Robert Post's Child?

Who is Jamie Clark, anyway? What makes this career civil servant tick? And, why should you care? Well, those are all decidedly valid questions. If you didn't already know, Jamie Clark is President Clinton's latest appointee to the position of Director of the Department of Interior's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the Service), the Nation's premier federal fish and wildlife conservation agency. Director Clark was confirmed on July 31, 1997 by the Senate, just prior to Congress' August recess. Worthy of mention is the fact that Director Clark is only the second woman to ever have held this office in all of the Service's distinguished 127 year history. Director Clark succeeds the late Mollie Beattie; coincidentally, the Service's very first female Director.

As matters would have it, Jamie Clark is married to none other than James M. Clark, also an employee of the Service at the Service's brand new National Training Center, and a former refuge manager of Matagorda Island National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), and current wildlife biologist, author and photographer from Leesburg, Virginia, although, neither of which are to be confused with Jim Clark of Millwood, Virginia, the editor of Refuge Reporter, a magazine as well as Internet web site dedicated to reporting on the Nation's NWR system. Perplexed? Well, not to worry, so are a lot of other people.

In The Beginning

It seems that Director Clark's (Director Jamie Rappaport Clark, to be precise) formative years were, in Senator John Chafee's own words, spent as an "Army brat", as her father was a career employee in the Army Corp of Engineers. In her youth, Jamie recalls moving about every year and a half, although, she states that she has some rather fond memories of exploring the great outdoors on horseback. As a result of her alleged devotion to the outdoors, Director Clark studied for, and in 1979 earned, a B.S. degree in Wildlife Biology from Maryland's Towson University (TU) (whose claim to fame is alumnus and notable Muppet creator, the late Jim Henson). As a consequence of her ascension to the Service's directorship, the Dean of TU's College of Mathematics and Sciences, Dean David F. Brakke, recently awarded her the college's outstanding alumnus of the year award.

Director Clark also obtained a Masters degree in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, where her thesis concerned work with deer hunters and her considerable efforts to determine the optimum population densities for various herds of white-tail deer.

It's not exactly clear when Director Clark got married, but what is certain is the fact that she got married at a NWR. In fact, she was wedded at the Matagorda Island NWR, located some 60 miles northeast of Corpus Christi, Texas; the NWR which her husband James then managed and which refuge is a unit of the Aransas NWR. Of note is the fact that Matagorda Island NWR is, among other things, the wintering home of the endangered Whooping crane.

As cited by Senator John Chafee at her Senate confirmation hearing on July 16, 1997, Director Clark's marriage on a NWR demonstrated "but one example of her strong commitment to the protection of wildlife and other natural resources." According to Senator Max Baucus, this fact also reflected "her total commitment to her work!" Whatever the matrimonial event may have epitomized, according to Director Clark's Senate confirmation testimony, her wedding to husband James on Matagorda Island NWR was, indeed, a "compatible use" of the refuge's grounds. Not to be mean-spirited about the matter, but contrary to the Senate's implicit endorsement of such activity, there are a number of concerned individuals who question whether such use of a NWR is, in fact, either a legitimate or a compatible use of our NWR system. This is particularly so as a result of Congress' recent passage of the National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act of 1997, an act which the Director has previously described as being an "organic" law.