There goes another National Seashore superintendent
Brian Carlstrom climbs a career ladder; we start over
There is community, there is bureaucracy, and where the two intersect sits the superintendent of the Cape Cod National Seashore.
Now the latest person to inhabit that swiveling chair is vacating.
Brian Carlstrom arrived in 2018, a second-generation, 30-year National Park Service bureaucrat who called Cape Cod a feather in his career cap. But after five years he’s gone.
There are no indications he was forced out, perhaps incentivized by the “who-gets-to-live-in-a-duneshack” fiasco that has turned ugly and personal.
Regardless, once again those of us who remain start over. Why? Because relationships rupture, connections sever, personal ties break, and then comes the challenge -- once again -- of trying to help a new superintendent hike a steep learning curve.
This is déjà vu all over again, though Carlstrom’s five-year tenure is the shortest in nearly half a century.
His predecessor George Price hung in for 11 years, Maria Burks 9, Andrew Ringgold 7, Herb Olsen 11. In 1989, a Park spokesperson offered that “10 years per assignment” was typical for superintendents, a notion expressed to cover the appearance that Olsen had been forced out because he outraged off-road drivers in the name of beach and plover protections.
High tides smooth all tracks in the sand. Time washes away remnants of those who once seemed sculptural on this peninsula.
So it will be with Carlstrom. A decent, well-meaning man, he was good at presenting as the sincere, rational face of the Seashore while making it clear he answered to higher powers; he always tamped down expectations when initiatives or out-of-the-box thinking emerged. He would commiserate about how long it took to get decisions from Park bureaucracy, and advocate for the Cape when professionally appropriate. But he remained a product of the federal corporate structure, a cautious career guy.
So when controversy like the dune shacks surfaced, it was duck and cover. There was no personal upside in pounding the table about Cape Cod culture, no smart play in pushing back against a cookie cutter approach to turn shacks into rentals for high bidders, no insistence on transparency about the evaluation process.
His career takes to heart an old Japanese proverb and warning:
The nail that sticks up is the nail that gets hit.
When the Cape Cod National Seashore was enacted more than 60 years ago there was no thought to bureaucratic discontinuity. Had there been, the big eminent domain takings still would have happened – and we would still be overjoyed that they did.
But half a century of this slow superintendent parade has done nothing positive. It keeps forcing us back to the starting line to cover the same ground over and over. This is true regardless of staff holdover, because each superintendent must imprint a personal stamp, while conjuring a public face.
My plaintive muse assumes that superintendents actually matter, that they are in charge of the Cape’s most important environmental organization. On second thought, that seems naive.
The lesson from this progression of local figureheads is that the real decision makers are deep within regional Park headquarters in Philadelphia, national headquarters in Washington. Facades, by definition superficial, come and go.
Mid-level managers don’t arrive at their positions by bucking internal authority or protocols. They follow orders rather than try to bend and reinvent to suit a backwater like the Cape. Therefore they qualify for “promotion,” moving up the ladder — then apply the exact same approach on another rung, someplace else: Brian Carlstrom is off to Colorado, and I wish him well.
His short term departure is the latest reminder that parity, a true balance of bureaucracy and community, is not just elusive, it’s a mirage.
Bureaucracy wins out.
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Thanks for your perspective Seth. I absolutely agree that most all decisions this Superintendent made during his 5 year tenure were directives from NPS headquarters in Philly or DC. More and more evidence is mounting that the Legislation that created the Cape Cod National Seashore is not respected by the National Park Service. The Mission Statements from both of these wonderful concepts point out just how hard it is to merge two very different objectives. In my experience with Superintendent Carlstrom I found him unable to merge. He clearly thinks NPS policy is the only policy.
Once again, the Cape's most knowledgeable commentator hits the nail on the head. Not to be missed by anyone interested in local/CCNS politics.