Chris Barns is the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Representative at the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center. Chris came to the Carhart Center in 1999 after serving almost 9 years as the lead of the Wilderness, Recreation and Paleontology programs for the Bureau of Land Management's Farmington Office in northwest New Mexico, where he was responsible for the day-to-day management of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness. Prior to that, he worked for the National Park Service at Zion, Isle Royale and Lassen Volcanic National Parks. Prior to that, Chris was a professional theatre director for seventeen years. While with the BLM, Chris drafted wilderness legislation which was enacted in 1996, and coordinated the planning exercise at the 6th National Wilderness Conference that resulted in the four agencies' Wilderness Strategic Plan -- 1995, for which he was the lead author. He has written on topics as broad as the direction of the National Wilderness Preservation system, as narrow as paleontological research in wilderness, and is one of the co-authors of Monitoring Selected Conditions Related to Wilderness Character: A National Framework. He has taught interpretation for the NPS and BLM, is the author of the video Isle Royale's Wildflowers -- an introduction, wrote and directed the documentary film American Values: American Wilderness, and currently serves as an active member of the Wilderness.net Working Group. Chris was graduated cum laude from Cornell University, went through the M.F.A. program of theatre at Penn State, and received an M.S. from the University of Minnesota's College of Natural Resources.