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Tom Kiernan
 Leadership Position: President, National Parks and Conservation
Association
NOLS Graduate: 1978 Wind River Mountaineering
Tom Kiernan’s Wind River
Mountaineering course in 1978 set the stage for a career
in environmental protection. Today, Tom is the president
of the National Parks and Conservation Association. With
400,000 members, it is one of the largest conservation
organizations in the world.
“My NOLS course very much changed my personal relationship
with the world,” remembers Tom. “The mission
of the school has played out to a certain extent in my
life because the course ignited in me a desire to work
to protect
the wild places of the world.” Today, Tom guides the NPCA as the organization works
to protect and preserve the nation’s parks and monuments. “I
couldn’t have designed a better job for myself,” he
says.
Although it has been more than two decades since Tom
backpacked into the Wind River Mountains, the memories
are still fresh. “I
remember that two-thirds of the way through the instructors
asked us what we’d like to do, what we’d like
to learn in the last third of the course,” says Tom. “It
was really a great experience, because we got to slide
into a role of thinking through what we wanted to learn
and to
design the rest of the course.”
The design included a single-day quadruple traverse of
several major summits in the Winds that started at dark
and ended
during the dark, and while it was very hard, “it was
just an incredible day,” Tom reflects.
Today, Tom is still deeply connected with the school.
In 1999, he was given the school’s alumni achievement
award and several members of the NPCA’s board have
affiliations with NOLS. Moreover, the lessons Tom learned
at NOLS still run through his life.
As the leader of a large non-profit organization, Tom
notes that he is continuing to refine and use leadership
skills,
but NOLS helped him in that role in 1978. “You learn
how to lead in different environments, and you learn to broaden
your leadership capabilities in those environments,” says
Tom. “NOLS helped me build some of my leadership
skills in a new environment.
“One of the things that one of my instructors advised if there was an emergency
was to sit down for a minute and ‘smoke a cigarette,’” remembers
Tom, citing an old lesson of Paul Petzoldt’s. “We are so inclined
towards action sometimes, that that reminder from that course wonderfully translates
to my work here. It’s important to think and then react. With that
lesson, which I remember often, I can learn how to lead in times of stress,
to make
good judgments and to hone my judgment.”
Tom looks forward to the time when his children ages 11,
8 and 5, will have an opportunity to take a NOLS course.
In the meantime, he gets out
into the
wilderness
of the nation’s parks as often as he can, using the camping skills
he learned in the Wind River Mountains. He is an avid boater and recently
completed
a lengthy
expedition to the Gates of the Arctic National Park.
Expedition Leadership | Leadership
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