Park Service seeks minority support as it marks 100 years

FELICIA FONSECA AND BEATRIZ COSTA-LIMA

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz.— When Asha Jones and other Grand Canyon interns arrived for their summer at the national park, they were struck by its sheer immensity, beauty and worldclass hiking trails. Soon, they noticed something else.

“It is time for a change here, specifically, at Grand Canyon and in the National Park Service in general, to get people who look like me to your parks,” said Jones, a 19-year-old black student at Atlanta’s Spelman College.

The National Park Service, which oversees more than 131,000 square miles of parks, monuments, battlefields and other landmarks, thinks it’s time for a change, too.

As it celebrates its 100th birthday Thursday, the agency is facing some key challenges ahead. Among them is reaching out to minority communities in an increasingly diverse nation and getting them to visit and become invested in preserving the national parks.

“If public lands aren’t telling their story, and they don’t see themselves reflected in these beautiful places, they may not support them,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said. “They may not recognize that these are their assets and protect them for future generations.”

The NPS doesn’t track the makeup of its visitors, but commissioned studies have shown about three-quarters are white. The agency’s workforce is less diverse, at 83 percent white, a figure that can fluctuate with temporary employees.

Minorities are expected to eclipse the country’s white population before 2050.

The problem of lack of minority engagement is longstanding and complex but can be tied to two main factors, said Myron F. Floyd, a leading scholar on race and ethnicity in outdoor recreation at North Carolina State University.

The first relates to cultural traditions. Outings to national parks generally aren’t passed down through generations in minority communities, he said, and few minorities grow up with an appreciation for such sites. Also, for many years, African-Americans were excluded from national parks and other public resources, he said.

Barriers to visiting national parks also can be as simple as not knowing they exist, or not having a way to get to them or enough money for entry fees and gear, said Jose Gonzales, Latino Outdoors founder.

Asian-Americans, meanwhile, can be reluctant to travel outside their ethnic circles, and they might find few billboards or brochures in their language at national parks, said Mark Masaoka of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council.

“It may not seem welcoming or as inviting to go to a place where there are hardly any visitor centers, few signs, and you’re left to figure it out,” Masaoka said.

The Park Service has made some changes to address these issues, including recruiting minority interns and producing videos and brochures for Spanish-speaking audiences. Its employees spend time in schools with large minority populations to encourage children to visit the outdoors.