Before walking the halls of power in Washington, D.C., Denise Ryan walked the Des Plaines River Trail, looking for colorful birds — or a toad to catch.
The 1986 graduate of Wheeling High School studied business at Northern Illinois University, and an internship opportunity got her into President Bill Clinton’s administration. Twenty years later, she has remained in the nation’s capital. On Oct. 18, she will become the National Park Service’s deputy director for congressional and external relations.
Q: You’re a city girl — how did you get a career in the outdoors?
A: I love bird-watching, I love scuba-diving — with sharks. But you don’t have to be an outdoorsy person to work in the park department. The park service operates thousands of indoor facilities. The Pullman National Monument, the Lincoln home in Springfield. They are the stewards of America’s places of solemn remembrance. I was interested in what they were doing with national parks, and public land.
Q: Growing up in northwest Chicagoland, were there parks or forest preserves that influenced you?
A: In high school, I would get on my bike and bike over to Dam 1 Woods Preserve and see if I could see anything in the water. The Wheeling Park District was a big part of my life. I would also beg my parents to take us to the beach of Lake Michigan.
Q: Has the park service seen a drop-off in young people coming, or a decline in engagement?…Or, are the outdoors still a lure?
A: We haven’t seen any drop off at the park service, yet. However, I can tell you, for the centennial of the park service, which is next year, the service has developed a program called “A Kid in Every Park,” targeted at fourth-graders to help them experience treasures. Maybe it isn’t so much of a “lure” — I don’t know about that word — as an invitation, to experience opportunities they didn’t even know they had. If you can get them by the fourth grade, you can get them for life. Personally, I think we all probably spend too much time in front of screens.
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Living in Washington, D.C., on 9-11, the parks had a big influence on me. I needed an outlet, as an adult. I started volunteering on a multi-year bird watching program, to monitor breeding birds.
Q: You were talking about the concept of public land a second ago. How do you decide what will happen to a piece of ground that is owned, collectively, by all of us? No matter what you pick, somebody’s going to hate it.
A: That’s politics, isn’t it? It’s a no-win, because somebody’s going to be upset.
— Ronnie Wachter, Pioneer Press
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