah National Parks. But NPS designations also include battlefields, parkways, seashores, and more. NPCA works to protect and enhance every single one of these sites. First, we advocate at the federal level to ensure parks have the resources they need to be effective. We also advocate for the creation of new park sites, to ensure the entire American story is told through national parks. This includes the proposed Chesapeake National Recreation Area, a future NPS site dedicated to telling the amazing story of the Chesapeake Bay. We also advocate at the state and local level to protect parks from threats. In the Mid-Atlantic region, that includes everything from the exploding data center industry to shipping warehouses. We ensure park landscapes, viewsheds, watersheds, and wildlife are protected now and moving forward.
What is one of your current projects you are the most excited about?
NPCA and partners advocating for data center reform at the Virginia State Capitol.
The project I am currently most excited about is NPCA and our partners' work around data center reform in Virginia, in Maryland, and at the federal level. Data centers present one of the most complex and difficult environmental issues of the 21st century. There is no doubt that our digital lives are here to stay, but we must ensure that the digital world does not harm everything we have fought for in the past 50 years, including fighting climate change, protecting landscapes around parks, and having clean water to drink and for the health of our aquatic ecosystems. It is no secret that getting this issue right will be critically important to the environmental movement in the coming years.
What issue area do you hope to focus on in the future? How is it relevant for clean water and healthy aquatic ecosystems?
In the future, I hope to focus more on work in and around Shenandoah National Park. Shenandoah is the only "capital N, capital P" national park in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and protecting and preserving the park and the landscape around the park will be critically important in the coming years. The region around Shenandoah National Park faces unprecedented growth, from industrial development like data centers to housing sprawl caused by population growth. NPCA hopes to work with partners around Virginia to work to protect the broader Shenandoah landscape from incompatible development. In the face of a changing climate, protecting large landscapes around park sites in the Bay Watershed will be critically important to protecting regional water quality, wildlife habitat, and more.
NPCA joined Virginia partners at the Coalition's 2024 Chesapeake Bay Day on Capitol Hill, meeting with Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA)
