Stephen F McCool

Steve is Professor Emeritus, Wildland Recreation Management, in the Department of Society and Conservation of the College of Forestry and Conservation, The University of Montana. Steve began his professional career by investigating biophysical impacts of wilderness use in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota during the mid 1960’s and has continued working with wilderness and protected area managers his entire career, focusing principally on management of visitors and tourism, public engagement processes and new paradigms of planning. His current approach to protected area stewardship is based on the premise that planning and management occur within the context of messy situations—conflicting goals, uncertain cause-effect relationships. These settings require substantially different approaches—in process, focus, public participation and institutional design—compared to traditional tame problems. Thus, he focuses on “messy” issues associated with protected area planning, including the conflicts between recreation opportunities, integrated resource management, and application of frameworks to resolve competing demands. Recent publications include those focusing on reframing the notion of sustainable tourism, approaches to enhance the performance of protected area managers, frameworks for thinking about protected area management, an assessment of various visitor planning frameworks, and discussions about the relationships between tourism and protected areas. He has authored over 200 publications dealing with protected area management and provided advice and service to a number of park and protected area agencies in the U.S. and abroad including Canada, South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, Belize, Brazil, Iceland, Croatia, China, and New Zealand.

He has held faculty positions at Utah State University and the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He received a B.S. Forestry degree from the University of Idaho, and holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota. From September 1987 through August 1993, he served as the Director, Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research at The University of Montana. From January 1993 until August 1995 he worked as Co-leader, Social Sciences staff of the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, a large-scale ecosystem assessment process for the US Pacific Northwest. He is a member of the World Commission on Protected Areas and currently serves on its Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group.