Posted on 08/24/2016 5:22:42 AM PDT by SJackson
This article was originally published on Grist. This week Grist is celebrating National Parks and the humans who use them. Check out the rest of the series here.
For its first one hundred years, the National Park Service had a pretty clear agenda: preserve America’s remote wilderness wonders. The far-way, tough-to-get-to, gotta-drive-or-hike-to-it stuff. The more pristine and undisturbed, the better.
But for its next one hundred, the parks service is eyeing a whole new type of preservation: local beaches, tree-lined urban rivers, or a historic building within biking distance of downtown. Less Half Dome, more Superdome.
That’s right: The folks with trees, mountains, and bison on their badges have decided it’s high time to serve city dwellers.
Today, the park system mostly caters to the people who can afford a major road trip, and they are overwhelmingly white. One survey found that 78% of park visitors were non-Hispanic whites. That’s a problem for the Park Service, because the country’s demographics have shifted radically since it was established. The United States is an urban country, with 80% of us living in cities, and its white majority will soon be history.
The diversity of America “is not represented in the National Park Service,” the agency acknowledged in a recent report. “Indisputably, much of the success of the NPS in coming years will depend on its ability to diversify and prove its relevancy to new populations.”
“The urban agenda is really about relevancy,” said Alan Spears, cultural director of the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, an advocate for the parks. “It’s about creating a 21st-century park system for a 21st-century America.”
Truth be told, the National Park Service already has a pretty big foothold in cities; it’s just that these parks don’t have the same foothold in our minds. There are tons of historic sites and monuments that you can visit in big cities around the country, just as you might visit Yellowstone. There’s the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan, the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area running through Atlanta, and pretty much all the famous sites in Washington D.C.
The agency wants to use these sites as gateways for city dwellers, then get them out to other nearby parks, like Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco and the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles.
The young Gayle Hazelwood was exactly the type of person the parks are hoping to reach with their appropriately named Urban Agenda. “Until I was 20, I didn’t know national parks existed,” she told me. Then she happened to get a summer job at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, amid the rolling hills just outside Cleveland, and learned what she was missing. Hazelwood was so bowled over by the park and the family-like welcome she received from the staff that she decided to stay put. She’s now a deputy regional director for the park service and has dedicated herself to making sure everyone gets a chance to spend part of their childhoods playing in the parks.
Early in Hazelwood’s career, she partnered with two local low-income housing agencies to introduce kids to Cuyahoga Valley. She set up a three-part class in the city for children to learn about the park and outdoor safety. Kids who attended all three sessions earned an overnight camping trip. Hazelwood said programs like these are bringing a new, diverse generation of kids into the parks.
“It really is rewarding,” Hazelwood said. “You see these kids’ eyes light up, you see that sense of wonder, you see them get to experience that welcoming, family feeling of the national parks.”
Efforts like these are expanding the appeal of national parks, said Rue Mapp, founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, a nonprofit that — if you can’t tell from the name — gets African Americans into the outdoors. “I think that the national parks are headed in the right direction. This is really an opportunity for them to double down and become more reflective of America.”
In many ways, the National Park Service is a custodian of the way the country thinks about nature. I don’t know about you, but for me “nature” means Yosemite or the Grand Canyon — beautiful landscapes without many people. If there are visitors, they should be tiptoeing through, doing their best to leave no trace of their passing.
But this vision of nature has major problems. As the journalist Emma Marris puts it in a TED talk, by sticking to this definition, “We are stealing nature from our children.”
That is, when we define nature as pristine and distant, we are bound to make it difficult for most kids to experience it. Hew too closely to the ideal of an unsullied Eden and we’ll miss all the cool stuff that’s scurrying, fluttering, and growing close at hand.
I happen to have just written a book about urban nature, and I was astounded by how much I’d been missing. This effort to bring national parks to cities could help change the way we think about nature for everybody’s benefit. Instead of thinking that it’s beautiful and fragile, we might begin to think of nature as what surrounds us, what we live in. Sometimes, it’s the stuff we have to manipulate in order to survive. That’s a much more realistic framing.
So this campaign to make the parks more inclusive has the potential to be much more than a feel-good outreach effort. If everyone in the next generation grows up with access to to dirt trails, green fields, and wetlands pulsing with life, then maybe they will have a shot at figuring out how to live with nature on a planetary scale. That’s a legacy worth pursuing.
It is to funnel taxpayer dollars into bankrupt socialist “utopias”; “workfare”. However, they won’t generate revenues; the locals won’t go (or would show up when it is “free”), and tourists know these places are dangerous.
“Historic preservation has been part of the NPS’s mandate for generations. Think Gettysburg and Antietam, and work out from there. “
Battlefields are one thing and a good thing to preserve. Old and”traditional” Homosexual gathering spots are absurd.
Look for Highway rest areas to have NPS monuments for queer activity at some point down the road.
Every park involves judgments. I am bracing for an effort to remove confederate statuary from the battlefield parks.
I’m 100% on board with this new “urban agenda” for the National Park Service. Maybe it will keep these urbanites at home so they don’t bother me in the mountains. LOL.
Speaking of mission creep, looks like they could solve this problem of the unaffordability of road trips for urban blacks (who are not yearning to visit national parks, but the current govt just can’t accept that as a fact) by just giving them free RVs and gas cards with our tax money, no?
What could go wrong?
The gambit is but yet another valve and pipe to drain the treasury into politically auspicious pockets
The Democrat party is a criminal enterprise
And the definition /declaration of "Historic" is where the creep comes in.
People will flock to the inner cities! /s
Fire them all and hire people who will do their job without all this mumbo jumbo pansy crap.
I would agree with you about the emphasis on historic sites, particularly if the idea as I suspect is engaging urban populations, since so many are in or near urban areas. The problem in creating new ones is also that, so many are in the east, costs would be high. Not like the feel your pain FDR who created Shenandoah and the Smokies by throwing out the people who lived there for generations. And I suspect as you indicate, most candidates might well be better candidates for state and local protection. Perhaps with some federal role
Urban "parks", probably. the King already owns much of what's west of the Mississippi. Thus the clearly discriminatory fact that the eastern United States is National Park deprived.
Didn’t mention it, but when I mentioned industrialized Detroit as a historical candidate in my first post, not entirely sarcasm, I was thinking of Pullman. Haven’t been there, sketchy neighborhood, and if like most parks I have to leave any personal protection in my car. From your comment, it isn’t bringing out the local population. And I do think it’s a good thing to encourage urban population to visit National Parks, but I think the idea should be exposing them to what’s out there, not bringing the parks to them. I’ve friends who don’t go to parks, don’t camp, don’t go outdoors. IMO their loss, but they live their lives just fine.
I think there is a preservation role, for National Parks perhaps foremost, but beyond that I agree. If the people don't come, no matter.
Thank you, Stonewall National Monument. Urban. Let's build one in Ferguson.
There are more white Americans alive today than ever. The demographics have not radically shifted. We were invaded.
Fedzilla is just like any other competitive organization: they want to grow sales 10% per year without regard to environmental damage. They need to keep their ponzi pension schemes going. If the government schools, jails, and free hospitals start emptying out then Fedzilla imports new customers no matter how problematic they are.
Afterward it occurred to me that the NPS is concerned that 78% of its visitors are non-Hispanic whites, but that is right in line with the percentage of whites in the general population. Where is the demographic imbalance?
Another site that probably will come under the NPS is the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois. That is a major pre-Columbian archaeological site with a fine museum and spacious grounds with miles of trails among the mounds. I grew up nearby and have lost track of how many times I have visited. I still make it a point to go when I am in the area. It is on the outskirts of East St. Louis (from the top of Monks’ Mound you have a fine view of the Arch) and the neighborhood, while not being the disaster area ESL is, is kind of run down. Nearby is a long-standing Mexican community. The same thing there as Pullman. I hardly ever see minorities there, except the vendors and artists who show up during the Native American Arts Festivals.
You think Yellowstone is just about geysers??
There are 20 things in Yellowstone that could be a stand alone great park. Yes, it's my favorite park. It's magnificent.
No kidding! Saying that Yellowstone is just geysers is like claiming that the Rockies are just a bunch of big hills!
Trees, wildlife unseen anywhere else, azure and turquoise lakes, rivers and streams of unfathomable beauty: Some folks really don’t get it.
Wildlife is ok in its place. Whatever rings your chimes. But I’ll take history any day. The NPS is big enough to serve more than one constituency, but it’s badly overbalanced in favor of the big western parks.
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