A belief that the National Park Service cares more about natural resources than cultural resources when it comes to climate change impacts has prompted the agency's climate change adaptation coordinator for cultural resources to resign.

“Despite the needs and potentials of cultural resources with respect to climate change across the national park system, and the leadership role the NPS holds in providing cultural resources guidance to federal, state, tribal, and local partners, over the course of my position I’ve seen the NPS repeatedly struggle to support cultural resources at levels commensurate with natural resources," Marcy Rockman wrote in her resignation letter that she posted on Twitter last week.



She added in a tweet that, "(M)y reason for leaving is a series of pressures from the NPS that required me to spend ever more time & energy fighting for the right to exist & perform basic tasks. Going forward I want my creativity to go fully to climate & heritage, wherever that heritage may be."

National Park Service officials in Washington, D.C., did not immediately respond Monday to an email seeking comment on Dr. Rockman's assertions.

In her resignation letter, Dr. Rockman used a comment made during one of her monthly conference calls on climate change to illustrate why she thought her program was overlooked, that it was a victim of gender harassment.

"Our language does not assign genders to things, but we still respond to things as if we do," she paraphrased the speaker. "For example, when civilization and nature are compared, civilization takes on masculine charactertistics and nature feminine characteristics. But when it comes to resources management, these roles flip. Natural resources management is masculine, and cultural resources management is feminine."

In the future, Dr. Rockman urged the Park Service to "pay careful attention to and reduce this contrast as you address the scope and support for both the work of my position and the management of the person or people who fill(s) it. In my experience, the NPS approach to gender relationships and harassment does not support the creativity, outreach, and scientific rigor appropriate to effective climate change response."

Dr. Rockman played the lead role in drafting the Park Service's Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy, which was released in 2016. From the Park Service she moved to the United Nation's International Council on Monuments and Sites to "improve representation of cultural and natural heritage in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Climate change impacts related to sea level rise, more potent storms, and even wildfires are expected to pose great threats to units of the National Park System.