Natural Resource Library

Natural resource protection and management is integral to the work of the National Park Service and Friends of the Park.  These papers represent research and documentation over the years of the creatures, plants and marine life on St. John. 

Natural Resource History

Doris Jadan (June 18, 1925 – December 20, 2004) was an environmentalist, teacher, author, and journalist in the US Virgin Islands. Born in 1925, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, she graduated from Tulane University in Louisiana and moved to Cruz Bay in 1955. She was a schoolteacher at the Bethany School and then at the Julius E. Sprauve School after it opened in late 1955. Jadan was an early environmental activist and conservationist on the island. She testified before Congress about pollution on Saint John in the 1960s and in 1970, she founded the Environmental Studies Program at the Sprauve School, writing that her aim was the "direct exposure of young Virgin Islanders to a unique West Indian cultural and natural heritage in order to increase awareness of and sensitivity to the changes that threaten the total V.I. environment." She also was involved politically and administratively in the establishment of Virgin Islands National Park, spoke out against privatization of the Water and Power Authority, and assisted in naturalist studies of local fauna.