Abbreviations

BLM: Bureau of Land Management

CFC: Crissy Field Center

CIP: Comprehensive Interpretive Plan

DNC: Delaware North Corporation

EIS: Environmental Impact Statement

ESA: Endangered Species Act

GGNPC: Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (until 2003 known as “Golden Gate National Parks Association”)

GGNRA: Golden Gate National Recreation Area

GMP: General Management Plan

IPCC: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

LRIP: Long Range Interpretive Plan

NEPA: National Environmental Policy Act

NHS: National Historic Site

NHP: National Historic Park

NP: National Park

NPF: National Park Foundation

NPS: National Park Service

NS: National Seashore

PBS: Public Broadcasting System

SUV: Sport Utility Vehicle

UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

US: United States

USGS: United States Geological Survey

YI: Yosemite Institute

Introduction

The visitor’s view

In Yosemite in late July, there is no more inspiring place to stand as evening approaches than a cool 3,214 feet above the Valley floor at Glacier Point - about an hour’s winding drive, and a welcome escape, from the lodges and food courts of Yosemite Village. After leaving your car in any of several hundred tidily paved parking spaces, beautiful new interpretive signs guide you on a looping walkway past a gift store and restrooms to viewpoints where parents nervously enjoin their children not to climb railings that overlook an unforgiving vertical drop to the Valley floor. Glacier-carved Half Dome presents its world famous granite profile directly before you. Vernal and Nevada Falls unwind their misting ribbons far below, spectacular even at such a distance. The earth seems to open overwhelmingly above and below and beyond; space itself floods out from between the monumental granite shapes to meet your spirit as a tangible force. Despite the heat and crowds and the long drive you are glad you came to Yosemite. Enjoying the experience beside you at the railing, a tattooed Latino man in a tank-top challenges his children to spot a big rock far below in the Merced River where they cooled themselves earlier in the mid-day’s 92 degree heat, and visitors converse in several European and Asian languages while they gesture back and forth between a wayside map and the distant granite shapes it says were born of glaciers.

The interpretive signs are world class, bright and pictorial, even sculptural, always at the right place to answer any conceivable English-speaker’s question about the cultural and geological history of Glacier Point. Everything about your day in the park - the wayside signs, the swim in river snow melt already warmed by the season, the Visitor Center’s spectacular new “Spirit of Yosemite” movie and even its worn lobby exhibits, speak about Change, and especially about the transformative and sustaining powers of ice and water.

Yet nowhere in any signage or videos, not in handouts or waysides, not at the viewpoint below Bridalveil Falls nor in the numerous displays describing ecological transformation over geological time in the Mariposa and Tuolumne and Merced groves of giant Sequoias - nowhere in Yosemite as far as I can tell - can a visitor clearly read what interpretive rangers in the park know all too well: that year by year, spring is coming earlier and earlier in Yosemite. Warm rain, arriving earlier as industrial carbon dioxide warms the earth’s atmosphere, reduces snow packs that have until now sustained the Park’s world-famous waterfalls and the soothing waters of the Merced, and those of the Tuolumne which San Francisco and its suburbs drink. Not just these rivers, but those of the entire surrounding Sierra Nevada system - whose snow packs provide most of the water on which Californians depend for their agricultural economy, their recreation, and their lives - are changing their flow patterns in ways that are beginning to challenge the ability of water managers to contain and channel them for human use.

Within a few decades the visitor experience of Yosemite’s renowned resources may be diminished, with a reduced Merced offering fewer swimming holes for the Latino man’s children to enjoy. Visitors may wonder if the mid-1900’s photographs in the Valley’s Ansel Adams Gallery were retouched in their representations of ancient fat waterfalls now subdued or, more likely than on earlier visits, dried out entirely.

The question

My thesis poses a single question: do US national parks offer an opportunity to enroll their one-quarter billion annual visitors in the stewardship of resources that require preservation and protection from global impacts that result from the very actions of people like themselves? It examines possibilities and constraints for enrolling them through interpreting global sustainability. It examines the implications of global sustainability for the resources that the National Park Service (NPS) and its partners have pledged to preserve and protect.

Chapter 1, “Sustainability, Globalization, and the National Parks” reveals the need for providing these interpretations by making the case that critical natural and cultural resources are being destroyed at parks and world-wide by the global actions of industrial nations and corporations, encouraged by specific international accords. Chapter 2, “Interpreting Global Sustainability,” highlights work at sites where the NPS and its partners are currently interpreting global sustainability. Chapter 3 examines “Constraints to Interpreting Global Sustainability” in parks by the NPS and its partners, while Chapter 4, “Corporations, Money, and the NPS” focuses on constraints imposed by corporations and money and proposes ways to transform them instead into enablers of interpretations on global sustainability. Chapter 5 examines institutional and emerging factors that provide “Opportunities for Interpreting Global Sustainability” in national parks, now and in the near future. Following the Conclusion, Appendix I, “Guiding Documents,” provides references to existing internal NPS documents and major national legislative acts - some of which are little known to NPS staff – that currently impact interpretations in all parks or could provide direct support for interpreting global sustainability. Appendix II describes the process by which I solicited survey responses and the kinds of responses I received.

What this thesis does not do is offer a critique of the National Park Service as an agency, or focus on any other single challenge it faces such as conservation, education, visitor or employee experience, or choice of partners - though it interrogates each of these insofar as it bears upon my central question of interpreting global sustainability. As an NPS education volunteer and park partner employee over the last six years in San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) who works every day with rangers, it may be all too easy for me to see NPS employees, especially those in interpretation and education, as highly motivated, educated, and experienced public servants now under unprecedented stresses of privatization and personnel reduction. For balance the reader might explore a few well-known critiques of the NPS as listed in the Bibliography, some of which can be read online at the National Parks Services’ web site, nps.gov. One of the most famously acerbic critiques of the NPS can be found in Alston Chase's "Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park." (Chase). It appears to be referenced from a couple dozen NPS online publications, but not to be online itself. Also well-known and less critical, but still offering a history of the parks that is sufficiently at odds with the officially sanctioned internal version to provide perspective, is Alfred Runte's "National Parks: The American Experience" (Runte), also available online in full text at nps.gov (National Parks – the American Experience.)

For my research laboratory I chose two parks for several reasons: I have worked in the GGNRA for five years both as a volunteer and as an employee of both the NPS and a partner, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (until 2003 known as the “Golden Gate National Parks Association); Yosemite NP is within a day’s drive of the GGNRA; and the two provide contrasts between a newer open-access urban park (the GGNRA) and a more “typical” gated destination park (Yosemite NP). In pursuit of my question I interviewed 17 current officials and employees of the GGNRA and Yosemite National Park and their partner organizations live. I also interviewed 90 officials from other national parks across the country via email or letters to provide a cross-section of opinion more representative of the national parks as a whole where resources did not permit me to undertake live interviews. All of them play key roles in teaching the public. Many have fifteen to thirty years of experience within the parks, and any one of them can provide a reasonably complete picture of the operations and the challenges facing the national parks. I invite you to visit them in their parks. Almost all have the knowledge and incentive to help us – as public citizens – meet the challenges of global sustainability.[1]

Chapter 1:
Sustainability,  Globalization, and the National Parks

A quarter billion visitors to U.S. national parks could learn that their own life choices determine the sustainability of the global resources on which they and their parks depend. Will they?

People have been using and actively managing even extensive resource areas since the earliest times, particularly through channeling water and wildfire to enhance local availability of plants and game. Early communities that mixed semi-nomadic hunting with restrained and localized mixed-planted agriculture seem to have often sustained low or zero-growth populations for as long as thousands of years with little depletion of local ecosystems while precipitating few extinctions beyond those of the largest land mammal species. Though most of us may prefer our current lifestyle to what we imagine our ancestors experienced, anthropology and archeology show us that human life is possible – and in fact appears to have thrived over much of the planet - without sacrificing long-term sustainability to support its immediate needs. All major sustainability problems today are caused by people – by how we think and organize. This chapter discusses these problems, their impacts on parks, and who in parks is ready to learn about them.

Sustainability

Sustainability may mean many things. My thesis concerns itself with the sustainability of natural systems as resources for humans and as a set of living systems and beings valuable in themselves. It focuses particularly on human caused impacts which might be attenuated by increasing the public’s awareness of them.

In recent decades it has become widely known to social and physical scientists that sustainability of human and biological diversity has progressed from a merely academic or political issue to one of survival. In the words of the United Nations Environment Programme, “. . . many areas of the world are on trajectories that will lead them into crisis and . . . little time is left for creating effective responses if deteriorating situations are to be stabilized.” (Geo)  Because the world is now highly interconnected through the exchange of resources and information, and because we all experience and contribute to industrially generated effects on the global commons, sustainability can be understood most powerfully from within a global context. Our environmental activism – our desire to preserve, protect and steward our resources -  is empowered when we learn that our concerns are not simply personal, but are mirrored by people with like concerns in all countries.

Resource sustainability problems today are increasing very rapidly in both their intensity and their interconnectivity. Billions of tons of natural resources are extracted, modified, shipped around the world, and ultimately deposited as enduring and often toxic pollution each year. The gaseous composition of our atmosphere, the essential living organisms of our seas and the composition of our soils are being transformed with accelerating speed by economic enterprises – corporations and the nations with whom they partner – with effects that rapidly reduce the ability of the earth to support people and other living things. Corporate fishing fleets are so powerful that almost any ocean-going fish species that corporations popularize gets depleted beyond economic viability within a few years. Agribusiness is so well organized and financed that the seemingly boundless, sea-size underground aquifers supporting America's Midwestern "bread basket" will be permanently depleted within 30 years or so, leaving one of the modern world's greatest grain production areas without water and unproductive. Animal and plant species are taken to extinction by construction, production of cattle, removal of forests and wetlands, mining operations, and industrial warming of climates far more quickly than scientists can name and catalog them and so quickly that our era is commonly known as the earth’s "sixth great extinction", the most rapid of the six and the only one caused by excessive domination by a single species – humans. Perhaps most disturbing is the simple observation that none of the practices by which we transform the planet's resources into the products we require are sustainable. In the words of "green" businessman Paul Hawken, "If every company on the planet were to adopt the best environmental practices of the 'leading' [most environmentally responsible] companies . . . the world would still be moving toward sure degradation and collapse." (Ecology of Commerce xiii)

Nuclear technology, shared around the world and developed simultaneously by the “military-industrial complexes” of a growing set of nations, constantly threatens a Chernobyl-style rapid toxification of extensive inhabited areas, while abandoned nuclear weaponry and materials are dumped in oceans, left to leach into soils, or secretly sold by desperate nations to the highest bidders. Meanwhile the possibility of almost instant massive transformation of human and natural environments remains configured within the aiming mechanisms of tens of thousands of intercontinental nuclear missiles, many of which, like the political forces which own them, are under uncertain control and subject to no real international oversight. Millions of buried land mines lie scattered and uncharted amidst the living, farming, and working areas of the world’s poor.

Great bodies of water like the Great Lakes and the San Francisco Bay lose formerly productive fisheries as invasive species escape the poorly monitored ballasts of international cargo vessels, multiply, and destroy local fish species. Fishing weirs which not long ago trapped wild Atlantic salmon driven by ocean currents into the Bay of Fundy have been repurposed as large permanent cages in which tank-bred salmon circle as machines dispense food pellets laced with antibiotics - to protect them from their own excreta - and with artificial coloring to imbue their flesh with a marketably pink color. Most super market and restaurant salmon now comes from such impounds, not from the open ocean which is destructively dredged to extract the smaller fish from which the salmon’s feed pellets are produced at a ten-to-one loss of available protein. Agriculture and timber interests struggle against the latest invasions of imported insects. Public health agencies fight disease vectors transporting flu, West Nile Virus, AIDS, and ebola at the speed of commercial airliners from one continent to another, increasingly unable to fight pathogens that have evolved resistance on factory farms where pigs and cows are routinely fed a diet of human antibiotics, rendering them medically useless more quickly than replacements can be developed. The six thousand remaining human languages are being lost – as many as a couple each week – as the capital, military interventions, and values of extractive global enterprises[2] marginalize human cultures and the traditions, relationships to resources, religions, and social relationships that have sustained their unique outlooks for millennia, pushing millions off the richer agricultural lands now coveted by industrial agriculture for the expensive crops they yield to wealthier diners on distant continents. A full third of the world’s amphibians are globally threatened by climate change, habitat loss, species invasions and as yet unidentified processes with no conservation remedies available.[3] These include the frogs that consume mosquitoes now carrying deadly imported West Nile virus as far as northern California and which provide the familiar backdrop of sounds that speaks of nature to visitors of national parks.

The genes of plants and animals are being intermixed in the laboratories of large corporations and the universities they sponsor to create custom plants optimized for the processes of industrial agriculture. These are marketed by international conglomerates, disseminated through heavily capitalized offerings amid considerable coercion especially in developing countries, planted on millions of acres, and broadcast unlabelled into the world’s food supply. Research demonstrating that parts of these novel genes are invading the genomes of ancient wild species thousands of miles from where the genetically modified commercial varieties were originally planted is convincing. However, such research has been disputed by scientists-for-lease hired specifically for that purpose, funded by massive corporate grants to universities aimed at creating a new generation of researchers comfortable with producing “science” at the behest of corporate sponsors who fund whole university divisions and hire their graduates. Researchers who have revealed the accidental drift of laboratory genes have been denied professorships by budget committees in their departments[4]. An estimated 85,000 toxic materials are currently under manufacture while several thousand new ones are released each year - far beyond the ability of government labs to test in isolation, much less in the uncharted combinations by which people, the animals they eat, and other living things actually take them into their bodies. Many will remain in the environment – in the air, soil, oceans, well water, lakes – for millennia, or bioaccumulate upward into the food chains of people and endangered animals. “Remediation” of industrially and militarily toxified soil - in those few situations where money is available to dig it out instead of the less expensive and therefore more prevalent expedient of “capping” it with a coating of cement – consists in hauling it to dumping grounds where it remains indefinitely with its toxic elements largely intact.

Corporate globalization

If there is a free market - an "invisible hand" guiding the commerce that has caused such global disruption of resource systems - it is directed by a highly visible arm: international trade agreements instituted by industrialized nations since the latter days of World War II, embodied now in the World Trade Organization (WTO - formerly GATT, the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. These eventually derived from a meeting of the world’s leading corporate figures, economists, politicians, and bankers held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July of 1944 (Cavenaugh 18), where it was decided that the way to prevent future wars was to promote global economic development via a centralized global economic system. These organizations and their later expressions in the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) “engineer[ed] a power shift of stunning proportions, moving real economic and political power away from national, state, and local governments and communities toward unprecedented centralization of power for global corporations, bankers, and the global bureaucracies they helped create, at the expense of national sovereignty, community control, democracy, diversity, and the natural world.” (18-19) It is a model designed to give precedence, over all else, to unlimited global corporate growth as a “value” superceding any opposing local values and is embodied in specific international accords whose signatories cede sovereignty in many areas, including those designed to support local environments and distinct cultures.[5]

UC Berkeley’s professor of environmental history and philosophy Carolyn Merchant has called for an environmental ethic of partnership between men and women, people and nature - even new forms of dialog that provide representation for the “voice” of nature at planning meetings[6] - as ways to replace court battles, shouting matches, deprecation and hubris with productive discussions and sustainable policies. (Merchant – Earthcare, 212-223) This ethic might bridge the dominant and often divisive environmental ethics she has identified, including the “egocentric” ethic that supports resource extraction for the benefit solely of an individual or narrowly defined enterprise; a “homocentric” ethic that treats nature purely as a set of “resources” for disposal as most benefits people, and even an “ecocentric” ethic that recognizes nature’s rights yet may place them above the needs of people.

In many ways the Bretton Woods accords were initially an expression of a homocentric ethic. A guiding philosophy of the accords was that poor nations could become elevated to full participants in the world economy if the richer nations lent them money to create local enterprises. However, in general this philosophy failed, leaving weaker nations in such debt to more powerful ones that they were forced to submit to externally mandated “restructuring” – changes in their internal laws, policies, and ways of life – in exchange for being allowed to continue participation in a world economy to which loans had now made them dependent. This has resulted in what some have called a new, if initially unintended, form of colonialism. Despite at least some homocentric intentions, by and large the trade accord signatories and the corporations they sponsor seem to have expressed what Merchant identifies as "an egocentric ethic" where "what is good for the individual, or the corporation acting as an individual, is [considered] good for society as a whole" (Merchant – Earthcare, 212-223)).  We are conditioned to taking this ethic for granted, but like international trade accords themselves, it is not by accident that this ethic seems to have gained such power especially in the United States and industrialized nations. Corporations have worked with considerable deliberation to create a world ethos where they can successfully dominate the global landscape.

Multinational corporations have gone far beyond the use of mere advertising and Congressional lobbying to acquire public “mindshare”. They no longer simply sell products, but also commercialization itself and the egocentric ethic as a way of life wherein the names of corporations have replaced those of cultural heroes on the lintels of ballpark entryways, the views from the windows of city buses and trains are often obscured by the advertising panels which cover them, and children receive the approval of parents and peers when they  wear corporate labeled clothing that transforms their bodies into walking advertisements. (Klein) Shopping malls, unheard of a generation ago, now arguably provide better attended and more persuasive “learning” centers for children than ever more poorly funded public schools, while the average American spends several hours each day in front of television programs so saturated with commercial messages that in recent years, some form of corporate logo often appears continuously superimposed during the duration of a program. Shopping malls feature stores that are continuations of the virtual environments of television so that the experience of being a living, willing participant in a nonstop advertisement is at times nearly seamless.

NPS interpreters may or may not think much about the impact of corporations on the American mindset, but they must constantly work around the results. Just to point out a problem created by a corporation - as relevant and essential as such an interpretation might be to providing citizens with a factually informed background enabling them to think critically about the preservation and protection of both local and global resources – can set off concerns or elicit blocking within the minds of people who have been under the tutelage of corporations at home, at school, in theaters and shopping malls for their entire lives. Such interpretations, however, may provide indispensable perspectives valuable in proportion to the difficultly of successfully and appropriately implementing them. Parks provide a temporary escape from commercialization, creating a uniquely safer space for such interpretations. As parks become increasingly privatized, spaces safe for interpreting the real causes of global unsustainability may become more rare.

The National Parks and the problem of global sustainability

"The endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle recovery program underway here is all about global sustainability, or rather, a 'lack there of'. In some of the interpretive programs I present for visitors I liken the plight of the Kemp’s ridley to a human victim of a mob beating. My analogy uses the premise that so many people are involved in the death of an individual during a mob attack it is difficult to determine who the real killer was. The demise of the world’s sea turtle populations is similar in that virtually everyone has played a part in their diminishing numbers yet no one individual or group can be held entirely accountable."  
   - William "Buzz" Botts, Education Coordinator, Padre Island National Seashore

Among the major human-caused global sustainability issues that not only affect and are affected by the world at large (Impacts) but that also directly impact resources that NPS visitors desire to see interpreted at parks are global warming, habitat destruction, propagation of invasive species, loss of cultural and biological diversity, reduction of fresh water sources, proliferation of environmental toxins, and the observed and potential effects of modern warfare.

Concerned with forthcoming rises in sea levels as human-caused global warming melts the ice caps, the NPS is working with the United States Geological Survey to develop maps showing which coastal parks are most likely to be impacted along 7,500 miles of at-risk parks shoreline. (Global Climate, Relative Coastal Vulnerability Assessment). The NPS points out that at Glacier National Park “Global warming may make a mockery of our attempts in all nature reserves . .  to preserve natural communities and rare, threatened, and endangered native species.” (Biodiversity) Melting glaciers and rising sea levels affect not only ecosystems - which may not be the insistent concern of most park visitors - but also the famous coral reefs, waterfalls, glaciers, beaches, wetlands, wildlife, giant trees, and even low-lying battlefields and monuments which visitors cross continents and oceans to enjoy in America’s national parks.

Global warming is perhaps more usefully characterized as “global climate change,” since warming is not the only predicted effect of human transformation of the atmosphere. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects more extreme weather events in the future (Climate Change 2001). Rangers in Yosemite understand that over time they can expect more of the summer lightening that causes fires during the peak visitor season (Kline). One recent climate change model suggests that at some future point “despite enhancement of fire suppression efforts, the number of escaped fires (those exceeding initial containment limits) [will have] increased  . . . 125% in the Sierra Nevada.” (Fried) During my July 2004 visit to the park even necessary controlled burns caused by lightening produced a number of burdens on staff, visitors, and concession employees.[7] More uncontrolled fires mean even more difficulties in protecting and preserving parks.

The national and international consensus that global warming requires immediate action has in recent years become overwhelming. In an open letter to US Senators Frist and Daschle of October 1, 2003, one thousand environmental scientists from prominent institutions (including ecologist Dr. Sue A. Perry from Everglades National Park), most of them with doctoral degrees, issued a warning. According to “the consensus opinion of the scientific community . . . Even under mid-range emissions assumptions, the projected [human-caused] warming could cause substantial impacts in different regions of the U.S., including an increased likelihood of heavy and extreme precipitation events, exacerbated drought, and sea level rise.” Internationally, findings of the IPCC may be more worrisome to the park managements than to any other institutions. Among their concerns: “The frequency and magnitude of many extreme climate events increase even with a small temperature increase and will become greater at higher temperatures (high confidence). Extreme events include, for example, floods, soil moisture deficits, tropical and other storms, anomalous temperatures, and fires . . . Increases in extreme events can cause critical design or natural thresholds to be exceeded, beyond which the magnitude of impacts increases rapidly (high confidence).” (Technical Report).

People will differ on what they consider scientific fact. For decades after researchers demonstrated the health affects of tobacco, corporate executives sought to keep the issue “controversial” via strong relationships with media and the US Congress. As a result it took medical practitioners and health officials many years before the relationship between 400,000 annual deaths and tobacco consumption could be placed in the “fact” column for many citizens. Rachel Carson encountered similar resistance from the pesticide industry when she began revealing the effects of DDT[8], and that same industry today is attempting to make controversial the growing scientific evidence of the toxic environmental affects of the ubiquitous pesticide atrozene (Hermaphrodite). When a subject of scientific enquiry is thus kept controversial by pragmatic means, it is more difficult to discuss it in a public non-advocacy setting such as a national park to an extent that discussing other global sustainability issues, such as invasive species or habitat fragmentation, is not. Whether it is your child who has taken up smoking, or your glacier or ecosystem that is endangered, effectively alerting the public to the problem can thus present a challenge, one which has been addressed with varying degrees of success by the NPS and its partners as I demonstrate in Chapter 2.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change devotes another publication to possibilities for mitigating the effects of global warming (Climate Change 2001: Mitigation). My thesis is inspired by a shared belief that if the public learns how their lives and decisions impact the global systems on which they and their valued resources depend, their concern will call them to action and they will want to preserve those resources.

However, education may be just as valuable in preventing overreaction based on exaggerated concerns. Currently, the public appears to be under-informed about global issues, and in fact in the same recent years that scientific consensus has coalesced around the certainty that human-caused global warming is a looming problem, polls show that public concern for it has actually waned considerably [9].  In Yosemite chief of education Kathy Dimont's experience so far, politicians at large "seem to laugh at it [global warming] - to think it’s a 'sky is falling' type of argument." When GGNRA's cultural historian Paul Scolari was involved with the park's Big Lagoon restoration project at Muir Beach, he remembers that when a hydrological designer brought up the gradual rise in sea level due to global warming, the subject was approached "half tongue-in-cheek." So today in Kathy Dimont's Yosemite "we are not teaching anything" about global warming. [10]

Under conceivable circumstances the pendulum could swing back the other way, and a sustainability issue – for example global warming - could become magnified in the public eye, as lurid scenarios of environmental destruction become grist for popular publications sustaining themselves - truthfully or not - by feeding on the public's escalating fears. The first science fiction disaster movie on global warming was released in May of 2004. (Climate Flick) Like all disaster movies it probably attained some of its popularity from a public disquiet that – as with the ship wrecks, plane crashes, and virus outbreaks that powered other movies of its genre – something like it might happen.

In August and September of 2004 the San Francisco Chronicle reported in its paper and on its website that recent scientific studies predict at least a tripling of heat-wave days and related deaths in San Francisco (Hall) and "extended heat waves in Los Angeles, disrupted ecosystems in the mountains and chaos in California's water-supply system." (Global Warming Clouds).  National Geographic recently announced its 73-page September article on climate change with the bold cover headline, "GLOBAL WARNING." (Appenzeller) Among the possibilities and predictions its scientists extrapolate from currently measured trends: disappearance of the spectacular glaciers in Denali NP (25); displacement of a hundred million people as sea levels rise (28); drastic water shortages in heavily populated deserts including those of the US (31); a worldwide decline in amphibians (34); the disappearance of Antarctic Adelie penguins (39); bleaching and death of many coral reefs (44); the disappearance of sea ice (and with it polar bears) from Hudson Bay by 2070 (51); and an increase in global temperatures of 2° to 5° Celsius (3.6° to 9° Fahrenheit) within the next hundred years (75). It hints at far more grim possibilities such as severe and permanent changes in climate based on historical changes that they have observed to occur over geological time.

Kathy Dimont has also been busy developing Wawona's Sierra Nevada Research Institute in Yosemite with atmospheric scientists from the University of California whom she characterizes as “frantic.” “They are terrified" over global warming, she reports (Dimont). Mary Kline, the park’s chief of non-person interpretation (media, exhibits, and signage) with 23 years experience in 9 national parks, notes that USGS data points and hydroclimatology studies in the park show spring arriving in the park three weeks earlier than in previous times. There is less snow and more rain, which in turn impacts water availability in the Central Valley and San Francisco. Summer rainstorms are more likely, along with more lightening strikes and the fires they cause. Climatological predictions for 2050, she finds "startling."  How will the public, with little background in environmental topics, react once it fully grasps the seriousness of global warming through popular media?

One of the principle predictions of global warming models is an increase in the number and severity of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, droughts, and floods (Appenzeller 21, Climate Change 2001: Impacts). Once the public has global warming on its mind, aided by spectacular media coverage it may take catastrophic but anecdotal weather events as proof that climate change has suddenly arrived in their own neighborhood and now poses serious concerns - concerns which may rise to a level that politicians and corporations might choose to exploit. Ironically, NPS interpreters might then find themselves in a position where any resource interpretations that did not include direct admonitions about global sustainability - global warming at least - would be considered by the public to be "controversial" - the reverse of the general situation today in which parks staff often feel that addressing global warming would carry their interpretations uncomfortably into areas of speculation or advocacy. Increasing public concern with global warming may be worthy of consideration by parks currently planning exhibits and waysides that require significant lead-time and that will subsequently remain unchanged in place for many years.

Politicians are currently touting the benefits of a hypothetical “hydrogen economy”, in which hydrogen would replace fossil fuels in automobile engines to reduce urban pollution and slow global warming (Hydrogen Economy). Although hydrogen could be extracted from fossil hydrocarbons, it is more likely that it would be produced at centralized facilities that would generate electrical power to rip apart water molecules into the oxygen and hydrogen atoms of which they are composed, imparting to them potential energy. The atoms eventually would be recombined inside automobile engines as an emission of very clean water vapor, in the process releasing heat to power the engine. A hydrogen economy would require massive new investment in generating facilities to rip apart enough water molecules. It would slow global warming only if these new power plants did not burn fossil fuels. Given time and good sense, industrial economies could transition from the current preponderance of oil, coal[11], and natural gas generating facilities – all of which contribute massively to global warming – to new renewable sources. Some combination of biomass, wind, and solar powered generation – along with far greater vehicle efficiency and changes in lifestyles - could power our cars through this hydrogen economy. This is every environmental educator’s ideal outcome, to which I hope interpretations for global sustainability in national parks might contribute.

On the other hand, if people panic over global warming, Americans might decide to resume development of their problematic nuclear industry to implement this hydrogen economy rapidly, or some other economy based on replacing fossil fuels with new forms of electrically derived vehicular power. Nuclear plants are expensive but they seem to possess the essential qualifications for mainstream American industrial development projects: highly centralized, well connected to big industrial and military suppliers, blessed with a track record for attracting huge governmental subsidies and for receiving favorable treatment by consumer rate regulators, and easy to calculate in terms of output per facility. Historically, America has supported large centralized projects over collective solutions such as wind farms, roof-installed solar systems, and demand reduction. If fears of losing the nation’s water and ecosystems due to climate change were to become so fired by pundits and by industries eager to build these facilities that they overcame concerns over nuclear terrorism, the multi-thousand year storage requirements of radioactive byproducts, and the warming of local riparian and tidal areas from plant coolants, the nation might decide to reawaken its hibernating nuclear development programs to produce the vast amounts of electricity needed in turn to produce hydrogen. Such a proliferation of nuclear plants is probably not the outcome that most environmental educators desire. Widely educating the public on global climate change earlier rather than later could help forestall such a misstep or other possible overreactions, and parks enrolled in interpreting global sustainability would thus facilitate pragmatic, proactive rather than reactive attitudes.

By understanding how and why people visit parks both in person and through media outreach, we will be better prepared to consider how these impacts and choices can be interpreted meaningfully for their consideration.

The audience for interpretations in national parks

The NPS itself goes to some effort to understand its audience in aggregate, and attempts to count the number of people who visit its parks each year. But what can be counted as a visit? Yosemite NP's visitors pass through discrete gateways, as do those visiting the GGNRA's Alcatraz island and its Muir Woods reserve. But the vast majority of visits to many parks, including those to the geographically complex and diffuse 75,000 acre urban GGNRA, can only be estimated by counting the number of people driving past fixed locations in the park. Howard Levitt, chief of interpretation for the GGNRA, puts the number of visitors in the park at about 20 million per year, but the number who have contact with staff at perhaps 3.5 to 5 million. George Su, the park's media specialist, states that his NPS website received 3.3 million hits, that he produced and distributed 325,000 publications, and that some tens of thousands of people looked into or became volunteers there last year.

Webmasters like to measure activity on their sites by the number of pages that have been browsed by "visitors." But it is difficult to assess the educational impact of a page being displayed on a computer during a browsing session. Web page visits are often extremely brief and probably impact the visitor little compared to face-to-face live interpretations by staff at parks.

The NPS maintains a vast and relatively open website with links to all of its parks, to studies and entire books, and even to many of its own internal documents such as Director's Orders and management plans. Many people may assume that whatever page they browse on the nps.gov internet domain must reflect NPS perspectives, but this may be only partially true. In this thesis I have assumed that NPS content on its park-specific websites reflects the interpretations visitors will experience when they actually visit those parks. The nps.gov web publishes many documents apparently more as discussion points than as representatives of NPS perspectives. Still, by placing a document on nps.gov, the NPS invests it with some degree of institutional acceptance and at least a presumption of relevancy, and I have assumed this when quoting pages of the NPS website.

How many people learn something in national parks? I know of no estimate of how many people read interpretive signs in parks, nor of how many are repeating their visits with such regularity that they have ceased learning anything new in parks with which they have become familiar. Mary Kline, division chief for non-person interpretation (media and exhibits) at Yosemite, philosophically estimates the number of learners there at somewhere between the few hundred who are surveyed in the park each year and its total attendance of 4 million! More realistically, in fiscal year 2003, 53,700 people received (and supposedly read from) Yosemite publications; 1,675 attended programs; 7,000 local urban youth were visited by traveling outreach vans; and in all personal contacts were made in some form with 1.8 million people.

Various NPS spokespeople provide numbers like 250 million or 400 million annual visits to NPS sites which include national parks, recreation areas, preserves, seashores, lakeshores, rivers, parkways, trials, monuments, memorials, cemeteries, battlefields, historic sites, and historical parks, plus affiliated areas and other designations. (Designation) Some individuals believe that visitors to parks are intent mostly on recreation; others, that visitors chose National Parks as vacation destinations because the programs, historical and natural features, museums and interpretations within them offer educational experiences unavailable at other vacation destinations. Certainly many private and public schools visit parks for experiences that are expressly educational.

Parks provide extensive outreach into surrounding urban communities. Hundreds of buses of public school children are brought into both Yosemite and the GGNRA each year for anything from loosely structured outdoor romps to highly structured and curriculum-focused park "classroom" experiences. Christy Rocca, director of GGNRA's Crissy Field Center, puts the number of visitors to the building at 54,000 per year - most of whom probably engage in some form of learning. The nonprofit Yosemite Institute provides structured outdoor science learning experiences to 13,500 school children at Yosemite (and several times that if you include their work at other national parks) each year. Responses from other national parks indicate that both informal and structured learning experiences occur there in similar proportions.

NPS educators also refer to a sort of outreach ripple effect which can be incidental or designed into a program. One way the NPS actualizes its policy of encouraging "non-traditional" park users - non-white and lower income communities - to visit Yosemite is to bring urban youth from Fresno, Mariposa and other local communities into the park on classroom excursions, then to give them free passes granting their entire families a return visit to the park free of the $20 entry fee. When Yosemite's education chief Kathy Dimont succeeds in convincing one child from a traditionally large clan-based Hmong family in Fresno that the park is there for her enjoyment and stewardship, the child in turn may encourage her family and others in the community to experience the park. Dimont sees an exponential educational outreach that is much greater than immediate numbers might indicate. She has encouraged young people to serve as interns in the park, and over a number of years some have become the first individuals in their families to attend college via participation in park-based programs. When she encourages migrant labor classrooms to attend parks and learn lessons of stewardship, others in their communities are affected for the first time.

NPS staff in general exhibit a passion to infect the public with their message of preserving and protecting national resources in parks, and they sometimes reach out in creative ways. About ten years ago Corky Mayo, NPS chief of interpretation, helped set up a Junior Ranger program that urban kids could read about on the back of their cereal boxes. Thousands of kids each sent in a box top to one of ten major national parks to initiate a pen-pal relationship with NPS staff there. Rangers wrote each kid back, and a few of those correspondences continue today.

In the GGNRA and Yosemite no first-time visitor would be able to drive, walk, cycle, or sail far without reading information signs or maps which unavoidably provide messages of historical and natural conservation, beginning with the naming of features considered significant by the interpretive staff who develop them: "Old Fort Chapel"; "Redwoods Loop Trail"; “Toxic Soil Removal Site” and so forth.

Perhaps it would be safest to say that significant educational contacts between visitors and the staff and exhibits at NPS sites occur tens to hundreds of millions of times each year, and that the depth and transformative affect of these contacts varies from casual to deep.[12]

My thesis assumes that millions of national park visitors can receive messages about the need to act for global sustainability, and that they are in a position to take political and economic action. If NPS efforts to include new communities are successful, it might seem that the proportion of the higher income white demographic with its propensity toward high participation in the political process and representation on corporate boards may be reduced by the inclusion of people with less ability to affect the social changes needed to reverse the destruction of global resources. On the other hand, there may simply be more people of all levels of influence in the parks. The NPS diversity outreach is premised on the idea that communities of color will wield an increasing proportion of the political and economic power needed to sustain parks in the United States in coming decades. If so, educating the new communities about global sustainability will be one key factor in keeping ecosystems, agriculture, and lifestyle-enhancing levels of economic activity functioning, as well as key natural and even cultural features of national parks.[13]

An interesting aspect of the new urban communities is that they often bring with them into the parks less exposure to traditional conservation and environmental values than traditional park visitors. This means that they will bring fresh minds into the process of developing interpretations, presenting NPS educators and park partners with opportunities to rethink the meanings of parks and environmentalism along with the educational methods and messages by which they are addressed[14]. The perspectives of the new communities are urban, and they may be well disposed to help shape the requisite new relationship between people and parks as growing urban areas embrace ever more closely the boundaries of formerly "isolated" parks.

Conclusion

By raising opaque walls of abundance around their own communities, the world's most powerful people have blinded themselves to the resource impacts which in the process they have created, endangering the unseen people of their own future and of other communities – human and otherwise – which are already deeply affected beyond their view. Collectively as corporations and governments, acting from a highly promoted ethic of grasping magnified by powerful international accords, they irreversibly transform complex living systems into short-lived monocultures, and human communities into labor resources, throughout the world. Their natural resource transformations, in particular, have powerful impacts on the sustainability of important resources in national parks. How have parks provided interpretations informing their visitors of the source and nature of the globalized impacts that reduce their own and their parks’ sustainability?

Chapter 2:
Interpreting Global Sustainability

A rich cross-section of alert citizens enter the gates of national parks ready to learn from the extensive and popular educational facilities and the living contexts which the NPS and its partners have developed and preserved over decades. NPS and partner staff have always addressed this audience’s potential for helping preserve park resources through interpretive development. Many parks now recognize that "interpreting the resource" is most engaging to the public and helpful in protecting local resources when it explicitly demonstrates the connection between local and global sustainability. They have developed their interpretive practices and exhibits accordingly, even at sites whose initial enabling legislation requires them to interpret primarily historical resources.

Through a variety of traditional and innovative methods these parks address a wide range of global sustainability problems including national over-consumption and the forms of multinational commerce and militarism that encourage it; threats to native communities, biodiversity, and whole ecosystems; global warming and the shrinkage of glaciers and wetlands; disappearance of ancient forests; accumulation of human toxins in air, water, and soil especially in unequal distributions that affect environmental justice; destruction of sea life through coral bleaching and oil spills; and alternatives leading to sustainability including an ethic of addressing nature as life rather than as a set of resources. They provide successful and flexible models for interpreting global sustainability that can be replicated at other sites. At the same time, other parks have overlooked obvious possibilities for interpreting global sustainability, often due to staff resourcing priorities or shortages.

Interpretations by the NPS

Presenting facts on global sustainability at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri reveals how the park’s enabling legislation supports interpretations of local resources that help to contextualize the problem of global warming. Elixa Kunz’s banners interpret them with explicit, succinct and non-technical language: "The Greenhouse Effect, or global warming, is the build-up of gases trapping a certain kind of heat (or infrared radiation) near the Earth’s surface." (Kunz)

She and her educators have overcome what other parks accept as barriers to interpreting global sustainability (see Chapter 3) through several techniques. First, they use a temporary exhibit – in this case four 16 foot by 11-½ foot banners – perhaps chosen because it offers the benefits of temporary exhibits that I describe in Chapter 5. Second, following the admonitions of most NPS interpreters who responded to my surveys, they provide statements of well established fact, rather than opinions.

A "fact" need not be some exact and self-evident number. In ecosystem science, a fact is often represented by a range of probabilities based on established science. For example, some may quibble with the range of global daily species extinctions given on one of Kunz's banner - "from 5 to 50" – and say it is low compared to the 75 per day theorized by prominent ecologist E. O. Wilson, a featured presenter at the NPS's Discovery 2000 national conference (E.O. Wilson). But all who study global sustainability and conservation recognize that species do disappear every day; that for important reasons the number can never be established with precision; and that the number is probably within a range such as Kunz has provided. By staying with facts Kunz's team also follows another NPS interpretive principle commonly mentioned by my correspondents when she adds: "No one is told what to do.  The items are there to provoke thought so people can make their own informed decisions."

Her banner topics are exceptional in that they explicitly interpret global sustainability and/or the sustainability impacts of the United States, and demonstrate the range of topics that she feels are appropriate to interpret in a national park: acid rain, tree planting as a means of reducing carbon dioxide buildup, wind power as a renewable energy source, the 2.7 billion pounds of pesticides introduced by the US into the environment each year; the fact that an acre of timber disappears in the US each second, that "Global population growth occurs at 1.7% per year, while the world’s cars multiply by almost 5% yearly," that the globe adds 93 million more people each year, that "Over half of the world’s wetlands have been lost in the past century" and that "The United States has 5% of the Earth’s population and consumes nearly 30% of the world’s economic output." Stating specific ways that the United States creates problems is apparently not seen as an infringement on the visitor's prerogative to form her own opinion. The banners also steer clear of politics by listing well known actions of the United States rather than its policies.

The interpretive exhibits at Jefferson also suggest that showing Americans ways to improve the actions of the country they are proud of may be an acceptable alternative to simply suggesting that they as isolated individuals should change their habits to increase sustainability[15]. Most interpretations at parks seem to take the more timid approach of either suggesting that visitors act individually rather than collectively as a nation, or simply make no suggestions at all on the theory that good interpretations should describe resource problems but not possible responses to them. Given the constant feedback that interpreters receive, it is likely that the differences in approach may stem from the differences between audiences from park to park, but several of my respondents claimed that decisions by the local park superintendent made a big difference in how interpretations were formed.

Interpreting problems provides the opportunity to highlight individuals and institutions that provide positive solutions. In the context of each set of environmental problems, these same banners specifically call out cultural and environmental protections provided by national parks – protection of sacred Indian sites at Chaco Culture National Historical Park, the re-meandering of the Kissimmee River and the creation of detoxifying marshes at Everglades NP, and the protection of ancient trees in Sequoia NP.

Jefferson, like many other historical NPs, has determined that the history of America's people is intimately tied to the history of America's environment, and that changes observed in one help explain and provide context for changes to the other. As Elisa Kunz puts it, "This park is basically historical.  By infusing a connection with the natural environment, it can bring a more complete view of the 19th century continental exploration."

With similar logic, Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site in La Junta, Colorado interprets the relationship between cultural exchanges among the many diverse cultures along the border between the US and Mexico on the one hand, and changes to ecosystems which are at once both local and transnational on the other. Staff interpret the major impact of the fur trade and Santa Fe trade during the first half of the 19th century on the native environment and native peoples since "Bent's Old Fort . . . was involved with international industries and early examples of multi-national commerce, which today continue to transform the lives of human beings around the world."(Wallner) Their website describes a 19th century "expanding trade empire" (Bent’s Old Fort), language very similar to that used by analysts of today's US multinational corporatism. However, if Bent's is like other parks, staff probably find it more appropriate to interpret impacts to cultures and ecosystems that occurred in the past than they do to provide intellectual and emotional links to similar impacts on local resources by corporate empires today.

Yellowstone NP’s Long Range Interpretive Plan lists as one of its primary interpretive themes “Natural Resource Preservation” whereby “The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem preserves a world-renowned biological reserve with a gene pool that includes rare and endangered species. Yellowstone preserves biological processes and ecosystems as well as living things and their surroundings. Threats to resources are not limited by park boundaries. For example, migratory species require healthy habitats and protection as far away as Central America and the Arctic tundra; exotic species from around the world have invaded the park and now compete with native species; global warming could alter climate and shift habitats.” (Yellowstone Long Range)

The park’s “Resources & Issues Handbook” reminds visitors that there are “few places remaining on Earth where we can not only preserve but study such ecological completeness.” It argues for management of a large ecosystem extending beyond park boundaries and into Canada “to ensure the long-term survival of wildlife in the Northern Rockies from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to the Yukon Highlands—a distance of 1,900 miles.” (Yellowstone Resources 34) Also, “Yellowstone is an active participant in the Western Working Group of Partners in Flight, an international effort to protect migrant land birds in the Americas, because more than 100 bird species spend the winter in Mexico and Central America. There, they are threatened by loss of habitat, pesticide use, and increasing human development and pressure.” (111) It argues that “As global biodiversity declines, national parks and other preserves become increasingly important as sources of genetic diversity for scientific study as well as products that may benefit humanity.” (139) Going far beyond traditional local interpretation, in October of 2003 Yellowstone hosted its Seventh Biennial Conference on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem “to generate, in non-technical language, a publicly oriented discussion of issues that draw together national parks in the Greater Yellowstone and East Africa” and “consider the interdependence of both nature-society relations and natural and cultural history in local and global contexts.” (Seventh Biennial Conference)

Warm water sea coasts are particularly susceptible to global impacts on their ecosystems, and parks located on them raise public understanding of their fragility through appropriate interpretations. Gary Bremen interprets coral bleaching in Florida’s Biscayne NP by explaining that ocean warming is often its cause, then letting visitors figure out the connection to global warming themselves – which, he says, they usually do. This illustrates that the flexibility of live interpreters to adjust to particular audiences gives them far greater ability to lead people to understandings than "canned" media like waysides and even well developed multimedia, which have no awareness of whom they are addressing.

Cherry Payne's staff interprets a broad range of global sustainability effects that locally impact the Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Parks - invasive exotics, fisheries, boat groundings, the 40% of world shipping that passes the park and the transcontinental migration of critical bird populations that nest in it. A new theme of their current GMP is that "The Dry Tortugas is a fragile ecosystem that is influenced by global, regional, and local activities."

Currently, despite the importance of global effects to the park's fragile and globally dependent natural resources, interpretations with an explicit global perspective await implementation of their just-completed Comprehensive Interpretive Plan for Dry Tortugas. Interpretations have focused regionally rather than globally in part to increase awareness of Everglade's critical dependence on the upstream development and/or restoration which impacts the availability of water to sustain the wetlands which constitute the park – effects that depend on local understanding and policies. Yet Everglade NP’s designation as a Wetland of International Importance, a World Biosphere Reserve, and a World Heritage Site – each of which must have required a great deal of effort to obtain – provide an ample prelude to reinforcing and adding interest to local understandings by interpreting global ones.

Scientists studying global warming at Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park collaborated with the Public Broadcasting Service to produce a highly accessible mini-documentary to inform the public about the impacts of global warming on beautiful native birds. Hopefully, many thousands of people viewed it as a news segment on PBS and are viewing it today on PBS’s website. (Online News Hour) This demonstrates that park sites can literally “broadcast” an interpretation of global sustainability given appropriate partners and circumstances. At the same time, I find it notable that the segment is not shown to visitors on the island, where its messages would have great impact and appropriately interpret the local park resources. According to Mardie Lane, several scientific teams on the island not only research sustainability of the fragile ecosystem and many endangered species but also interpret to the public, including the U.S. Geological Survey Biological Resources Division, the U.S. Forest Service, and scientists from Stanford University.

Gulf Islands National Seashore in Mississippi and Florida encourages visitors and local residents to help protect migratory species which include monarch butterflies, sea turtles, and birds including Least terns, snowy plovers, and black skimmers. By placing seasonal barriers and other physical restrictions on activities in the park that might disrupt nesting, they provide the public with very tangible reference to species fragility. Interpreters discuss conditions in Mexico that affect butterfly wintering grounds. But, their emphasis is on simple acts of avoiding nesting areas, and it is not clear if they relate the sensitivity of nesting grounds there to extinctions caused by the loss of vast habits throughout the world, or to the political and economic factors that drive those losses.

One National Seashore hosts symposia that inform the public about the impacts of global warming on sea level rise near salt marshes. Reducing personal consumption of energy is suggested as a way to mitigate those losses. (attribution withheld).

Enabling legislation for Alaska’s Klondike Gold Rush NHP asks it to preserve historical structures and trails, but in addition Sandy Snell and her team follow their new General Management plan under which they will begin to interpret the great diversity of natural communities within the Skagway and Taiya river valleys and how these have affected human use over time. Part of their new work will be to interpret globally-related sustainability issues like the melting of glaciers – whose resultant sediment deposition has raised the level of the Dyea historic town site area by several feet over the last century – and particulate releases from cruise ships and tourist trains which have caused dramatic changes to vegetation in this most diverse area of southeast Alaska.

Timothy Manns and his interpreters at Ross Lake National Recreation Area, North Cascades National Park and Lake Chelan National Recreation Area in Washington draw visitors’ attention to the effects of global climate change on the combined parks’ 316 glaciers and the importance of glaciers to the water requirements of salmon, people, and other species. They discuss lake habitat contamination from air pollution caused by human activities upwind and draw some connections between these impacts and the lifestyles of visitors, but apparently not to the historical role of state citizens in granting and revoking the charters of corporations according to whether or not they serve local interests.

At South Carolina’s Congaree National Park, Fran Rametta and the interpretive staff provide guided programs about the declines of migratory and herpetological species, and conduct census programs that involve the public in butterfly protection – all of which are discussed within a global context. “Visitors are informed that loss of habitat and pollutants are contributing towards species decline,” she states.

Lia Vella and the other interpreters at Oregon’s John Day Fossil Beds NM address climate change over geological time as a basic narrative of the park, and tell visitors that “climate and life are intrinsically linked and ever changing.” As far as modern climatology, “It’s up to the individual park rangers to choose whether or not to make a connection to the impact of human activity on ecosystems.”

An exhibit at Muir Woods NM in the GGNRA with its famous giant redwood trees provides one of the clearest fixed interpretations of global sustainability that I observed or heard about. A boardwalk circle intercepts the path of all of the park's 4 million annual visitors shortly after entering the park, and displays small live plantings of different redwood trees native to several continents. In the middle of the exhibit a large wayside reads: "It is probable that today human activity plays a role in the current rapid progress of global warming. Scientists estimate that a three to four degree increase in global temperature could eliminate the cool, moist coastal zone in California. What, then, might the future hold for Coast Redwoods?" According to Mia Monroe, a primary purpose of the exhibit is to acknowledge to the park's many foreign visitors the significance of their own home countries, and to encourage them to carry the ecological messages of the park to their own homes. The exhibit also resonates with the interpretation of an important event in the park's history on May 19, 1945 when delegates to the signing of the United Nations charter came to visit the park. The wayside commemorating that event features a 1955 quote from UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld: "Persons who love nature find a common basis for understanding people of other countries, since the love of nature is universal among men of all nations." The park's website provides a spiritual "global connection" when it quotes its patron philosopher John Muir: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Taken together the park's interpretations integrate the ecology of fascinating local resources, global sustainability, and world peace. According to Mia, Muir Woods may also be the one site in the GGNRA where ecological destruction by a corporation may be part of interpretive conversations with visitors: the continuing destruction of old growth redwood forests in Humboldt County, California in an accelerated and often illegal manner by the Maxxam Lumber Company. (Maxxam)

Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens in Washington DC “is the only National Park Service site devoted to the propagation and display of aquatic plants” (Kenilworth). According to Kate Bucco, “As a wetland park, and with the global destruction of wetland, we can’t not include this topic.” (Bucco)

One NP in the mountains interprets air quality and its connection to distant source pollution, water quality and its relationship to acid rain, forest health impacts of air quality, acid deposition, and the introduction of exotic pests, and impacts on biological diversity due to global changes. These are brought to the public through publications, ranger-led programs, electronic media, and citizen science projects that engage all ages, including middle and high-school students who participate in service learning projects. (attribution withheld).

Interpretations by park partners

Non-profit organizations that develop environmental education programs locate themselves in or near parks to take advantage of natural and staff resources that can assist them in their mission. I am particularly familiar with the programs at Crissy Field Center in the GGNRA where I have worked for several years. Live animal demonstrations often provide the context for successful and popular discussions of global sustainability, like the family-oriented presentations on bats which feature them live while the presenter explains their value and habitat protection requirements worldwide. An evening presentation and discussion of genetically modified organisms mass produced by the Monsanto corporation, along with the problems caused by their global distribution, attracted a large audience of activist-oriented individuals. The 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize winner discussed her Louisiana community's fight against nearby toxic releases by the Shell corporation's chemical refinery. A program on healthy food and agriculture discussed the sector's contribution to global warming and pesticides, and how organic alternatives could offer better health for people and environments. Popular movies with global environmental themes were presented in a topical series.

Crissy Field Center is unique in combining staff from both the NPS and a cooperating organization in its operations, so its programs may bear a bit more of an “official” NPS imprimatur than those of NPS partner sites which typically operate much more independently. I have not significantly researched other GGNRA partners.

From browsing their website (Welcome), the Gulf of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary Association in the GGNRA does provide a curriculum on oil spills and mentions the large number of ships that transit the bay, but it is not clear that it critiques global shipping for delivering invasive salt water organisms, the dangers posed by transiting nuclear submarines, or any of the direct human impacts of the shipping industry in filling the bay and creating asthmatic levels of truck diesel pollution for children near shipping ports. If they mention the 47,800 barrels of radioactive waste near the Farallones or the policies that brought them there, it was not immediately clear from a scan of their website. Perhaps, like the NPS, they tend to reserve discussion of such controversial topics to person-to-person programs. Among the three organizations which provide by far the largest individual contributions to Gulf of the Farallones (FY2003 Annual Report) is the National Parks Foundation (Proud Partners) – which, as I discuss more fully in Chapter 4, is a conduit for corporate contributions from Ford - who is totally dependent on the oil tankers that cruise through the Sanctuary – and Time-Warner, the global media giant whose income is derived from selling whatever sails by on container ships. The point is not that Gulf of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary is corrupt but that park partners, like the NPS itself, may experience major constraints in interpreting the actual sources of impacts that effect the resources they want to protect through education. Some NPS staff feel that partners are freer than the NPS to interpret political and corporate effects, but as I indicate later in Chapter 4, even they are likely to experience real constraints in what they can present even to an open audience.

Slide Ranch in the GGNRA (Slide Ranch) is frequently mentioned by local NPS staff as a partner in education who uses a hands-on organic farming environment to educate around global sustainability. According to the mission statement on their website, “Every bite of food connects us to the soil, sun, water, and air, and to the people who work to feed us. Slide Ranch teaches respect and responsibility for sustaining these connections.” Volunteering their “provides a chance to spend meditative, relaxing time with plants and the earth.” All participants “are encouraged to consider their interdependence with other living creatures, and their role and responsibilities as humans.” A sweat lodge and fire circle are available for group use. In many ways they offer a bodily and spiritual experience of connection to the earth itself, in which essential resources are experienced and enjoyed in context rather than commoditized and de-localized. The contrast they create to the corporate-generated world just outside their facility is huge and deliberate, and it is likely that by generating the message on such a sensory level it is deeply received - whether or not they explicitly inform visitors that much of the world’s people still live close to the earth in this way but are being pushed into unsustainable sweatshop manufacturing by corporate globalization.

Missed opportunities for interpretations

By taking advantage of specific situations for interpreting global sustainability, these sites provide clear contrasts with sites where such situations are not actualized. I have identified three circumstances which seem to prevail where this interpretive opportunity is neglected: a disconnect between resources and sustainability impacts; a disconnect between scientists and interpreters; and a shortage of trained interpretive personnel.

While many parks – even historical ones – draw relationships between local events and larger sustainability issues, in others a disconnect exists between local resources and global (and even local) sustainability. Many either simply have not progressed to the development of sustainability interpretations or prefer not to allocate their resources in that effort. Whiskeytown National Recreation Area's ecologist Jennifer Gibson is familiar with the parks "astounding biodiversity," the impacts of diminishing water quality and availability, and the park's importance to migratory birds and threatened species – yet the park provides very little interpretation on them so far. Its enabling legislature is forty years old, and reflects old-style interpretations of the NPS mission, in this case enjoining the park to conserve "scenic, scientific, historic and other values contributing to public enjoyment of such lands and waters . . ." Whiskeytown does not seem to have moved as far forward as Yosemite and other parks which have "recognized that whenever a park is charged with protecting scenery it's a factor of the age in which the park was set aside, and that it should include all the things that that park would be set aside for now." (Kline)

Minuteman Missile NHS in South Dakota is required by its enabling legislation to “interpret the historic role . . . as a key component of America’s strategic commitment to preserve world peace.” (Herberger) Such a mission could be the start of a larger interpretation of why an increasing number of nations maintain nuclear weapons systems and what the potential affects of their use is to human culture and ecosystems; what happens to discarded nuclear material; and other global implications of nuclear weapons. The narrow focus and recent establishment (1999) of this park’s enabling legislation suggest that interpretations on the global sustainability of nuclear armaments will not be forthcoming in the park any time soon. Similar constraints to providing extensive interpretations on sensitive topics are discussed elsewhere in Chapter 3.

Missed opportunities for interpreting global climate change at Yosemite were dramatized in the Introduction. Glacier Point hosts a particularly apt site for such an interpretation – its beautiful open rock-walled “Geology Hut” overlooking vistas of Yosemite Valley and its river and waterfalls. The Hut interprets the Valley as change: “Anchored in granite, the scene before you appears permanent, fixed as a photograph. Yet landscapes, like time, are in constant flux.” It asks visitors to look beyond what they can see before them – beyond the immediate resource – and to understand it over time. The Hut exhibit could interpret discoveries of the ongoing park-wide hydrological studies and Sierra-wide scientific research programs that report changes that are affecting tangible aspects of the resource visitors experience from this view point – those caused by human-induced global climate change.

A second major limitation of the NPS for interpreting global sustainability is the disconnect between science and interpretation. Where scientists may focus almost exclusively on broad ecological implications – of climate change, for example –  NPS interpretive staff engage the public by focusing on “interpreting the resource” – the most obvious historical and scenic elements that are sought by visitors. Powerful scientific studies at parks are sometimes little interpreted to park visitors, though some parks encourage their scientific personnel to present findings to staff, the public, and interns[16].

Scientists - especially those performing research at national parks - who want to expose their findings to an audience beyond academic circles and directly affect the opinions of the public should describe and model impacts not only on ecosystems, which are little known to visitors, but also on famous scenery - for example, the glaciers of parks like Glacier, Kenai Fjords, Klondike Gold Rush Historical, North Cascades, and Olympic NPs whose reduction can by readily interpreted to visitors, and the waterfalls of Yosemite whose scenic fullness is a constant concern for visitors and concessionaires and is being affected by climate change.

Thirdly the NPS lacks interpretive rangers. Park visitors expect to meet rangers and hear their talks. Although multimedia like Yosemite’s “Spirit of Yosemite” movie provide emotionally powerful educational experiences, as “one size fits all” interpretations they, like websites and waysides, do not engage visitors as flexibly as one-on-one interactions with knowledgeable staff who are trained in interpreting for the public. In Muir Woods, waysides are specifically designed as take-off points for flexible interactions between interpretive staff and visitors. For each wayside, a comprehensive set of interpretations has been developed over time and collected in a binder whose contents are taught to regular and interning staff. Interpreters are then able to engage visitors of diverse ages and backgrounds with informed responses chosen extemporaneously from a variety of well considered perspectives. A visitor who comes to the park to stare at magnificent trees may take home an understanding of ecosystem sustainability because a ranger knew how to take her from her initial interest to a broader understanding of the resource – including some of the political and corporate issues involved –  and how she can help preserve and protect it.

Rangers quickly develop new interpretations to suit opportunities as they emerge, and work constantly with partners, schools, and new communities on a local level and with each other on a national level to produce effective and authentic educational experiences. Laying off interpretive staff and funding fewer trainee interns may be the surest ways to reduce the ability of parks to provide transformative learning experiences for visitors in all areas, especially understandings of global sustainability which they will need to protect the resources of parks as well as the rest of the world. Transmitting these understandings requires sensitive conversational approaches that cannot be delivered via fixed media.

Conclusion

Of the parks that responded to my survey, a small but increasing[17] number, especially those dedicated to protecting resources sensitive to ecological disturbance, expand and contextualize local interpretations of environmental sustainability by providing visitors with linkages to global factors. Of those, fewer still - perhaps only Jefferson National Expansion Memorial - meaningfully interpret current collective impacts of the United States, while among the slightly greater number who do suggest that visitors might reevaluate their own impacts, most suggest that citizens might act as individuals rather than collectively or nationally. Perhaps surprisingly, some parks established for historical preservation and recreation have become major interpreters of at least local natural resource sustainability.

Many clear opportunities for increasing public awareness of global conservation and impacts to help in the protection of park resources have not yet been seized. Scientists in parks often fail to communicate their findings about sustainability to the public in ways they can grasp (with notable exceptions), while critical person-to-person interpretations are becoming less available as ranger staff is reduced. But beyond the neglect of a few clearly outstanding opportunities and connections, why is it that throughout the national park system, global interpretations on sustainability appear so limited and constrained? This is the question which I next address.

Chapter 3:
Constraints to Interpreting Global Sustainability

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
   - author Richard Bach

The over 400 national park sites in the United States receive, in aggregate, roughly the equivalent of one visit per US citizen per year. The public - as individuals, collectivized interests, legislative bodies, and corporations – all have vested interests in affecting the sensibilities of this enormous audience. NPS and partner staff must work within the powerful constraints imposed by these stakeholders and by their own historical mandates, physical circumstances, and economic realities as they attempt to preserve resources amidst changing scientific understandings and political climates.

The NPS is a Federal agency

"All agencies of the Federal Government shall recognize the worldwide and long-range character of environmental problems and, where consistent with the foreign policy of the United States, lend appropriate support to initiatives, resolutions, and programs designed to maximize international cooperation in anticipating and preventing a decline in the quality of mankind's world environment."
   -  a section of the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) of which, to my knowledge, NPS interpreters are never made aware.

What the public learns about their world while visiting an NPS site is constrained and shaped by the agency’s status as a Federal agency. Though the agency’s Washington DC, Harper's Ferry, and regional headquarters actually have limited control over how NPS facilities are used by the public [18] and how interpretations are shaped at individual parks, they can and do influence them.

In June and July of 2004, US media carried numerous stories describing the large relative cutbacks in funding for the NPS and its field staff  (LA Times). In my interviews I investigated the simultaneous media claim that NPS site officials were “gagged” on the subject of budgetary reductions and received a mixed but somewhat consistent response. Site officials may speak of specifics - for example, Mary Kline, a senior administrator[19] at Yosemite, can tell me openly that the park’s staff of government-paid seasonal rangers was reduced to one for the current summer.  The Chief of Interpretation at Everglades [20] can tell me that staff reductions have cut her winter interpretive services from 120 to 20. But both are probably prohibited from discussing NPS budgeting in general, and, according to other NPS site officials, would put their jobs at risk if they should do so. NPS budgets are publicly available on their website (Justification), but staff are not allowed to engage the public with general discussions of their impacts or sufficiency.

Kline says this restriction represents an application of a general NPS interpretive principle: present clear facts, not supposition or advocacy. Still, other interpretations engage visitors in forming intellectual connections to events in their parks, to consider the whys and wherefores of human actions, so to some extent the NPS budget stands out as a specifically taboo subject. Several senior people at NPS and partnering non-profit conservation organizations have informed me privately that the current Presidential administration (Bush, 2001 - 2004) is exceptionally inclined to fire or transfer outspoken NPS officials who might publicly examine policy issues. Some parks staff would only discuss such straight-forward facts as staff reduction counts and percentage reductions in retirement benefits anonymously, for fear of negative consequences.

However, neither the current nor past presidential administrations appear to make any effort to affect the public interpretation of most topics within parks. And in general, even the NPS’s own administration in Washington, DC, its several regional headquarters, and its interpretive center in Harpers' Ferry seem to have quite limited impact on what or how topics are interpreted at sites. Park site officials usually agree that their interpretations are based on the mission of the NPS, the Congressional enabling legislation of their particular site, the work of local staff in consultation with external professional experts and local community members, and only to a much lesser degree, initiatives that are handed down from Washington. And those initiatives are often developed in response to the concerns of local site interpretation staff.

I’m personally aware of limitations on ones’ ability to simply present what seems factual and relevant when educating the public within a national park.  For several years I have maintained an interactive message board exhibit at the joint NPS/non-profit Crissy Field Center where I work in the GGNRA. It is my responsibility to periodically post an article of environmental interest in a highly visible area where visitors are asked to respond on written cards. Because I listen to scientists who say that the world’s resources are being rapidly reduced to a level which will not sustain either humans or other living beings, I often present not only articles immediately relevant to our own park's survival but  also those that highlight the national and global scale at which such local problems as ours aggregate, and at which they need to be addressed. Sometimes I post articles from major media that reference the roles of the entities who have effects at that scale – governments and corporations – and which often examine specific policy choices and actions. Once or twice a year one of the articles has to be removed from the exhibit during a visit by a national official or corporate grantor in order to avoid offending an important friend or sidetracking the development of important conversations during the visit. I've also found that if the topics I post too directly criticize the actions of an elected administration, the reactions from the public sometimes spin out into a referendum on an elected official rather than a discussion of the critical environmental policy which the article is intended to address.

Similarly, NPS interpreters sometimes tip-toe around controversial topics to avoid overwhelming, with political debate, any opportunities to educate.

Crissy Field Center is a new experiment within the parks - a direct collaboration between the NPS and a cooperating association, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Our on-site staff consists of both Conservancy employees (of whom I am one) and uniformed NPS interpretive rangers. The message board and some of our programs - especially those developed by youth from underserved communities -  test the envelope of what most NPS sites would consider appropriate for visitor messages.[21] In my experience, the Center is generally able to post newspaper articles that fairly consider the impacts of specific governmental policies, or even criticize them outright while providing counterpoint in support. Our interactive exhibit may be a fairly unique and new context within the NPS to interpret the major affecters of global environmental outcomes amongst which certainly are the United States, specific presidential administrations, and corporations.

Nationalism versus self criticism

The US, as the world's one remaining economic and military superpower, bears great responsibility for the reduction of global sustainability caused by its huge support of industrialism and consumerism. It is impossible to fully interpret global sustainability without in some way referencing impacts of the US, its multinational corporations, its citizens, and its international trade and domestic policies. When I asked several interviewees if NPS interpreters are free to criticize US actions, all responded that they are largely restricted from doing so. Many respondents defended a non-critical approach in general on the theory that education works best when it does not point a finger of blame, but instead provides facts and allows the public to form its own conclusions. However, it is also the case that the NPS is so much in the public eye that it must not only avoid placing blame, but sometimes avoid presenting facts simply because they might incur controversial reactions, even if they would provide a more comprehensive and thought-provoking interpretation.

Major wars, and nuclear war especially, represent perhaps the greatest of all threats to global sustainability. Warfare exacerbates those destructive tendencies of industrial nations which prevail even under the pressure of simple economic competition: short-term goal setting, purely pragmatic understanding of living things and even people as "resources," and in general, re-active decision making based on fear rather than on a broad, inclusive, and sustaining pro-active vision. A senior NPS official at a memorial site suggested to me that "'peace' is ultimately a critical element of any conservation effort and issues involving the sustainability of global resources. Even a victor in a war may fail to implement conservation as they prepare for and hold onto what was won." (attribution withheld)  Scenarios of global nuclear war, even when devised by the most pragmatic thinkers, appear so beyond the realm of our experience that they may seem as fiction. But among those envisioned are a "nuclear winter" in which so much of the world's forested areas burn that the constant smoke erases summer for a season, causing global extinctions on a massive scale and destroying agriculture in a world whose peoples are too decimated to address the new problems. The NPS's historic military sites should provide an opportunity to interpret the relationship of warfare to global sustainability along with the critical role that the United States plays in the global conflict and geopolitics that impact it.

The Congressional enabling legislation for Superintendent Herberger's Minuteman NHP asks him to interpret America's use of nuclear defenses to preserve peace in the context of the Cold War, yet he points out that "global sustainability is not yet on our radar screen." The Nike Missile Site in the GGNRA has been wonderfully restored over the years by the painstaking work of volunteers, many of whom originally manned the defensive installation near San Francisco when it operated during the Cold War. The historic technology of the installation is fascinating to visitors who learn of nuclear tipped intercept missiles that were to be guided by mechanical computers engaging far less computational power than today's average wrist watch. Because those volunteers interpret mostly this gear, to some people it seems like an opportunity foregone to engage the park public with the meanings of war and nuclear conflict and proliferation, including their devastating potential impacts on the global sustainability of cultures, their resources, and other living things.

Why are seemingly ideal opportunities to critically interpret US nuclear arsenals and the importance of maintaining peaceful international relations generally foregone at the loss of many excellent opportunities to understand major potential impacts on local and global sustainability? Part of the reason is nationalism and the way it has been expressed by Americans through their parks.

Parks, war memorials, battlefields, peace parks, monuments, historical sites, recreation areas, scenic rivers, and trail systems are established from time to time by the United States Congress (or by the President in the case of monuments) and placed under the management of the NPS as repositories for Americans’ collective identity: America as internationally unique scenic splendor, as the home of indigenous peoples past and current, as the remembrance of sons and daughters who died, as collections of unique living things, as places to play under the protection of the national flag. This can be read explicitly in the 68-year-old mission statement of the NPS, in the enabling legislation of each site, and in independent histories written about the discussions which surrounded the establishment of NPS sites. (Runte, Dilsaver)

Although Americans visit national parks in large part to learn about their nation’s history and living systems, they also desire – and sometimes demand – to be inspired about its contributions to the world. Public interest groups such as veterans’ organizations and historical societies organize themselves as politically effective watchdogs over park interpretations. They encourage parks and their partners to portray a nation - including its military in which they have served and the corporations for which they work – as having positive impacts on the world. Can the NPS, this keeper of the American consciousness, also interpret the misdeeds of the nation, its military, and its corporations, or even factually represent at all American deeds whose discussion might lead to controversy? I see three conditions under which nationalistic sensibilities act to constrain the interpretation of global impacts: a lack of historical distancing, distrust or dismissal of “foreign” nations, and perceptions of geographic isolation.

Events that reflect negatively on the American character can be and are interpreted in appropriate detail at parks if they are historically distant, while events that occurred within the living memory of a significant constituency tend to be whitewashed. The contrast between the interpretability of historically remote versus more recent events is nowhere more apparent, and perhaps nowhere more consequential in determining public awareness of potential sustainability impacts, than in the interpretation of warfare.  Nineteenth century massacres of Indian peoples live in a past sufficiently remote (at least from a non-Indian perspective) that they can be reported in detail, including a precise count of bodies and ethnicities and the names of official and uniformed American perpetrators, on a number of NPS websites without apparently drowning officials in angry deluges of emails and phone calls.[22] But the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred during the living memories of US veterans. One can find NPS sites that do enumerate the people killed by US atomic bombs in Japan, but also ones using sanitized references such as "The crew of the Enola Gay [which dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima] proved that an atomic bomb could be used under combat conditions" on a page (Wendover) which omits any mention that people were killed by it. Looking again at the distant past, an NPS site that interprets the European and American slave trade states that “Overall, at least twelve million Africans  . . .were kidnapped, sold into slavery in Africa and shipped to the Americas from 1450 to 1850 . . . Perhaps one-third of all kidnapped Africans perished before being forced onboard a slave vessel, and perhaps another third died on the voyage across the Atlantic.” If this page were as sanitized as the Hiroshima interpretation it might simply state that Africans were given passage to America and began working here. Most people would feel that the salient aspects of the Middle Passage were being ignored – woefully – and one could say the same of the Enola Gay web page.

Neither the Indian nor the Hiroshima nor the slavery interpretations trespass beyond the facts to pass moral judgment on the perpetrators, but the interpretations of Indian massacres and slavery provide more complete historical statements – allowed to be told more completely perhaps, as interpretive staff have suggested to me, because a) they occurred in the distant past and b) the extent of the misdeeds are widely acknowledged by now. In 2004 there are no significant remaining defenders of Indian suppression or slavery as an institution around to deny or bemoan interpretive details, but there are many who defend the atomic bombings - which occurred during the living memory of many Americans - as beneficial acts which saved the lives of both Americans and Japanese.

It may be argued that African Americans and American Indians form active NPS constituencies whose influence may have been more decisive in assuring rounded historical interpretations than the mere fact of historical distancing. However, despite a significant constituency within the United States that strongly desires to daylight a more complete story of the atomic bombings, it has had little effect in producing more complete interpretations. In the controversy surrounding the installation of the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum, the defenders of interpreting the effects of its bombs simply lost out to those who objected. After working with historians and veterans groups for years to develop a historically accurate interpretation of the effects of airplanes on warfare, Museum Director Martin Harwitt resigned when veterans’ groups lined up 81 Congress people to force him out after he attempted to construct an informative exhibit on the impact of the Enola Gay’s successful mission to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities. (Former Smithsonian) Veteran’s of WWII, large numbers of whom are still among the living, censor historical interpretations in ways that long dead US veterans of the Civil War or of Indian wars do not.

According to Minuteman National Historic Park's web site which interprets the Cold War, "The devastation caused on 6 August 1945 at Hiroshima and 9 August 1945 at Nagasaki led the world to fear an atomic war." (Minuteman) Since the fear engendered by the bombings in Japan is thus seen as critical to interpreting the Cold War, some mention of the thousands of deaths in Japanese cities and that they were not simply "caused" but were - like Indian massacres and African slavery of long ago - engineered by historically specific decisions and actors, would have provided additional depth and context, and told us why those events led Americans to fear a global nuclear war. It would also have stirred uncomfortable controversy among those who, still living, participated in those bombings and in the wider context of WWII itself.

Most discussions of Hiroshima on NPS websites mention it almost in passing from the perspective of living US veterans as a mission that is usually characterized, without discussion, as having directly resulted in the end of hostilities between the US and Japan, an assumption that is disputed by historians[23] but appreciated by Americans. Often no mention is made of casualties in the city, despite their enormity and their importance in determining critical modes of confrontation and decisions made in the Cold War decades following, and contrary to NPS official guidelines for interpreting the historical event.[24]

The NPS web makes available a contrasting article from the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas. It concerns itself with a structure dubbed the "Japanese Village" built in the Nevada nuclear testing grounds to enable an international study of radiation effects. The article does not avoid a body count: "The death toll has been estimated at more than 200,000 between the two cities. Additional deaths within five years added another 130,000, with many more victims suffering long-term radiation effects." It goes so far as to point out that "The tragic loss of life and long-term health effects suffered by the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are perhaps the main reason that an all-out nuclear exchange never occurred during the Cold War." This provides a clear, emotionally and intellectually tangible link between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki "missions" on the one hand and the reluctance of governments to initiate nuclear exchanges during the Cold War on the other - a link that is much less explicit in the Minuteman NHP’s attempt to interpret the Cold War.

GGNRA regional education chief Mia Monroe has more than considered how meaningful interpretations might engage a wider public at the Nike anti-nuclear missile site. Already she trains NPS interpretive interns to guide visitors beyond discussions of payloads and trajectories and to help them reflect on what it really would have meant to “save” the US from a Soviet attack with a nuclear intercept missile so designed that it would most likely have also destroyed San Francisco in the attempt.

A second effect preventing full interpretation of national impacts on sustainability is the American distrust or dismissal of “foreign” nations. Moose Mutlow believes that American children come to his environmental education classes in Yosemite with inordinate fears toward people who hold viewpoints different from those of their own families and communities. Compared to young people from other countries whom he has taught, “They've generally been conditioned to be frightened,” he says.[25] Field staff from another park report that “a few local residents have opposed our inclusion of global references, because they believe that the United Nations is involved in a conspiracy to take over private land under the guise of International Biosphere Parks.” (attribution withheld)

The United States is one of the few industrialized nations which has generally refused to become signatory to international accords such as those on climate change, use of land mines, and enforcement of human rights actions against military personnel in world courts. The government has often withheld membership dues to the United Nations, and Congressional leaders express their disgust whenever that body criticizes a United States action. The current Presidential administration (Bush 2001-2004) has greatly restricted participation in international conservation efforts notably by the NPS. Distrust of the intentions of the world beyond the United States seems strong enough to encourage resistance to actions that suggest alliance or cooperation with other nations, especially if they do not provide a clear and immediate benefit to the United States and enhance or at least support its presumed status of preeminence.

Interestingly, this distrust has had little effect on the development of truly powerful international accords as represented by the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and NAFTA, in large part because the United States has been successful in convincing citizens that these bodies protect its interests over those of other nations. However, in some cases major investments by foreign governments in US interests may be concealed or downplayed by United States corporations with which they cooperate through advertising and via ownership of major media outlets, to prevent domestic concern. So in effect, US citizens are told that humanitarian and environmental accords with other nations will limit their freedom, while economic accords will promote them. This mindset increases the difficulty of interpreting the negative global environmental impacts of corporations and the difficulty of suggesting the possible benefits of international cooperation in the solution of environmental problems.

Geographic isolation of their nation, real or perceived, is a third effect that may make Americans less amenable to considering their environments in a global context. Europeans established an American identity as they gradually broke from their European sponsors in the 17th and 18th centuries. Eventually a new nation spread to occupy an Atlantic to Pacific section of the North American continent embracing  3,618,770 square miles (Water Science), several major mountain ranges, and biomes ranging from desert to tundra, grasslands to rainforests (North American). The very size of the United States and its ocean boundaries have often allowed a false sense of isolation which has been breached only by extreme events like the attacks on Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center, by the responses of its economic system to world conditions, and, occasionally, by concerns over global environmental impacts like the atmospheric dispersion of debris from above-ground atomic testing and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, and dust storms crossing from the overgrazed steppes of Asia to America’s west coast. While conservationists in smaller European nations easily understand that biological resources cross borders, Americans have tended to believe that their conservation issues could be contained within the political boundaries of their continent-sized nation, especially in the historical period before large-scale industrial emissions made cross-border affects evident to more American environmentalists.

National parks located at national boundaries where visitors are aware of their connections to other nations tend more to interpret conservation from an international perspective. Boundary parks whose interpretations of global sustainability I discussed in Chapter 2 include Bent's Old Fort HNS near the border with Mexico; Biscayne NP, Everglade NP and Dry Tortugas NP in South Florida; Gulf Islands NS in South Florida and coastal Mississippi; Hawai`i Volcanoes NP in the middle of the Pacific; Ross Lake NRA and Yellowstone NP near the Canadian border.

While well-conceived interpretations can and do move visitors to consider the responsibilities they bear as members of a nation for impacts and threats to global sustainability, current park constituencies concerned with defending their past actions, along with a prevailing sense of political and geographical isolation, discourage interpreters from providing visitors with well-rounded and essential interpretations on the impacts of America, its military, and its corporations on global sustainability.

The “advocacy line”

“Interpreters are responsible for presenting factual information to visitors based on current scientific research and are not allowed to present their own opinions or the opinions of other groups.” (Hellmich)

A visitor to a national park does not expect to be harangued or proselytized, especially by rangers. She expects to receive interesting stories and information about the park and its resources, but not to be told how to vote or what size car to drive, even if such choices might affect global warming.

According to Cherry Payne of Everglades NP, “as a federal public service agency, we are not advocates for any one position . . . . our job is to talk about issues and concerns that challenge parks, and to present the facts - but, visitors make their own choices as to whether or not they want to engage in advocacy activities” (Payne). But in pursuit of the mission in Rocky Mountain NP, “Sometimes action is suggested (more efficient cars, fuel reduction in our forests, etc), but again not in a confrontational manner. Personal opinion of the interpreter is never appropriate.” (Frederick)

Still, NPS staff must somehow express their basic mission to preserve and protect their historical and natural resources, and their extended mission to welcome both old and new communities to parks. In many ways they are active advocates, emphasizing as part of their programs and waysides the fragility and needs of the plants, animals, ecosystems, skies, rivers, historical buildings, battlefields, and even pollution-affected neighborhoods within and sometimes beyond the boundaries of their parks. If a ranger were asked whether he thought it better to destroy the park’s resources or to preserve them, he would seldom tell a visitor that both choices are valid – unless a bill were pending in Congress to destroy park resources, in which case he would be required to refrain from taking a position. I believe it is possible that if a large corporation used its resources successfully to convince the public that destroying park resources was their civic and moral duty (to create industrial parks for jobs, create housing, etc.), then protecting and preserving the park resources would be withdrawn behind the “advocacy line” and, like the deaths of children from the atomic bombings of Japan, become too controversial to interpret.

One way that sustainability can be interpreted in parks without crossing the advocacy line has been suggested by the GGNRA’s Mia Monroe. The voice of John Muir is historically and environmentally central to her Muir Woods NP interpretive program. By interpreting his life of advocacy and inscribing his quotes on waysides, environmental advocacy is represented to visitors without requiring rangers themselves to assume the position of advocates.

NPS officials pointed out to me that the NPS chooses which organizations may hold leases to buildings on its sites. It can and does at times choose leaseholders who advocate global sustainability. As I point out elsewhere, however, NPS staff may have an exaggerated view of how unrestricted these non-profit organizations are in interpreting global sustainability, since many rely to a large extent on funding from large corporations that cultivate a public conditioned to overlook their disregard for the sustainability of the earth’s resources and human communities.

Many of my survey respondents expressed the belief that drawing the line against advocacy tightly enough to remove conclusions of any kind from interpretations enables visitors to learn in the best way possible - by drawing their own conclusions. But few respondents offered actual incidents of visitors doing so.  Sometimes educators referred to an “aha” moment: a self-realized epiphany, an experience of learning that is exceptional and impactful because it appears to oneself from oneself, rather than being imposed from outside. When I visited San Mateo County’s wonderfully conceived Coyote Point Museum, I watched a small family traversing ramps which switch-backed in such a way that they were led from lively displays describing individual California ecosystems, to panels explaining how humans impact them. The father held his little girl’s hand as he read to his wife from one panel, “Did you know it says here that the United States with less than 6 percent of the world’s population uses nearly 30% of the world’s resources and produces about one-half of the world’s pollution?” It sounded like an “aha” moment to me, derived I believe from his sense of the credibility of the Museum’s presentations, an external source of authority. Even though the dots had been connected for him, I believe he still experienced it as a personal revelation.

Controversy and interpretation

Controversy over issues can threaten to overwhelm the email boxes and telephones of already pressed NPS interpretive and management staff. They can and do receive hate messages when they control wildlife to the disapproval of animal rights’ advocates or fail to interpret military memorials to the liking of veterans. Staff approach controversial topics in many ways, but always with some caution and with a “soft” approach emphasizing facts already widely accepted by the general public and de-emphasizing or even proscribing "personal opinion" – which may sometimes refer to accurate information which happens to be disputed by some interest, like the scientific consensus that much of global warming is caused by humans. As a result, their interpretations are subject to manipulation by political organizations that succeed in creating controversies over issues in the public mind.

A very senior officer of a major NPS partner privately puts it this way: "As with many federal agencies, the NPS is very cautious about an arena that could be considered politically loaded in any way. It will go at [interpreting the impacts of US policies and corporations] obliquely. At the Grand Canyon, you can hear about air quality problems caused by power plants. I guess that's why there are conservation associations that take on the advocacy and activist role." However, even an "independent" partner such as the Yosemite Institute has significant dependence on Congressional and corporate funding. Four years ago according to education director Moose Mutlow, Yosemite National Institutes received a $1.8 million Federal appropriation. Critical support was provided by "Slate Gordon, a conservative right wing rural power based Senator from Washington." Mutlow is certain that such grants do not affect the Institute’s programming content - and in fact he points to Gordon's support as a positive indication that the Institute reaches diverse constituencies - but from the outside, it is hard to imagine that such grants and the political affiliations of their grantors have no constraining effect. The effects of money on interpretations are further addressed in Chapter 4.

Sites readily interpret regional and global effects of water pollution and invasive species even when they cannot be directly observed, and even though their real impacts for the most part cannot be quantified. There are no significant economic or political vested interests who are harmed by acknowledging these impacts, therefore there is no argument – no controversy is generated over these impacts - and they are widely interpreted in parks. On the other hand, although the general process of global warming has for years been understood by the national and international scientific communities as a certainty, “free market” advocates aided by corporate-sponsored “think tanks” and political champions of industry have challenged it because they believe action to remediate it would threaten the short-term economic priorities that maintain corporate competitiveness. They have transformed the scientific fact of global warming into a controversy, and this has made it more difficult for parks to interpret.

The scientific community may bear some responsibility for allowing controversy over global sustainability. It has tended to define “facts” as those observations which can be repeatably demonstrated under controlled laboratory conditions. On large scales such as the planetary ecosystem, the most certain of occurrences can never be explained in the same precise way, so the scientific explanations of events on a global scale may be perceived by the public as hesitant. It is up to scientists to educate the public - to use terminology that conveys the same level of factuality to large-scale observations made outside of laboratories as to those made under controlled conditions – to reduce the burden of controversy on interpreters and educators.

“Interpret the resource”

Park visitors expect to learn about what they see within the park, so interpretations are designed to connect them to the objects and processes before them. It makes little sense to talk about Nike missiles to visitors standing beneath a giant Sequoia in Yosemite’s Mariposa Glade. Rangers and park partners repeatedly emphasized to me that they must “interpret the resource.”

When GGNRA educator Roxy Farwell[26] works with communities to develop programs about the geological formations at the Marin Headlands and not about something else it is because "the resources are here. They are NP resources and have been designated as nationally significant. You don't change the resources and make them invisible and ignore some to meet educational standards [of local schools]. They are here. We can't change the park story. We can't change the story of the resource, that's self-evident, that's there."

But even local resources have extension beyond the physical and temporal borders of the park. In parks such as Yosemite and the GGNRA’s Muir Woods, many wayside signs extend the visitor’s frame of reference from the immediate present to one spanning thousands of years. A visitor can touch a tree that has stood there, she is told, long before the founding of the United States. The spectacular granite cliffs of Yosemite, visitors learn, were created by glaciers long before even the first people came to the valley. These unusual and tangible experiences of trans-political timescales may expand visitors perspectives beyond the usual boundaries by which they experience natural systems, even though they are based on the local resource.

Similarly, most parks that preserve natural resources provide geological and biome-based interpretations that contextualize local resources trans-nationally, though seldom explicitly. That is, they speak of natural processes that operate universally. However, it appears quite rare for waysides to suggest that human actions produce effects on these scales that influence global sustainability, or even specifically to mention that the ecosystem processes they interpret – for example plant succession - occur throughout the world just as they do in the local park.

Enabling legislation

National parks are created not by the NPS, but by Congressional legislation (except for monuments, which are created by Presidential decree). According to almost every one of my respondents, a park's enabling legislation is second only to the mission of the NPS itself in shaping interpretations within the park. While rangers say that they interpret resources which are "inherent" or "found within" the park, it is the enabling legislation that indicates which are the salient ones. When Roxy Farwell speaks about "the resource" in the GGNRA it is true that it may be "self-evident", but she also indicates that Congress has made some selections when they "designated [certain resources] as nationally significant" in drafting the park's enabling legislation, which therefore effectively directs visitors to those aspects of the park not only through influencing its choice of interpretations, but through developing physical access – roads, turnouts, and so on.

Yet, for a park's interpretations to remain relevant enough to elicit the intellectual and emotional responses by which all interpretive staff seek to connect people to parks, even its enabling legislation needs to be brought up to date occasionally. Parks are not solely about scenery and its preservation today as they were when Yosemite was set aside from private ownership in 1876, or even later in 1916 when a Congressional Organic Act gave birth to the National Park Service. A famously quoted portion of the Act enjoins the agency that its "purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."[27] It also stipulates that the Director of the NPS shall receive a salary of $4,500. When the Act was written, no-one had heard of ecosystems or of $500,000 condominiums. Parks do some translating of the Act today, asking what conservation means to the public today, and what a $4,500 salary is in today's dollars. Few of the parks’ natural resource staff today are asked to prioritize the preservation of scenery over that of the ecosystems – if only local ones – in which functioning communities of plants and animals are preserved. Moreover, in the words of the current director of the NPS, “the NPS functions in a complex global environment unforeseen by the framers of the 1916 NPS Organic Act.” (Director’s Order #13a)

During my July 2004 visit to Yosemite, the vistas in the valley were greatly reduced by the smoke from natural fires that park officials allowed to burn, not only to keep the park safe from future catastrophic fires that would result if fuel were allowed to accumulate, but also to preserve plant communities that required the fires in order to propagate. The visitor's enjoyment of scenery - apparently the top priority of the 1916 Act and arguably so in the establishment of earlier parks (Ridenour) - was certainly being sacrificed in favor of long term ecological benefits. Visitor access today is commonly restricted in many national parks to protect natural resources, if not to the extent that conservationists would prefer. For example, on Alcatraz Island in the GGNRA visitors are prohibited from a large area of the island from February to October during bird mating season. In some parks light and loud sounds are seasonally reduced to avoid harassing mating pairs.

In designing interpretations for Yosemite, Mary Kline must deal with the park's outdated enabling legislation. Written in the 1890's, it identifies recreation and scenic enjoyment as Yosemite's chief reasons for existing.[28] According to Kline, the priorities of today's Yosemite differ from those stated in its enabling legislation. "This park has unique Sierra Nevada ecosystem components which are elevated somewhat [in our park's mission of protecting and preserving resources] because so few of them are left - such as the riparian water way along the Merced, and higher alpine lakes. There just aren't that many that are protected anymore." Yet, the park's enabling legislation says nothing about ecosystems. Speaking for the NPS generally she says that "We recognized that whenever a park is charged with protecting scenery it's a factor of the age in which the park was set aside, and that it should include all the things that that park would be set aside for now. So we take a current ecological and historical and cultural look at it and say, 'These are the things that make it significant in addition to the scenery.' And these things contribute to the scenery." De facto revision of enabling legislation is not unique to Yosemite, since Kline has observed a similar process in others of the 9 national parks she has worked in.

Parks are still largely concerned with connecting visitors - millions, in the case of Yosemite - to resources that need to be protected, often ironically in the form of tourism that impacts those very resources. But the age when parks where strictly about scenery has long been supplanted by one focusing on ecosystems that is highly interpreted throughout Yosemite, even in its 1960’s-vintage Visitor Center exhibits[29]. Mary Kline's planned revitalization of these exhibits so that they interpret the effects of global warming on the park's waterfalls and Mia Monroe's cautionary wayside in the GGNRA's popular Muir Woods site tying survival of giant trees to human-caused global climate change hopefully herald a new phase of interpretation in which global factors will be understood to be as critical to protecting and preserving natural and cultural resources as regional and local ones.

Enabling legislation for Jefferson National Expansion Memorial requires it to interpret America’s westward movement[30]. Elisa Kunz, the park's director of education, interprets the environmental impacts that accompanied it. "As a park, our goal was to have people engage in a different look at the westward expansion movement.  This park is basically historical. By infusing a connection with the natural environment, it can bring a more complete view of the 19th century continental exploration." And certainly, major changes in ecosystems are historical artifacts – so much so that in recent decades environmental history has distinguished itself as a major academic field. The wall-size eco-banners Kunz has developed interpret the dramatic impacts of western expansion on “Air,” “Water,” “Land,” and “People,” and emphasize the increasing environmental impacts as the United States has continued its expansion - now in terms of economic and political power - beyond the boundaries of the continent and across the world. “The world loses between 3 and 50 species a day,” reads the text of one; “The United States has 5% of the Earth’s population and consumes nearly 30% of the world’s economic output,” reads another.

Chuck Sayon of American Memorial Park in the Northern Marian Islands explains a strong motivational force for extending interpretations at least to the margins of the park’s enabling legislation. “Being a national park, we take every opportunity (internally) to vie for funding in other disciplines outside the main purpose of the park. These pots of funds are competed for.” So he has “stretched” his mandate to interpret WW2 with interpretations of ecosystems and habitat preservation in the park’s wetlands.

In accordance with it new General Management plan, Klondike Gold Rush NHP will extend its interpretation from the themes of its original enabling legislation – historic structures and trails of the Gold Rush – to interpreting the great biodiversity of the area. (Snell-Dobert).

Enabling legislation that is both recent and designed to encourage subjective patriotic outlooks may create a formidable barrier to complete interpretations – of global sustainability or any other issue. The 1999 enabling legislature of Minuteman Missile NHS in part requires it “to interpret the historical role on the Minuteman II missile defense system as a key component of America's strategic commitment to preserve world peace.” The park itself is a recently converted Air Force base. It is hard to imagine that the global human and ecosystem implications of nuclear weapons and materials will be interpreted there any time soon, since they require a multidimensional examination of the rationale for the development, continued deployment, and effects of prior use of nuclear weapons by the United States – whose motivations are actually complex and extend beyond a simple desire for peace.

Obsolescence

In my Introduction, I dramatically decried the lack of any wayside interpretations on global warming at Yosemite's Glacier Point. Yet in reality Yosemite interpreters, like their education chief Kathy Dimont, do not entirely dismiss global warming. Yosemite, like other parks, is engaged in the process of finding ways to provide relevant interpretations of global sustainability.

When I attended a ranger-led tour of Yosemite's Hetch-Hetchy reservoir, a striking evening hike under a rising moon took us across a precipitous dam, through a rock-carved tunnel, and part way around the source of San Francisco's drinking water. The reservoir is an important venue for interpreting the history of the park and of the nation's conservation movement, since it was here that John Muir lead the nation's conservationists in a great battle over preserving a beautiful mountain valley, only to have it removed from Yosemite National Park and drowned to create the reservoir. Ranger Adrianna Hirtler took her audience beyond the historical context to the natural, and provided visitors with a well-informed discussion of the observed and expected effects of global warming on reducing the snow-fed flows into the Tuolumne, the reservoir, and down to the taps of San Franciscans.

One of the several great advantages of human interpreters over exhibits is that they can adapt very quickly to new information (some other advantages are discussed in Chapter 5). The lead time for creating new fixed exhibits is commonly five years or more[31] and since they are durably built, the information in an exhibit even at mid-life can be ten to twenty years old.

Twenty years ago, the science on global climate change was considerably less established and prominent than it is today. It is just too new to have been incorporated into existing waysides, or into the lobby exhibits at the Yosemite Visitors’ Center that Mary Kline is preparing to update.

Public disinterest

Visitors come to parks for a variety of reasons, but interpreters must accomplish their work knowing that enjoyment of recreation, and fascination with historical events and scenic wonders, are far more common impulses than a desire to be told how one’s choices impact the environment.

The island and former prison of Alcatraz in the GGNRA is a potentially rich site for interpreting the migratory and mating behaviors of the many bird species that nest there. In its better funded days the NPS paid a full-time natural resource ranger to manage a popular volunteer bird monitoring program there that produced important scientific data. But, few of the island’s 1.5 million annual visitors join rangers for the nature walks they offer; by far the majority want to view relics of the prisoners – Al Capone, the Bird Man of Alcatraz, the escapers – made famous by Hollywood movies. There is no longer a natural resource ranger stationed on the island.

Many interpreters find that visitors are not particularly interested in the conservation topics that they would like to present. So interpreters frequently use a “by-the-way” technique. Larry Frederick finds that most hard-hitting resource issue topics “have limited appeal to general park audiences” at his Rocky Mountain NP. “So rather than [providing] a wildland fire walk we talk about wildland fire on a wildflower walk, which will be well attended.” In presentations featuring popular topics, they introduce global sustainability themes like ozone increases, global retreat, exotic plant control, wolf reintroduction, and forest health, “by-the-way.” Like interpreters in most parks, they gauge the receptiveness of the group and/or individual they are addressing to determine and present the appropriate material so that a program becomes in part a conversation with visitors. Frederick speaks for many of my respondents in stating that “It depends on the topic, the sensitivity, the potential controversy, the targeted audience, and many other factors on how topics might be addressed and/or interpreted.”

Belief that interpretations of global sustainability are already in place

Many educators and interpreters point out to me that they interpret sustainability via issues and in ways that could be applicable anywhere else, or everywhere else, in the world. In fact, many argue, it is best to just paint the dots and let visitors connect them – that is, let them extrapolate from the local to the global by themselves. Interpreters may tell visitors that the ecosystem before them is suffering from the impacts of local development (loss of water, incursions of people and pets, introduction of invasive species, toxic runoff, heat generation, loss of wildlife refuge for reproduction, etc) and then allow them to draw for themselves the conclusion that ecosystems around the world must be similarly under threat from development.

However, it may not be the case that park visitors have sufficient background to extrapolate correct conclusions from such throttled-back interpretations. In fact, a magnificent park may inadvertently project a satisfying aura of permanence and elicit a comforting feeling that nature is doing quite well after all, everywhere apparently. Engaging communities in the preservation of a locally endangered species may instill a conviction that volunteer work can solve sustainability problems, belying the grim reality that a vastly greater number of species are being driven to “the death of birth” each day by forces beyond anyone’s control with no solution currently imaginable. Jim MacDonald, education specialist for Muir Woods in the GGNRA with its magnificent stands of millennia-old trees, points out that visitors are often very surprised to learn that similar ancient trees are currently being cut down by loggers not just all over the world, but within an easy drive’s distance of Muir Woods itself. Few visitors, he has discovered, in fact know anything whatsoever about ecosystems.

It can be argued that letting visitors “connect the dots” to derive their own world views may be just as valuable as explicitly global interpretations in moving a person toward a conviction of the need to attend to global sustainability. However, if staff do not see a visitor making these connections from the local interpretations they provide to the global ones they also consider important, they have no way to know whether he ever arrives at those connections.

Conclusion

On occasion there may be no more than a single beleaguered ranger in the GGNRA's Muir Woods to greet a day's share of the year's 4 million visitors. She will voice the park's interpretive themes of world peace and the ecological sustainability of ancient and threatened forests to an unknown cross-section of national and international visitors, and is expected to keep her words within the anticipated political and philosophical comfort level of all 4 million. Parks require across-the-board support from a nation of citizens with diverse and media-informed perspectives, and must offer a low common denominator of potential controversy even when it requires avoiding plain statements of  facts that have not only been well established within the historical and scientific communities but are also crucial to a deep appreciation of interpretive subject matter. Powerful interest groups erode the sharp edges of interpretations, sometimes leaving them dull and uninformative. Visitors currently accept or fail entirely to comprehend the global sustainability impacts that are integral to their own daily political and economic landscapes and are driven by their choices – but to get through the day or the year park staff often need to tell visitors what they want to hear, rather than what they need to know about global sustainability if they are to help sustain park and world resources in the long term.

Chapter 4:
Corporations, Money, and the NPS

No interpretation of global sustainability can be comprehensive without accounting for the role of corporations and nations, especially the United States, in transforming, redistributing, and reducing the future availability of critical resources. Yet my research indicates that these very institutions reduce the ability of NPS and partner staff to provide relevant and necessary interpretations in ways that are subtle, pervasive, and unmanaged. One may judge the overall impacts of corporations and the US to be good, bad, or indifferent, and chose to advocate a position towards them one way or another. But that their impacts have major transformative effects on global sustainability is seldom questioned; to acknowledge this is neither in itself controversial nor does it represent an advocacy position. Corporations are here to stay, and the NPS needs to address them in new ways if it is to continue to provide real interpretations of global sustainability.

Arrowheads, flat-hats and corporate logos

Around 3 to 4% of all the liquid which enters the bodies of humans on this planet comes to them via the Coca-Cola Company.[32] On a planet where fresh water is increasingly scarce[33], where does Coke get all the water that they flavor, bottle, and ship?

According to their website, "The Coca-Cola Company is part of the fabric of life in each of the communities [in the 200 countries] we serve throughout the world. It operates as a local business partner, providing quality in the marketplace, enhancing the workplace, preserving the environment and strengthening the community." (2003 Summary Annual Report (2))

But on August 19, 2004, D.S. Mathur, Coca-Cola India's V-P for technical operations in New Delhi, resigned amid an ongoing controversy at their bottling plant in Plachimada, in Palakkad, India (Coke's tech V-P quits). India officials in that region shut down a Coke plant - even at the cost of many lost jobs - after sit-ins by local farmers protested that the plant was critically lowering their water table and that the waste sludge from Coke's bottle cleaning operation was contaminating what remained. The controversy is international and charged with claims and counter-claims by environmental groups, business organizations, and politicians.

In Yosemite NP's village of Wawona, the most recent five years of education chief Kathy Dimont's 34 years in the NPS have been spent not only building the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, but also finding ways to bring local communities together with her park. Several sources confided to me that while Congressional budgeting for the NPs has remained fairly level, the cost of living for employees and non-salary expenses have greatly increased throughout the NPS, resulting in staff and program reductions in many parks. The staff who used to help Dimont manage the 300 busloads of school children she brings into Yosemite each year has been gradually cut from four down to zero. Lacking local staff, she decided instead to make creative use of a $100,000 private grant and "bought two big Dodge vans, got them painted with wild animals [and the NPS logo], and filled them full of environmental education materials." (Dimont) She gave them to the Discovery Center in nearby Fresno, who drives them to area schools every evening to teach kids about the environment.

The $100,000 for Dimont’s vans came from the Coca-Cola Company.

In Yosemite, this summer the NPS budgeted the whole park for only 1 seasonal ranger to deal with the year's biggest influx of the park's 4 million annual visitors. (Dimont, Kline). At Everglades NP, "In the last couple of years, our capacity to present personal interpretive services has diminished from about 120/week in the winter season to 20-30/week.  This is due to reduced staffing levels." (Payne) The GGNRA has seen cuts in its maintenance staff (all of whom, in 2004, face the prospect of layoff through privatization); and sources tell me that a 20% reduction in NPS staffing for the GGNRA was announced in May of 2004. Staff from several parks tell me that the morale of their park is at its lowest point in years or decades due to these and similar reductions.

Because of her ability to reach young people from underserved communities - to educate them in becoming stewards of the parks and of their own urban streets, to put them on track to be the first ones in their families ever to attend a university – Dimont’s job during these last five years has been the most satisfying in her life. The money from Coke for the vans was received uncritically and thankfully, as corporate money usually seems to be by all NPS personnel and their partnering organizations.

I asked several of my interviewees if receiving grant money from corporations and non-profits had changed the content of programs, and the answer was almost universally "No." Dimont's response is typical: "The NPS won't accept a grant if you have to put the Coca-Cola logo next to the Park logo. But I would do it in a heartbeat for the kind of money they give us. I would wear a Coke tee-shirt with my flat hat. They are generous and really require nothing of me." For corporations, exposure in national parks clothes them in universally favorable associations - wildlife, trees, leisure, safety, campfires, family. Like most corporations who provide grants in Yosemite and the GGNRA, Coke’s sole requirement was for a modest amount of publicity - in Dimont's case an initial photo-op with kids and rangers at the van. Some nonprofit corporations may be more likely to require their grantees to perform a simple assessment of some kind to ascertain that learning has taken place. In the GGNRA, Toyota funded their National Park Labs in creating several environmental programs for local schools, without impacting content at all (Fonfa, Levitt).

However, private grant money may affect whether a program comes into existence in the first place. Yosemite is one of several national parks that benefit from a Federal "fee demonstration" program under which they receive most of the income from “recreation fees” (80% of the $20 per car park admissions, in the case of Yosemite) and are allowed to use it within the park. (Recreational Fee) Interpretive division chief Mary Kline has to compete with other NPS departments in Yosemite for use of this money, and if she can find matching funds, it increases the chances that her project will gain approval. "Within this park we have to apply for it [fee demonstration money] because there are so many of us who want to use it.  So how you succeed in getting the money might be either how well you can tie to partnerships, or tie to a national initiative in some way.  Where someone is going to pay the other half that boosts you up the list of recipients." This would seem to suggest a de facto screening process that may favor programs specifically of interest to grantors including corporations - as well as nonprofits and philanthropists, many of whom have strong financial or family ties to corporations as well.

Moose Mutlow, director of the nonprofit Yosemite Institute's staff of 38 environmental science educators in Yosemite NP, ponders the morality of accepting money from a corporation like Chevron (who gave a lot of money to the Yosemite Institute's GGNRA organization) when "a student living in Richmond [California, across the San Francisco Bay from the affluent GGNRA neighborhoods] . . . continually has refinery fires and lower quality air" as a result of Chevron's refineries in his neighborhood. Is Institute staff free to provide comprehensive environmental education, including on environmental justice issues of critical interest to the park’s new communities like the ones Chevron's Richmond refinery provokes, when a grantor might discover that a program they funded associated them not with deer and campfires, but with toxic releases in their customers’ neighborhoods? Or would the Institute be safer if it were to drop relevant environmental justice programs in hopes of courting the likes of Chevron? If the Institute wants support for the public schools which constitute 65% of the 13,500 students it educates at Yosemite each year, it has to accept almost whatever money it receives, though it tries not to accept money from some sources. "In a fifteen million dollar capsule campaign, if someone wants to get their name on a building, I think we'd probably take the money," Moose acknowledged to me hesitantly.

When you enter Yosemite NP and pay $20 for admission, a uniformed ranger presents you with three main publications. One is Yosemite Today, two newsprint broadsheets folded together telling you what to expect in the park during the current two week period. The second is a thin folded map which reads "Yosemite - Your Complete Guide to the Park" on the front, with the familiar NPS arrowhead logo on the back. But the most impressive of the three is a glossy 6" by 8.5" booklet, about 100 pages thick, also titled “Yosemite.” It bears the logo of a park ranger's flat-hat and identifies itself in small print as the "National Park Foundation Official Guide". Chief of non-personal interpretation services Mary Kline, who is probably the NPS employee most responsible for its production, calls it "the green book."

Inside the front cover of the green book is an eye-catching two-page ad for an SUV. On the following page is a smiling picture of a man in ranger uniform including badge and flat hat captioned "Michael J. Tollefson, Yosemite Superintendent", and right below it, a large version of the universally familiar NPS arrowhead logo. Tollefson's remarks fill the page and identify the green book as a guide to Yosemite resulting from the collaborative efforts of "the National Park Service, American Park Network and our park partners." (Yosemite - Your Complete Guide) He quotes John Muir's words and finishes with the wish that those words, and the guide, may "bring you nearer to the heart of Yosemite!" On the page facing Tollefson is a full-page ad with a young white boy gazing at a waterfall. It encourages the reader to visit "SeeAmerica.org" to find "detailed travel information, deals, and tips for all of the 388 National Parks in America." Both the NPS arrowhead logo and NPF ranger flat-hat logo complete Tollefson’s page.

Throughout the green book are ads - for fine art prints, the Dodge Durango SUV (two-page spread, with greenery as a background), a full page with Half Dome as a background for General Motors' OnStar medical communication device for "Cadillac, HUMMER [their capitals], Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, Pontiac, Saturn, Saab," AmericanParkNetwork.com (two ads), various camping gear, a full page for Toyota featuring a lone car winding through impossibly green meadows, a page for the Good Sam Club ("the one option every RV should have."), a half page for the Yosemite Fund, a full page for the Mercury Monterey  minivan, a full page for Chevrolet Equinox SUV, a two page tear-out response card for the Yosemite Fund, a page and a half for GoRVing.com, a two-page spread for the Chrysler Town and Country minivan, a page for Back to Nature cereal, a one-page ad for the Subaru Outback, and one page for Principal Financial Retirement Services.

Except for Tollefson's message, it is almost impossible to determine which of the informational articles inside the green book were written by the NPS, and which by the National Park Foundation or others. The dual attribution leading the article Oh Ranger! Live the Adventure  -"Neil Montanus, Kodak/NPS" – seems to imply that Montanus is an employee both of the NPS and Kodak and thus further supports Tollefson's representation of the green book as a collaboration. Perhaps it is a seamless one: in some places unattributed articles wrap their text around mini ads for camping equipment, which thereby appear to be endorsed by whatever combination of the NPS and its partners was inspired by the spirit of John Muir to write them.

In past years Mary Kline's staff wrote their own award-winning version of Yosemite Guide, but they can no longer come up with the $70,000 required to publish it. So they are collaborating with private partners who now foot the bill, and living within the limitations that these arrangements impose. Now working on it with the American Park Network (affiliated with the National Park Foundation), she and her staff are free to write whatever NPS messages they want for the green book, but the Network/Foundation decides on the formatting, and where to place articles inside the booklet.

The public hasn't objected to the close association between products and the Park Service, but some of Kline’s staff have. She is clear that advertisements also appear to project messages on behalf of the NPS, so she has objected to some ads, and blocked them from the booklet. One that she dumped featured a man in a sleeping bag next to his SUV, off-road, close to a mountain lion in another sleeping bag. It suggested so many behaviors that rangers work hard to discourage, that Kline killed it. When she rejects ads from major donors to the American Park Network, she often has to find replacement ads herself.

Interpretation Chief Cherry Payne and her staff at Everglades & Dry Tortugas National Parks are very aware of the regional and global issues that affect their ability to preserve and protect their ecologically hypersensitive parks' resources. But "as a federal public service agency, we are not advocates for any one position.  Therefore, on some issues, such as global warming, it would be inappropriate for us to tell people not to drive SUVs, for instance." To a Yosemite visitor, the green book's close association between Yosemite Superintendent Tollefson, the powerfully symbolic "flat-hat" logo on the green book's cover, and the evoked spirit of John Muir on the one hand, and multiple ads for SUVs and RVs on the other, might suggest that driving such vehicles is not only uncriticized, but endorsed or advocated, in much the same way that the ad that Kline rejected - showing a man sleeping off-road with his vehicle while treating a mountain lion as a pet -  would have appeared to endorse his behaviors.

I do not claim idly that the ranger's famous and distinctive flat hat iconified on the cover of the green book is a powerful symbol. The hat is so characteristic of the agency – its presence in parks, it history, moral essence, and authority -  that rangers frequently refer to other rangers as "flat-hats." When I asked Yosemite Institute education director Moose Mutlow what he felt about privatization of education in the parks, he responded that parks must always have uniformed rangers because "When a ranger walks in front of a student and has an interaction, it's a very different perception and value." Kathy Dimont speaks of studies showing that "me in my uniform giving [kids] information is many times more effective than written information. If I stand in that hat in the Mariposa Grove and tell a kid how important it is that he not take a pinecone out of the grove he'll never forget it." When she said that "If they wanted me to wear a Coke tee shirt with my flat-hat I would do it," it was to emphasize the importance of the partnership by suggesting she would go to the extreme of compromising her "top" symbol to sustain it.

Yosemite's ubiquitous green book demonstrates how much closer corporate logos are edging toward full association with the NPS logo, which has up to now apparently been expressly forbidden by NPS policy. To a visitor, products advertised in the flat-hat-logo’ed book which the uniformed ranger gave them on entering one of America’s most famous and venerated national parks must appear as if they were at least tacitly endorsed by the NPS whose messages and symbols face and surround their products. That Yosemite's chief of non-personal interpretations exercised a veto over some ads despite the great inconvenience, seems to indicate that she and her staff are cautiously aware that the public will assume such an endorsement with potential real consequences. There may be some limit to how far the NPS can go in its partnering with corporations and associating with their products without at least appearing to cross the agency's advocacy line, in this case for particular products including the SUVs which are frequently accused of gratuitously contributing to global warming.

A suggestion: full partnership with select corporations

The Union of Concerned Scientists, known for its non-inflammatory but thoroughly critical discussions of environmental problems that humans affect through our choices, praises the gas-stingy Ford Escape Hybrid as a step toward SUVs that could greatly reduce their contribution to global warming, noting on their website that "A rare confluence of industry, labor, and environmentalists has come together to laud this advance in fuel-efficient technology." (Escape Hybrid) They challenge Ford to go farther and apply hybrid technology to its far more popular Explorer SUV. If it did, at least for now it would be the unquestionable world leader in the manufacture of environmentally preferable SUVs boasting potentially greater fuel efficiency than even tiny Honda Civics and correspondingly reduced impacts on climate stability.

It is Ford’s hybrid SUV that occupies the double-page ad on the inside front cover of Yosemite's green book preceding Superintendent Tollefson’s evocation of John Muir’s spirit, and the ad has a couple of features that set it aside markedly from the other car ads in the booklet. One is its reduced reliance on the advertising method that environmental activists call "greenwashing."

Chevron may have been the first corporation to employ this marketing technique in its infamous "People Care" series of media spots, in which sensitive wild animals near its oil rigs were shown safely frolicking in their more-pristine-than-life habitats, even - from the implications of the ad - though Chevron had a right to harm them. Did Chevron really care about the environment even as it enabled global warming, pollution, cultural displacement in drilling regions and a world of clanking machines through encouraging increased use of fossil fuels? A soft woman’s voice-over told us it did care. Greenwashing ads continue to draw special ire from environmental activists. A great many automobile ads, like the aforementioned ones for the Durango SUV and the Toyota Prius, feature their products wending forever amidst green scenery, alone on the very roads which their manufacturers seek to congest with eternal corporate growth expressed through the manufacture of ever more cars.

By contrast, the Ford ad is just text and a picture of the Escape SUV atop an all white background and carefully innocent of the greenwashing that enrages environmentalists. While Ford is the originator of the SUV and has continued to be the number one pusher man for America's addiction to this climate warming vehicle type, it has tried to earn credentials in environmental leadership in a number of ways, including establishing itself as a "Park Partner." On a web page  where corporate logos are placed within inches of both the NPS arrowhead and the National Park Foundation's flat-hat, Ford is listed among the five corporations (American Airlines, Discovery Communications, Inc., Ford Motor Company, Kodak and TIME magazine) which have contributed (paid) tens of millions of dollars to support national parks and to be associated with them and their arrowheads, flat-hats, and rangers as Park Partners. Some of the other corporations that maintain a regular donor presence in national parks include Chevron, Toyota, Coke, and Delaware North Corporation, which runs the concessions at many NPs including Yosemite.

In order to survive on a national budget continually shrinking in its ability to support parks and their services[34]  and under a Congress all too willing to add new parks without new funding (Ridenour), the NPS along with its educators and partners have made whatever accommodations they can with corporations to support critical programs and simply to keep rangers in the parks.[35] Perhaps instead of "sort-of" endorsing an assortment of environmentally damaging products in its green book and elsewhere, the NPS could partner with Ford by openly endorsing Ford's new technology to push forward an agenda of global sustainability. It could encourage the world's largest manufacturer of SUVs to implement its technology, as the Union of Concerned Scientists recommends, on its flagship products. The idea may well be detested by environmentalists as an advanced form of greenwashing. But the NPS seems to become daily more dependent on corporations as Congress reduces real funding at the same time that the need is great to encourage communities with less disposable income to come to the parks by rebating even the admission fees which have provided parks at least some income to this point.

I imagine a program that might include a Ford hybrid (or a Toyota Prius, for that matter) being raffled in Yosemite Village - even better, in the lobby of the Awahnee. The "shopping mall" imagery presented by such a project, though quite possibly welcoming in its familiarity to new urban communities, may seem anathema to the "wild" image that these places are supposed to be associated with - especially the "white hunting lodge" image of the Awahnee[36]. But if it would pay enough to return the green visitor’s handbook to unmixed park messages, and to make rangers once again available for free hikes and tours for visitors including the new lower-income communities the NPS is trying to bring into the parks, it might be worth considering. To be completely clear, I'm suggesting a full-out endorsement by the NPS of particular products nationwide, associating them directly with the NPS arrowhead, describing their manufacturers as providers of industrial environmental leadership that will help preserve and protect critical national park resources.

Such an offer might encourage Ford to move forward with its promised environmental leadership. It would send a powerful message to manufacturers that real green products would have a desirable showcase in national parks and special exposure to the nearly limitless disposable income of their quarter billion visitors. Because so many Europeans visit parks, European corporations that already manufacture environmentally leading products in response to Europe’s far stricter environmental standards might also be willing to pay a great deal to showcase their products in settings which are exotic to their own traveling customers.

There are many possibilities and challenges in trying new product-specific partnerships between the NPS and corporations. Among them are:

• A need for buy-in from environmental organizations. At least some major ones would have to be convinced that it is possible to encourage corporations to provide green solutions. But, they seem to be so already.[37]
• A need to decide on some organizational level which products and corporations to openly endorse. Perhaps this is already happening when deciding on partners, or perhaps there is simply a threshold contribution in the case of Park Partners, or perhaps the National Parks Foundation does all of the arranging now (that was how Kathy Dimont got connected to Coke for her environmental education vans). De facto endorsement decisions as represented by the ads in Yosemite’s green book are currently being made outside the NPS, and bringing them back inside might enable them to be integrated with internal funding decisions, rather than requiring staff like Kathy Dimont and Mary Kline to fish for whatever grants they can find.
• A need to find products that fulfill several criteria:

  1.       their widespread sale would clearly lead toward improved sustainability of critical local park resources (glaciers, rivers, coral reefs, clean air, acid-sensitive historical buildings, wild fish, etc.)

  2.       they  provide opportunities to interpret the resource protection that they provide using positive messages that distinguish them from competing but non-sustainable products (as a hybrid competes with a fuel wasting engine, or a wind generator farm with a coal-fired power plant)

  3.       the manufacturer is willing and able to provide sufficient marking money to make a difference to the park(s).

The Ford ad in Yosemite's green book mentions that "lower emissions . . . make it the cleanest SUV ever." It says nothing about the real potential contribution of their new technology toward reducing global warming. Why? Ford’s marketers may have decided that the concept of global warming is not recognizable to enough Americans to merit a sales pitch. It may also have realized that to speak of global warming emphasizes yet another problem with all of its automobiles, especially the great majority of SUVs that Ford sells. Ford can claim that its vastly more popular Ford Explorer, like the Escape model in its ad, is "clean" on some level due to its emission controls, but it is stuck with the Explorer's reputation for contributing gratuitously to global warming until it implements hybrid technology in it. It may just be more expedient for Ford to keep fairly quiet about global warming for now.

In August 2004, the current presidential administration (Bush 2001-2004) sent a message to Congress acknowledging for the first time in its tenure that human-caused global warming is really happening (Administration Shifts). The September 2004 issue of National Geographic (Appenzeller) is heavily focused on climate change while scientists are pushing a new California state law mandating reduction in climate warming automobile emissions. It is likely that we may be seeing a resurgence of public interest in global warming. If so, Ford may soon find itself wanting to publicly characterize its hybrid SUVs as not only "clean" but also "climate friendly", a term they already use internally. They already promote their work in this area on their website. (Global Climate Change - Ford) If it hybridized its really popular SUVs, Ford could promote itself by loudly decrying the insensitivity of other manufacturers who, unlike itself, contributed massively to global warming.[38]

Instead of losing their rangers to $939 per person private hikes with their corporate partner Delaware North Corporation, parks could team with Ford to educate a public attracted and fascinated by a desirable automobile and the prospect of winning it in a lottery at the park, on how their consumer decisions can help preserve such local resources as the Merced, the Tuolumne, and Yosemite Falls through reducing global warming. Instead of Ford giving a couple million dollars a year to the parks through its own Ford Foundation or through the National Park Foundation, perhaps it could provide significantly more from its $3 billion annual advertising budget (Ford Annual) in exchange for two things: access to a quarter billion American consumers in the best of all possible demographics (national park vacationers) and the promotion of a positive reputation, unique in the automotive marketplace, for preserving America’s climate-dependent and iconic natural sites through reducing emissions of climate warming gases. Uniformed NPS rangers could be seen standing beside Ford’s hybrid cars as uncontroversial friends of corporate America, one of whose favorite sons (Ford) just happens to have made the business decision to denounce and describe in detail the extent and means of global destruction being carried out by specifically named rival corporations.[39]

Park staff will recognize that my imagined partnership with Ford is an unlikely solution. Even if such a program were implemented, the money from Ford might well go into Congressional coffers for use elsewhere since it is not a recreational fee and therefore does not fall within the federal fee demonstration program that provides money for parks. Implementing such a program would not be a decision merely of the NPS, but might well require Congressional legislation or at least, tacit approval from appropriate committees. However, Congress seems to follow the 2001-2004 Presidential administration in favoring public/private partnerships. Even before the current administration took office in 2001 with its push toward privatization of services in parks, (Rosen) Congress established the nations' first park mandated to attain financial self-sufficiency, the Presidio NP in San Francisco, in 1994. Congress has blessed the Presidio Trust’s construction of a new 2500-employee industrial park within the park, and the leasing of its historic buildings to whatever corporations can pay for them including marketing organizations and a dry cleaner.

My point is not that my particular suggestion as such could be successfully implemented. Rather, I pose it as a way to examine the current move toward blending the NPS including its symbols and personnel with corporations on a rather unselective basis that seems to blur NPS messages with others which are antithetical to conservation of park and global resources, and to suggest that there may be alternative and even more supportive public/private arrangements that would contribute to interpreting global sustainability.

In Yosemite I spoke with a college-age young man who was enjoying a summer working at a concession for the Delaware North Company there. They provided him with room and board, interesting activities with peers, and enough money to make it an earning summer for him. It made me wonder why any young person would choose to intern with the Yosemite Institute or especially with the NPS, which is increasingly too under-resourced to provide rooming or salaries to interns and volunteers. In my experience with the young interns and volunteers who work for the NPS and its staff - the ones the Service recruits not only for their immediate help but also to become the backbone of future staffing - they are highly idealistic.[40] They are very aware and critical of corporate effects on sustainability and on social equity across the globe. When they see NPS symbols and personnel becoming so closely associated with those very corporations which they have come to see as antithetical to preserving the kinds of resources they want to protect through their service in parks, their idealistic view of summer or career work in national parks may wane. If they are just going to spend a nice summer in a park, why not work for the DNC or some other company? What's special about service in the NPS, especially if it becomes just one more corporation in the park?

NPS staff from various parks cannot find enough words of praise for Delaware North Corporation which runs most of the concessions in some parks - hikes, transportation, restaurants and so on. DNC is nothing but generous some say, and has been characterized as providing the friendliest, most competent concession staffs the NPS has ever had. However, in some parks there is an escalating reliance on DNC and other corporations where Congressional funding for NPS interpretive staff proves inadequate. One senior NPS staffer confides his opinion that  national parks will eventually be run by the corporations - Delaware North and others. He says that "If they were all like Delaware North - or if Delaware North were likely to stay so completely [his emphasis] good and the white-hat guys - that would be great. But who knows what will happen? It's unnerving to me because this has been my life. I have loved this whole thing - all of it -  and its hard to think of it being turned over. It's hard enough to realize that a family has to pay [an admission] to get in here. You shouldn't have to pay  to get in here. But the fact is that Congress just isn't interested in funding us so we have  [his emphasis] to get the money somewhere." (attribution withheld)

I asked this staffer what motivates DNC to be so helpful. He says it’s because DNC makes a lot of money. I've worked with many NPS staff, and whenever we've spoken about careers and money in the NPS, they are clear that they will never make a lot of money at their job. Many believe they could easily make twice the salary working for a corporation, but stay with the NPS because they share a passion for its mission and, for interpreters, the opportunity to advance conservation of both historical and natural resources. If interpretations in national parks become the work of corporations, it is likely that they will be performed by people whose main interest is in career advancement rather than in protecting and preserving the historical and natural resources therein and reaching out to attract new communities into the park. I also think it highly unlikely that corporate employees will be nearly as apt as NPS interpreters to continue to advance interpretations on global sustainability, since inevitably such interpretations directly or indirectly reveal the environmental destructiveness of corporations and the processes by which they keep and maintain political and economic power nationally and internationally.

Corporate behavior by its very nature generally denies sustainability problems. In a culture where people are raised from the earliest age to self-identify as consumers, overtly consumptive behaviors by corporations and cooperating policies by the municipalities which depend on them for economic growth provide the public with convincing “evidence” that there are no real sustainability issues. Carol West and interpreters at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument try to raise awareness that serious water shortages are imminent in the region. But “it’s hard for the public to take conservation warnings seriously . . . while new housing developments with golf courses and swimming pools continue to be built all around us.” (West) After all, if there were really a water shortage, wouldn’t somebody pass a law or something? Park interpreters must first overcome the barrier of corporate messages which have become ingrained in people, before they can begin to interpret sustainability. As national parks are increasingly “Disney-fied” by privatization, it is hard to imagine their new private managers being seriously inclined to alert the public about problems in their own parks, much less in the other areas that they and their affiliates manage world-wide.

My suggestion, then, is that the NPS create overt partnerships – putting their logos and hats together with a select few, successful corporations that offer real leadership in pushing forward, along with global sustainability in general, the protection and preservation of critical park resources like groves of giant trees, waterfalls, glaciers, and monuments. Appropriate partnerships could lead to realistic public conversations about global sustainability and to park-relevant interpretations, and would replace the current situation: namely, the “sort-of partnerships” between the NPS and an unselective assortment of corporate partners of convenience that now seem to be leading, in conjunction with ever more inadequate Congressional funding, to the reduced availability of interpretations on sustainability in national parks. Units of the NPS could partner with any major corporations that offer new approaches to sustainability while joining them in factually critiquing the negative effects of competing US corporations. This could serve the competitive interests of those partner corporations that distinguish themselves through reducing the sustainability impacts of their products. For example, a Ford or Toyota hybrid vehicle would be prominently featured within a park – even at a visitor center’s exhibit space or near a famous waterfall – with NPS display materials that interpreted the importance of reducing carbon emissions in preserving resources while criticizing Ford or Toyota’s corporate competitors for continuing to contribute to global warming.

Because corporations with significant marketing dollars often engage in diverse enterprises, a key to my suggestion is that parks endorse specific green products, rather than corporations themselves – the reverse of today’s situation – and that endorsements be based upon defined quid-pro-quo arrangements, rather than on today’s awkwardly piecemeal and random associations. That is, corporations offering truly green products would pay marketing dollars to parks in order to sell those products in direct affiliation with the NPS, rather than offering token feel-good grants in exchange for a few photo opportunities with "flat hats".

The influence of non-corporate grant money

The National Park Service maintains its course by what Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy director Greg Moore calls a "deep institutional keel." Infused by its historic mission, legally dependent on its Congressional enabling legislation, constrained by the physical availability of natural and cultural resources that can be interpreted, a park's program content is not likely to be diverted far by grantors, but they may "tweak the dial" a bit. When the William J. Haas Jr. family volunteered tens of millions of dollars and enlisted the Conservancy's program management skills to transform San Francisco's Crissy Field in the GGNRA from an abandoned military base into a beautiful bayside park, the family was concerned that the neighborhood immediately surrounding the new park and most benefiting from the restoration represented an elite demographic section of San Francisco. They wanted the benefits of their support to accrue also to more distant and diverse segments of the urban population. So as a rider to their grant, they stipulated that a significant outreach effort must be made to encourage people who haven't traditionally visited national parks in large numbers - Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians - to make Crissy Field their park. This requirement was synchronous with existing NPS intentions to increase the participation of people of color in national parks. The Haas rider resulted directly in the creation of Crissy Field Community Environmental Center, an innovative facility and program in which uniformed NPS interpreters alongside staff from the nonprofit GGNPS provide programs in conjunction with San Francisco public schools and a variety of community organizations that focus on the interface between park and urban environments.

According to Moore, the Center would probably not have come about without the grantor's stipulation, and the focus on diversity as the GGNRA developed in the area might not have been as distinct. But on occasions when potential grantors proposed projects that lay clearly outside of or even contradicted the general goals of the Conservancy, they were refused.

Conclusion

While the public engages in well publicized battles over construction of facilities versus natural preservation within parks, in a subtle but perhaps more substantial shift corporations eagerly take up the service slack created by the reduced numbers of distinctly appointed national service staff in parks. If the NPS is to survive as an educational force within “national” parks, it understands well that it must accommodate privatization. But it has done so in part by blurring the distinction between private and public service staff and the different messages they promote  – perhaps a useful way to maintain a recreational space, but potentially disastrous for education. Corporate accommodations should instead be overtly acknowledged and decisively restructured to retain or even enhance interpretations of sustainability while preserving for the NPS autonomy in their development and delivery and allowing it to preserve the core values on which the preservation of park resource depends.

Chapter 5:
Opportunities for Interpreting Global Sustainability

“Through education we increase understanding.  Understanding creates respect.  Respect results in preservation. What we teach our children determines the future of our world.”

   - Anonymous interpretive ranger

This thesis describes from many perspectives how interpretations are formed and delivered. Despite cutbacks in funding interpretive personnel, especially at larger parks, have many options for delivering information to the public and engaging it in discourse.

A quote from the chief of interpretation of a major national park demonstrates how complex and comprehensive this work can be: “Critical Resources issues are identified through the Park's management team and the Primary Interpretive Themes were developed through the Comprehensive Resource Education Plan for the Park. As the Division chief, I require the staff to incorporate critical resource issues into their programs. The District staff oversee program topics. I also lead several interdivisional groups that are developing communication strategies for emerging critical resource issues . . . . Communication strategies are developed to target different audiences with appropriate interpretive media and messages. An outcome might be an article in the visitor guide (park newspaper) about the issue, a PowerPoint presentation, an information folio, interior or exterior exhibit, incorporation in curriculum-based education programs to local school groups.” (attribution withheld) Similar opportunities present themselves in many parks, and staff have developed strategies to employ them in promoting discourse on global sustainability within them and their surrounding communities.

Pedagogy

NPS staff in major parks include highly educated and experienced teachers and teacher trainers who work continually with the public and k-12 public school educators to discover the best ways to reach people with NPS messages, and to increase their own relevancy to new urban audiences. In particular, they want young people to grow up taking ownership and stewardship of the cultural and natural resources within parks. They try to discover the means for bringing classrooms into the parks, and for engaging them once they are there.

Beyond the logistics of funding buses to bring classrooms into their parks, park staff must convince teachers and principals that they will provide a valuable and valid educational experience. One of the most convincing ways is to match the park experience with state and federal curriculum by soliciting input via focus groups with teachers and administrators in local schools. This provides both a constraint (limiting programs to those that match federal and state mandated standards) and an opportunity (access to young minds) for presenting environmental messages. Park educators know that each age and each grade requires different approaches. Very young children may simply be taught to enjoy the sights and sounds and play opportunities of a beach or meadow. Approaching adolescence they observe wildlife and record their observations through writing or multimedia. Around high school they engage in scientific observation and, it is to be hoped, actively consider the wider social implications of industrialization and political power on environments. Environmental learning acquired during these several stages can eventually be applied in these later to years to an understanding of global sustainability. Thus, the most careful pedagogy, even if it were designed to lead eventually to an understanding of global sustainability, might make no explicit mention of it at least when the audience is quite young.

Yet, if the need to match curriculum is compounded by the other typical interpretive restraints -  to interpret only what is directly before the eyes of the visitor; to stick literally to aging enabling legislation; to tread lightly on issues which corporations have controversialized – it may be impossible ever to directly interpret the impacts and actors in global sustainability even to adults and young adults. If so, learners will be deprived of the informed perspectives they require if they are to make the choices which will preserve and protect resources within parks and beyond.

Interpretations may have to be greatly modified to accommodate particular audiences. The GGNRA has a large Latino audience, especially for school programs. Immigration issues are never far from peoples’ minds. Where much of the scientific community can freely speak of an “alien” or “invasive” species, those terms are shunned by GGNRA educators because young members of this audience may infer an aspersion upon newly entering communities. Roxy Farwell’s education programs there take special care to point out species from other parts of the world that make positive contributions to local ecosystems. (Farwell) It is only through long experience that the effect of interpretations on various audiences can be tested and content be modified for best effect.

NPS as an open system

Compared to corporations (and, in my experience, many non-profits as well), the National Park Service is an open system. Its management plans engage the public in long review processes that are openly contested. Director’s Orders and essential, working documents are available for review, often in the development stages, on nps.gov. Parks are created, reshaped, and decommissioned by elected representatives meeting in public and recorded sessions. Although the privatization and corporatization of parks is accelerating, it is still proceeding much more slowly than the mergers and takeovers which characterize the general corporate world, allowing time for public reflection and influences from more than one presidential term. How a park’s enabling legislation - and even the NPS mission under its establishing Organic Act - is understood and interpreted changes considerably over long periods of time in response to changes in public understanding of the function of parks. Park managers and staff understand their role to be communication with the public and so are generally open to discussion about the NPS itself, with some distinct taboos in areas that are sensitive to internal politics such as budgeting. Volunteers are often welcomed into working interpretive offices where they can observe the full range of activities and may attend staff meetings and decision making processes.[41]

In the case of this thesis, I received responses from 90 park officials, many of them quite senior, and most were willing to have their names and locations identified (see Appendix II for details of the interviewing process.) I sent my initial survey via email to over 400 park sites, all of whom have email addresses listed in a maintained NPS directory available on nps.gov (see Appendix III for a list of responding sites)

This provides an opportunity for citizens concerned about sustainability to provide meaningful input toward park policies, either directly or through elected representatives.

Demonstrations

The NPS’s National Mall near the capital buildings in Washington, DC has hosted some of the most dramatic and well-covered political and social demonstrations of the 20th and 21st centuries. (Creation of the National Mall) When the nation is ready for its “million environmentalist march” for global sustainability, this is the right place; once a major demonstration has taken place here, it becomes the work of the NPS to interpret it. After the march rangers will be free to interpret this historical act of advocacy for global sustainability without being accused of taking an advocacy position themselves.

Other National Parks have defined protocols that enable First Amendment expressions within them on a much smaller and less dramatic scale. Muir Woods has a very visible station in its parking lot and Yosemite has one well-positioned to enable substantial contact between first amendment activists and the public near the main visitors’ center. Park administrators will issue permits for two weeks at a time, and will continuously re-issue them for much longer periods. During six days in July 2004, during which I walked by the Yosemite First Amendment station several times a day, it appeared unused. So it seems available for advocating messages on global sustainability or anything else.[42] Presumably many other national parks have similar provisions for free speech, since guidelines that were faxed from the parks at my request appeared to be of federal origin – although the set I was sent from the GGNRA was quite different from the one Yosemite administrators sent me and listed different requirements.

Park partnerships

Park partners can push the “advocacy line” by developing programs and hosting speakers who are prepared to provide appropriate and accurate context for discussing global sustainability. The Crissy Field Center, which is run jointly by the NPS and a park partner, in October of 2004 hosted a presentation by Margie Richard, North America’s winner of the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize (Goldman). Uniformed rangers sat with local environmental justice organizations and inner city high school youth as she spoke about her battle against Shell Oil Company who finally agreed to resettle her community’s 1500 residents after they suffered for years from the toxic releases of the multinational company’s nearby chemical plant in Louisiana's “cancer alley.” Her talk helped her audience to establish emotional and intellectual ties to the GGNRA as a place for reflecting on similar important local resource issues in and near the park and the communities which it serves.

On other occasions the Center and other nearby partners have hosted discussions by critics of corporate modification of plant genes which also get to the heart of interpreting global sustainability.

On the other hand the Center, unlike most park partner sites, is jointly inhabited by the NPS rather than exclusively by non-profit staff – so it has been available and used as are many government properties as a media backdrop for government officials wishing to politically support the policies of a presidential administration widely criticized (and praised as well) for favoring corporate interests over environmental ones.

Parks can chose to a great extent who leases the buildings on their sites. They have the opportunity to lease to nonprofits who may not experience as many constraints in interpreting global sustainability as NPS uniformed staff. However, with increasing privatization, building leaseholders are more frequently corporations with no particular environmental credentials. One of the newest national sites, the Presidio of San Francisco in the GGNRA, has encouraged the construction of a new, 2500-occupant office building whose tenants are unlikely to undergo any kind of screening process and will likely be determined by the leaseholder. The newly welcome private enterprises are more likely to promote “business as usual” – consumerism as a way of life – than to interpret new pathways to sustainability. Even in a 75,000 acre park such as the GGNRA, this new office space must represent a high percentage of all leased tenancy. The new Presidio site, though part of a national park, is not managed by the NPS at all, but by a special management group (the Trust) mandated by Congress to support itself by obtaining rental income (around $50 million per year) from within the park itself, further blurring the line between parks and private enterprises. Perhaps one day parks in the model of the Presidio will be designated “National Industrial Parks.”

New communities, new perspectives

Some of the most innovative possibilities for new interpretations stem from outreach programs whose function is to create connections with the new, nontraditional communities that the NPS is trying to attract. Leaders in these communities often are more amenable to the critiques of national and corporate leadership that, I argue, interpreting global sustainability requires. At least one national park staffs full-time personnel just to create contacts between the park and local urban communities that have not included themselves, or felt included, in national parks, though such outreach personnel would probably not be hired today given the reductions in force currently being enacted in parks.

New communities may lack the traditional dispositions which connect the dominant culture to parks: prioritization of wildlife over use and property (especially the property of other people, especially in other countries![43]), a cultural sense of ownership of uninhabited spaces, a feeling that the outdoors is a safe place, comfort with walking by powerful dogs kept on or off leashes.  New communities have new dispositions that must be reached in new ways. Some very limited approaches have included enlarging camping spaces in a few parks to accommodate the extended family camping experiences favored by Latinos and Hmong, provision of buses to bridge the distance between urban centers and NPs especially for families with fewer and/or older automobiles, and the creation of multilingual interpretative programs and waysides.

Because the new communities have different outlooks and needs that will require hitherto undiscovered approaches, they may represent a wide open field for interpretations that may be not only free of traditional restraints (non-criticism of the United States and corporations, focus on local resource, and so on) but may also represent opportunities for interpreting global sustainability in ways not yet considered. One sustainability advocate associated with the GGNRA hosts San Francisco workshops for immigrants – outside the park so far – asking them to transmit to their countries of origin the idea that massive American consumerism is not as desirable as Hollywood and corporate advertising would have them believe, and in fact leads to deterioration of resources and loss of cultural identity. This would be quite radical to present within a national park but it has nearly been arranged at least once at the Crissy Field Center which partners very directly with the NPS.

Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens in Washington DC is an urban area that includes “ball fields and recreational facilities” along with wetlands which are locally interpreted in a global context. (Kenilworth) Such facilities may attract non-traditional park users and provide the means by which inventive outreach interpretive staff can connect ball players to park conservation and global sustainability issues.

The Biosphere Reserve and other international designations

Its praises are sung on an impressive website for "protecting two million acres" (Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve) and expensive multicolor maps have been produced that diagram it, but the Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve is based far more on wishful thinking than on any real power to arrest the demolition of essential resources and habitats, locally or globally.

I interviewed a person who, after 22 years as a manager at several major parks in the NPS, became a central developer and promoter of the Reserve (attribution withheld). She showed me expensive laminated maps and brochures of the "Reserve" that had been prepared, and spoke of the initial high hopes of area conservation professionals who stole as much time from their jobs as they could afford to try to launch it. But funding for staff was never forthcoming and those early volunteer staffers returned to their jobs, and finally ceased meeting to promote the Reserve.

The idea of the Biosphere Reserve never became sufficiently well known by area residents for them to respond much when promoters spoke to them about it. Environmental education and volunteer restoration efforts enrolling thousands of area residents continue as they did before the Biosphere Reserve, but seem to be little influenced by the knowledge that they are "inside" it.

Perhaps other biosphere preserves are more effective. The developers of this one seemed to give it every chance to succeed, but it never served as more than a transparent overlay on existing conservation efforts. Perhaps a seed has been planted for others to water if they ever feel inspired to take it on. Having your neighborhood designated a Biosphere Reserve requires application to and serious deliberation by UNESCO (The MAB Program). Once attained, the distinction offers a means to attract funding. Though it does not seem to have had much impact in the GGNRA, and one can wander through it without seeing much to indicate its presence, the international designation at least offers a continuing ready-made opportunity to interpret global sustainability in conjunction with local efforts at preserving and protecting important park resources. Perhaps such interpretations would imbue the Biosphere Reserve with sufficient life in the minds of the local public to finally draw the critical mass of funding and effort required to make it a viable resource for conservation.

When Michael W. Adams points out that  "Mammoth Cave National Park is the protected area of the Mammoth Cave Area Biosphere Reserve," (italics mine) it begs the question of whether or not the Reserve has any actual conservatory effect beyond that normally occurring within a national park.

Powerful sounding international designations may actually inhibit interpretation and action on sustainability if they provoke a complacent sense that something is being done – if people in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, actually believe that such a designation is already "protecting two million acres" as its website boldly claims. It certainly is not. Sprawling development of housing, shopping and industrial complexes across the Bay and into the Sierra foothills; over-fishing of the Gulf of the Farallones marine “sanctuary” in proximity to 47,800 deteriorating barrels of nuclear waste in a wide and poorly charted undersea dump area (Gulf of the Farallones); increasing population of humans and pets with their effluent and trash; air pollution out of compliance with EPA limits; distant glaciers melting from global warming and reducing the local viability of some of the world’s most biologically diverse ecosystems; continuing introduction and uncontrollable spread of invasive marine animals and terrestrial weed species; constant threat of oil spills from tankers and of nuclear materials from submarines that transit and dry dock in the north Bay; regular clandestine dumping by chemical companies in “protected” Bay wetlands which host endangered species; delays in cleanup of superfund sites including those currently in use as children’s playgrounds; continued subsistence shore fishing by immigrant populations of Bay fish kept dangerously toxic by non-point pollution run-off from agricultural and urban pesticide applications are but a few of the impacts that prevent the Reserve from offering protection to non-humans, much less to people (which is apparently beyond its intent altogether). If interpreting the “existence” of a “reserve” provides the opportunity for complacency it may do little to advance local or global sustainability.

Temporary and moveable media

Fixed exhibits require very long planning lead times – often across a multi-year process “tiering” first off a General Management Plan, then a Comprehensive Interpretive Plan, then a Long Range Interpretive Plan (Herberger). Such exhibits are carefully conceived and produced under high level supervision and professional review. This process often produces waysides and exhibits of very high quality and impeccable factuality, but has a couple of downsides. First, the information in such exhibits is often aging by the time it has completed the review and construction process. Engraved on a durable exhibit, information can be 5 to 10 years old when it is just mid-way through its useful life-span. Because ecosystem science and international relations evolve very rapidly, it is very likely that the public will experience information that is quite stale compared to what they are learning in schools, in their reading, and in the media. Second, because the information is subject to comprehensive reviews, it has to adhere to a “least controversial denominator” – that is, everyone who reviews it knows they will be stuck with whatever it says fairly permanently, and will want to reduce content that might require them to respond to heated visitor comments for the duration of their career at that park.

Temporary exhibits overcome these problems. First, they can be produced very quickly, responding to the latest advances in ecosystem science and global activity. Second, because staff and potentially critical visitors know that such exhibits will be removed from public view in a short period of time, content need be neither as rigorously authenticated (it can reflect knowledge that is new but not universally agreed upon) nor as non-controversial. People who object to the material can be assured that it is only temporary, or can even be allowed to remove it. At Crissy Field Center, we have “pushed the envelope” a few times by posting nationally published articles critical of the policies and actions of governmental, corporate, and non-profit organizations when they contained important if controversial critiques in order to engage the intellects of visitors on subjects of importance to the protection of our urban and wetland environments both locally and nationally. On occasions we have taken these down temporarily to be sure that certain visitors – funders and government officials – would not be offended. Charity Maybury, the Center’s urban ecology teacher, created a large paper poster to exhibit near the Center’s café, where it discusses the ecological and sociological advantages of Fair Traded and organic coffee. The poster required none of the extensive review processes that the Center’s fixed exhibits required – if anyone objects it can be taken down, but no-one has. Temporary exhibits are usually inexpensive to produce – which means that multiple copies can be produced and sent to other relevant sites. They can often be revised quickly in response to new ideas or visitor reactions – even to emergent environmental events like volcanoes or park fires.

Temporary exhibits can be fun and creative, engaging the intellects, emotions, and talents of young people and “amateur” artists and researchers. Schools and community organizations can be involved and see the results of their work displayed in front of the public within a school semester or less.

Temporary exhibits can also be mobile. In Hawaii, rangers at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park wanted to alert the public to the dangers posed by feral pigs to biodiversity in an island ecosystem. They produced a hundred pound sculptured “Port-a-pig” that “draws attention to alien animal control objectives at neighboring schools, teachers’ seminars, Audubon bird counts, and island ecosystem workshops” (Lane) as it is driven and flown to reach a wide audience within the island chain. Perhaps one day it will engage visitors to the Channel Islands NP in California, where pigs are similarly undermining threatened species. A traveling exhibit can alert the public to the commonality and breadth of problems across multiple national parks in the US and the world when the history of its travels is included in its interpretation.

Perhaps the greatest possibilities for temporary exhibits lie in their use as experiments, allowing staff to assess visitor reaction before creating expensive fixed versions. I don’t know if anyone is currently taking advantage of this possibility. It would provide a safe means to test an exhibit for controversial reaction, thus avoiding the need to implement the “least controversial denominator” for the topic.

Mobile exhibits that come to the classroom may in many cases be the only way students beyond elementary age can “visit” local parks. Students in upper grades, especially middle school and above, find it difficult to leave the campus for a field trip of meaningful length since they must first make arrangements with their several classroom teachers. Tough new federally imposed testing requirements also make it difficult to be absent from a number of classes to accommodate field trips. Yosemite chief of education Kathy Dimont overcomes these problems by having Fresno’s Discovery Museum drive her environmental education vans to area public schools.

Bent’s Old Fort NHS interprets the Santa Fe Trail by shipping a “Traveling Trunk” of state curriculum-based period clothing, artifacts, and games to local schools, who ship it back when they are finished with the ten lessons it provides. (Education Tours at Bent’s).

Environmental management initiative

By 2005 every NPS site is required to have developed an Environmental Management System (EMS) to oversee a reduction in the environmental impact of its practices. In addition, “The NPS will work with communities, external stakeholders, and the public to seek, develop, and share outstanding environmental accomplishments through appropriate media such as wayside exhibits, brochures, and educational materials.” (Director's Order #13a, section VI F) Creators of new park exhibits, programs and media might take this opportunity to modernize by referencing the positive impacts of new park environmental practices not only on local and regional environments, but on global sustainability as well. As NPS director Fran Mainella states in the introduction to her Order, one reason that “NPS managers today must demonstrate an awareness and understanding of the interdependency of the ecosystems, resources, biodiversity” in parks is that “the NPS functions in a complex global environment unforeseen by the framers of the 1916 NPS Organic Act.” (same, Section I).

Native America

Are American Indian people who provide programs in parks likely to draw for the public linkages between their own local histories, practices, and experiences and those of indigenous people worldwide in ways that inform global sustainability? In preparation for this thesis I spoke with several members of the Ohlone and Miwok communities in the GGNRA and Yosemite, as well as with the GGNRA’s Indian liaison and historian, Paul Scolari. I also researched the creation of parks in Alaska (Catton), where native subsistence has played throughout the 20th century, and continues to play today, a major role in the dialog that has shaped the use of state and federal lands there.

From 1969 to 1971, Indians from around the country staged a determined occupation of Alcatraz Island, an abandoned former prison in San Francisco Bay which has subsequently become part of the NPS’s GGNRA. Faded wall paintings and graffiti from that time can still be seen by tourists visiting the island, and have been catalogued by historians. Through some of their graffiti, occupiers expressed a global consciousness: “Cuahtemor, Bravo, Aztec Tribe, O.I.U. Organization of Indian Unity;” “Organization de Indios, UNIDAD.” “Indians of all Tribes of our brown continents, Unite!” (Scolari) The occupation with its expressions of global consciousness is still considered to be a critical milestone in the reestablishment of Indian identity in the US.

Immediately following the private Ohlone blessing ceremony of the Crissy Field Center just prior to its public opening in May of 2001, Ohlone elder Tony Cerda[44] spoke publicly on the steps of the Center. When Pope Alexander VI issued a bull that divided the “non-Christian” New World lands between ownership by Spain and Portugal[45] in 1493 he effectively declared war on all people of color, Cerda claimed. Since property is only legitimized by original occupation or willing transfer, how, he asked, had the Park Service become the owner of the GGNRA? He thus drew a relationship between global boundaries and actions and the current relationship of indigenous people within NPS parks and the rest of the New World.

For the most part though, the locals I spoke with seldom drew global links in their public programs, seemingly for several reasons. First, their engagements with preserving their cultural heritage are focused locally in such activities as monitoring archeological and construction excavations; setting up Big Times, encampments, and other Indian gatherings in park areas; and teaching to the public the production of artifacts such as baskets and foods made from plants from specific local sources. By focusing on the local, Indian interpretations also emphasize connection to local topography and ecosystems - key elements of indigenous spirituality and identity - while supporting moral claims to super-legal possession based on original occupation.

My sources also mentioned the constant need to debunk stereotyping of Indians – common notions of how Indians should produce crafts or hunt, what they should wear, even what color their skin should be. The exhibits in the Indian section of the Yosemite Museum counter such generalizations by focusing on the uniqueness of specific personalities and families of the immediate locale – how they individually adapted to life in the Valley before and after it became a park, and who they are and what they do now. [46] An Ohlone exhibit of ancestors at Crissy Field Center in the GGNRA similarly was based on the pictures and stories of individual local Ohlone tribal members.

On a few occasions people indigenous to other continents have visited the GGNRA and asked park officials if they could meet with the local indigenous residents. Maori from New Zealand have been pointed to Ohlone residents in the area, and the groups have at least met.

Indigenous peoples - especially those living in the southern hemisphere who in large numbers still obtain material and cultural subsistence from their traditional lands - continue to be displaced to ecologically marginal areas by globally linked, large scale agribusiness enterprises and other corporations. (Cavanaugh) But when Alaskan and Federal agencies worked with indigenous Alaskans to decide on how newly established parks would be used (Catton), the local peoples became heavily occupied with trying to maintain access to their historical hunting practices at local sites and seem to have had little inclination to connect to global indigenous peoples’ movements through the United Nations or elsewhere. Perhaps they decided that such a connection would do little to maintain their standing as subsistence users in Alaska state and federal governmental policies.  It does not seem clear to me that Indians in the US are likely to emphasize specifically global issues in their park programs in the near future, though many of their programs, in emphasizing small-scale sustainable relationships to land, do deal with cultural, environmental and ecological issues that are essentially trans-national.

Conclusion

National parks provide a variety of both potential and realized opportunities for interpreting global sustainability. People and institutions who recognize parks as a vast, relatively open and rapidly evolving set of educational (or advertising) opportunities are seizing the moment to advance (or constrain) interpretations of global sustainability.

New community partners, rapidly evolving science and politics and to a lesser extent, new technologies all offer choices that should be examined carefully and realistically for the impacts and opportunities they present in developing interpretations on global sustainability despite substantial constraints and both overt and subtle resistance.

Conclusion:
Global Sustainability and the National Parks

“Probably the biggest conservation issue for us is water.  With metropolitan areas of Phoenix to the north and Tucson south we can expect serious shortages within the next few years.  Within the last 100 years the water table at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument has dropped from approximately 100' to well over 750'.  There have been numerous attempts to bring water conservation issues to the attention of the public.  Our interpretive rangers discuss the issue as part of their talks about the prehistoric Hohokam and the complex system of canals they develop to channel water from Gila and Salt River for farming.  It's hard for the public to take conservation warning seriously, however, while new housing developments with golf courses and swimming pools continue to [be] built all around us.”
   - Carol West, Chief Ranger, Casa Grande Ruins National Monument

Science fiction writers delight in imagining a worldwide disaster in which an irrepressible asteroid targets the earth, or a computer glitch launches a global nuclear war, or an unstoppable virus escapes from a laboratory - in any case promising annihilation which is so immediate, undeniable and dramatic that a great novel or screenplay results (sometimes!). But what if a calamity on this scale were to develop over a period of decades or even centuries, and it was apparent only to those who cared to look and who dared to speak that we were bringing it upon ourselves? What forces would be artfully arrayed to confuse and deny the unwelcome message they bear? Or alternatively, how might it instead be brought to public awareness?

Mineral kings, timber barons, railroad tycoons, pork-barreling legislators, biodiversity conservationists and America’s First Peoples have all directed their passions toward harnessing the parks (and the NPS itself) toward their ends. This thesis instead attempts to use the national parks to another, very different end – interpreting global sustainability to a quarter billion people each year. It is an end which, I have hoped to demonstrate, is compatible with the first principles of the NPS and its interpreters, the goals of its partners in education and even industry, the enjoyment of its visitors, and the self image of the United States. I’ve been more than delighted that so many NPS and partner staff have taken the time to respond to my queries with comments and curiosity as they have helped me investigate the possibilities for interpreting global sustainability in national parks. And I’ve been surprised at the foresight and courage of those NPS staff who are already implementing such interpretations.

We really are facing a disaster – or what may be worse, a series of disasters issuing from diffuse sources, like ripples on a pond issuing simultaneously from multiple centers and coalescing in unpredictable peaks and troughs. The most powerful nations may hope that by refusing to address the causes of the catastrophe they may maintain dominance over resource distribution long enough to be the last to feel its effects. The United States prides itself on its ability to win any foreseeable war, Coca-Cola hopes to extend its place in the coloration, sugaring, and distribution of water from 3.5% to 20% of humanity’s total daily fluid intake, and Ford continues to expand its catalyzation of global-warming carbon dioxide through the production of ever larger vehicles even as it develops hybrid engines in a few smaller ones. Corporate capital, through the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and other bodies dedicates itself to stabilizing the economies of industrialized nations at the costs of increased cultural dislocation, environmental degradation, and economic instability in dependent nations. To some this may seem like a criticism, while to others it may seem laudatory that powerful nations should try to assure the livelihoods of their own children first, then from that bounty extend charity to the children of nations who have thus been rendered dependent. To reveal the extent and cause of the problem is not in itself to take an advocacy position, but those for whom such revelations are inconvenient support pseudo-academic “think tanks” and engage public relations enterprises to controversialize even the most basic physical and social science research findings on these issues until simply interpreting them incurs vitriolic responses.

The cumulative impacts of unsustainable practices cannot be attributed to any one source. Perhaps we are all the problem – not just because we warm the climate by driving to the supermarket instead of walking or  because we buy Coke or water shipped by diesel trucks across a continent instead of buying a local organic beverage, but because we fail to hold our political, corporate, academic, and religious leaders accountable.

The NPS has for a number of years been acting on the critical knowledge that America’s demographics are changing. As urban areas grow larger and ever closer to the boundaries of formerly “isolated” national parks, the ethnographic makeup of parks is simultaneously shifting away from European to Asian, Latino, African American, and Pacific Islander. Many parks are making substantial efforts to reach out to hitherto underserved communities in order to connect them to the parks. The NPS needs them as friends and supporters, as voters and voices in state and national legislative bodies. In the GGNRA, the NPS and its partnering educators obtain grants to bus urban school children to Alcatraz, Crissy Field, the Presidio, Muir Woods, and the Marin Headlands. In Yosemite, several hundred busloads of Mariposa county school children each year experience a natural setting for the first time, and the non-profit Yosemite Institute brings in tens of thousands of youth from throughout the state each year, increasingly from low-income environments.[47]

As the national parks change their emphasis from preserving scenery toward preserving ecosystems and globally connected resources, and as they connect with new urban communities, are they taking us someplace new? Are national parks, having preserved and defined much of our national identity for well over a century, opening a door toward a new nationalism?

Parks were originally created largely to give our new nation distinction in the eyes of the world (Runte). Where Europeans could boast a heritage of thousand-year-old churches and the ruins of ancient civilizations, early European Americans used parks to boast ancient “monuments” in the form of natural formations. Today many thoughtful Americans are concerned about the reputation and image of the United States in the world and ask if we have lost some of our moral leadership. To become a leader or even conspicuous global partner in preserving the world’s climate, water, soils, air, sea, minerals, and unique cultures would arguably be in the national interests, and Congress might do well to assist our national parks in reestablishing American’s leadership – this time as such a global environmental partner.

New partnerships between the NPS and green-leading corporations, if carefully and selective formulated, could tap into serious marketing dollars to promote and encourage the spread of green technologies while providing interpretations of the global sustainability they enable and providing a platform for critiquing the environmental impacts of non-sustainable industrial practices and the corporations which promote them through established corporate competitive practices.

An old African American church has occupied one corner of 12th and Willow Streets in an area sometimes referred to as the “lower bottom” – the worst of the worst - of Oakland, California’s depressed West Oakland neighborhood for generations. Kitty-corner across the street, half of a newly developed children’s playground is fenced off with wire and fresh signs warning of industrially contaminated soil that has been discovered under the surface of the play area. At the curb opposite the park, the driver of an 18-wheel diesel truck idles his engine near the sidewalk of this residential neighborhood, perhaps anticipating some street transaction, but drives off as I approach and cruises his monster vehicle slowly around the block past the old Victorian houses. More 18 wheelers are parked just down the street in a lot whose fence is topped by coils of razor wire. When they line up to await the offloading of the next in an endless stream of giant international container ships that makes Oakland one of the world’s busiest port cities, they will idle the diesel engines whose exhaust has given the children of surrounding West Oakland one of the highest asthma rates – and resultantly poorest school attendance rates – in a nation, the United States, whose child mortality the UN already rates as far worse than that of the Czech Republic, South Korea, or Slovenia. (State of the World's Children 2004)

Far across the San Francisco Bay at Crissy Field Center in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, visitors sip lattes as they contemplate the spectacular headlands which serve as a backdrop for the architecturally stunning Golden Gate Bridge. Tugboats and barges, oil tankers and massive container ships glide soundlessly by toward distant Oakland, adding animation and color to the scene. From here, from this national park, how can we tell visitors how these international vessels impact the lives of school children in West Oakland? and about the species snuffed out, peoples displaced, wars prolonged, and fresh water delivery systems degraded by the climatic changes which the crude oil bought from tyrants, burning in their engines, and carried to local refineries in their holds is rapidly inducing? to a whole local fishing industry destroyed in part by the prolific invasive clams transported in their holds from Asia to the San Francisco Bay?

Interpreters and educators in the National Park Service and its partners try new approaches toward interpreting global sustainability, aware of limitations on what even a quarter billion active and inquiring minds are prepared to hear (or perhaps, have been prepared by corporate culture to hear) about the need to reverse the destruction of irreplaceable and essential resources. Experience, dedication, knowledge, location, and community connection are on their side. Time, it seems to me, is not.

Appendix I:
Guiding Documents

Since I am asking how visitors to parks learn - in particular, about global sustainability – one of my concerns is to understand which documents do and can affect the development of interpretations, exhibits and waysides; relationships with partners and concessionaires; and the availability of personnel especially to create global connections. Therefore I asked interviewees to what extent they relied on national NPS documents and Congressional legislation as rationales in developing the content of interpretations and exhibits.

Besides enabling legislation, which has already been discussed, various types of documents were widely referenced in developing interpretations and education programs at most NPS sites. I also suggest here a few additional documents that could be used as the basis or at least justification for developing interpretations of global sustainability.

The Organic Act of 1916

"Mission statements" are traditionally the slogans by which corporations reinvent themselves every year or two and which they feed to employees on Lucite placards. By contrast the NPS mission, unchanged in its words if not entirely in its application after nearly a century, is deeply held by staff everywhere, and perhaps all can recite much of the famous paragraph of the 1916 establishing act enjoining them to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects [of parks] and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." Possibly all are aware as well of the ongoing contradictions between public and private use versus resource preservation that the Act has mediated for nearly a century. By remaining the center of the use-versus-conservation controversy that has pervaded national parks since the first foundings, it has perpetuated its own relevance. Like the US Constitution, the Act is reinterpreted by NPS managers to meet modern requirements, as has been discussed earlier in my thesis.

NPS Directors’ Orders

Director's Orders were generally regarded by my respondents as narrowly focussed and technical, and are apparently not widely influential in the development of interpretive plans and waysides. They had little impact on how my interviewees - both NPS staff and their partners -  developed programs and interpretations, although they have a major impact on the design and development of at least the primary access (“home”) pages of local park web sites (Su). These access pages are directly controlled at a national level.

Director's Order #13a, which requires each park to implement an Environmental Management System by 2005, has been mentioned above as an opportunity for informing the public that preservation of the local environment requires preservation of the global. It might be interesting to see if other Orders recommend and justify the development of global interpretations of sustainability. NPS Directors' Orders are available for public view on the NPS website (Director's Orders and Related Documents).

NPS Management Plans

Mark Herberger, superintendent of Minuteman NHP, provided a detailed picture of the interpretive planning process: “In National Park Service planning, the "broad" picture of resource conservation activities and visitor services is outlined through a General Management Plan (GMP). We are in the final year of drafting our final GMP. Specific management documents tier off of the GMP, including what is called a Comprehensive Interpretive Plan. The CIP outlines a multi-year program of visitor interpretive services and more specific year-by-year tasks. The plans highlight significance statements, interpretive themes, and visitor experience goals.” (Herberger) My general impression is that such processes are more common at large parks. Park sites may be so small that they are managed by two, one, or even no staff, so of course no such process occurs at least locally. In some cases all interpretation may be done by non-NPS organizations.

Wilson's Creek National Battlefield sent me a copy of their “Final General Management Plan – Environmental Impact Statement,” an 188-page 8-1/2” by 11” bound document containing clear, high quality maps and typography, along with reproductions of significant letters and emails from members of the public, interested local organizations, and concerned Federal agencies. It was developed with public input at advertised meetings and in consultation with local Congressman and Senators over a three-year period (less time, it appears, than GMP development requires at some other parks). It considers a wide range of impacts and possible uses for the park, and documents emotional arguments between recreational users and historic preservationists. It includes assessments by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the EPA. Three alternative plans each describe their impacts. No direct connections are made to global historical or ecological context and these do not enter into the discussion of alternative management plans.

It is interesting that whereas Herberger’s Minuteman GMP is the source of his park’s interpretive plan, the situation is reversed at Wilson’s Creek, where the GMP’s listed interpretive themes are derived from an interpretive plan drafted six years prior. And in fact, those pre-existing interpretive themes actually “helped guide” the GMP’s management alternatives to such an extent that “alternatives that did not support the communication of the themes were not considered.” (U.S. Dept. of the Interior 22).

According to one respondent, the GMP is submitted by the park superintendent to a Regional Director for approval. Another said that at her park, the GMP is developed with a great deal of public review and many public meetings. The GMP itself may determine that such community input is required.

According to another, “The content of the [general management and other] plans are determined by a team of park service professionals with the help of other professional consultants from the community. The general public has their say as well through public scoping meetings that document their concerns and ideas.” (attribution withheld)

A senior project manager for a partnering national conservation organization has the experience over many years that regional management plans are concerned almost exclusively with planning for physical facilities, and not with staffing or personnel management. (attribution withheld) Therefore they impact designs of road systems, buildings, and waysides, but do not determine the numbers or backgrounds of staff who will design and provide interpretations and education programs and create connections to visitors and local communities.

NPS National Initiatives

The NPS's national chief of interpretation (or "Program Manager for Interpretation") occasionally announces new national initiatives which often influence the development of programs and exhibits through recommendations which are in some cases accompanied by directed grants. They offer opportunities to reinterpret local resources and impacts with a new focus. National NPS initiatives to which my respondents have reacted in developing interpretations concern biodiversity, dark skies, human diversity, fire, urban parks, sustainability, and untold stories by locals.

As a major park partner, director Greg Moore of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has experienced many NPS initiatives as they came and went. He feels that their influences were mostly "at the margin." One that he believes to have persisted over time has been "diversity" - ongoing efforts to increase ethnic and demographic diversity in the staffing and visitation of national parks. A commonly voiced refrain among NPS staff cautions that the population needed in the near future to assure the continued support of national parks is becoming increasingly diversified and must be brought into parks.

One initiative,  National Resources, resulted in the establishment of Science Learning Centers in at least five parks, including one at Point Reyes National Seashore where natural resource scientists live and interact with the public (Monroe).

Mia Monroe, GGNRA's Headlands education chief, describes the national fire initiative as "huge." After the Yellowstone fires of 1988 (Wildland Fire) sparked heated national discussion the NPS decided to begin educating the public on the positive value of this natural process which had hitherto been interpreted as an unwelcome intruder in park wildlands.

By the time of my July 2004 visit to Yosemite the park had already reinterpreted fire everywhere as a positive force - now an indispensable partner in ecological renewal, safely disposing of fuel loads which threaten habitations and vacations, even a producer of rare vistas of granite peaks shrouded in the haze of mystery. A number of lightening-caused fires were burning out of sight of the valley, sending eye-watering smoke to visitors and concessionaires for many days. Each visitor received a handout when they entered the park explaining the importance of fire and why it was being allowed to take its "natural course" as a controlled burn. Every vista spot from which smoke could be seen hosted a temporary but prominent sign providing many forms of fire information, and a special fire management person from the Bureau of Land Management stood outside the visitor's center to answer questions.

It is not clear if Yosemite's major fire interpretive undertaking was a result of the fire initiative or was driven more by the necessity to intercept thousands of potential visitor fire reports before they could overwhelm administrators and fire responders. However, the amount, quality, and focus of the information seemed to indicate a distinct interpretation of fire that had been under development for some time, and it seems likely that the well-known post-Yellowstone fire initiative was instrumental in its development.

The large-scale instantiation of the NPS fire initiative at Yosemite exemplifies the principle of "interpreting the resource." Because fires were prominent at Yosemite, they were interpreted there with such visibility. But, all parks are asked to participate where possible in each initiative. The GGNRA's Park News recently featured a large article describing various aspects of living with fire in that park.

Initiatives may seem like a top-down process but they are often driven by concerns that enter from individual park staff and management and work their way up, or that laterally penetrate the NPS culture as a whole. Mia Monroe experiences initiative development as a community process within the NPS. Ideas "bubble up" from staff attending national conferences such as the National Association of Interpreters, or when key documents are being rewritten. Corky Mayo, the current (2004) NPS national chief of interpretation, listens for new ideas as they arise and sends out staff memos asking how the ideas might be of interest to various communities who visit or should be included in parks. Ideas may originate with "big thinkers" in the parks, then begin to appear in workshops, and then in professional journals. When it is time to write planning documents, managers incorporate these ideas.

Major Congressional Acts and NPS National Reports

According to park supervisors in my survey, some official documents are major drivers for their interpretations: the park's mission statement, national initiatives and General Management Plans of the NPS, and their own park’s enabling legislature, GMPs, and comprehensive and long-term interpretive plans. Given the limited resources available to parks staff, they are unlikely to respond to a host of additional Congressional and NPS legislation and recommendations. Since park interpretive personnel seldom indicated that they plan around the Vail Agenda of 1992[48] or other major NPS and Federal documents such as those catalogued in Dilsaver’s book, it makes little sense to reference many of them here in a thesis concerned not with cataloging documents, but with how peoples’ views can be changed. Still, even some aging legacy NPS documents continue to “silently” inform current perspectives. When Felix Revello, Chief Ranger of Fort Larned NHS wrote me that his goal is “To restore, to the extent possible, the appearance or illusion of a natural prairie with all of its components intact” (Revello) he could be reading right out of A. S. Leopold’s influential 1963 report to Secretary of the Interior Udall which said  that “A reasonable illusion of primitive America could be recreated, using the utmost in skill, judgment, and ecologic sensitivity. This in our opinion should be the objective of every national park and monument.” (Dilsaver 240). Leopold’s once groundbreaking report is now over forty years old but, like the mission statement in the Organic Act, still seems to bear weight today. Yosemite's chief of education Dimont quotes relevant parts of even aging NPS documents, including the Vale Agenda, when she writes proposals or defends the development of educational programs.

Federal Documents

"Do NEPA and the Endangered Species Act and the NPS management plans that talk about the park's role in global conservation . . . motivate our interp program? No. They don't have to . . . If the Endangered Species Act were rescinded, which has been proposed, that doesn't mean we would stop talking about endangered species. In fact we might talk more about endangered species. Our agenda is not set by those laws, but we are part of a global movement to educate people about important issues . . . We are conservationists - we provoke people to think about the implications of their actions, and we would do that whether there is a NEPA or ESA or National Historic Preservation Act or any other act."

   - Howard Levitt, chief of interpretation and education at the GGNRA

Though many outside the NPS have questioned the extent to which the NPS participates in a global movement or is a true “conservation” organization, most of my respondents in the NPS are in agreement with Levitt that interpretive programs at parks develop more from established core values than as a series of reactions to NPS top level mandates or Congressional legislation beyond a park’s own enabling legislation. Still, such documents can be and are used as justification by educators, park partners, and interpretive managers when competing for existing funds from within the NPS or from the Congress when establishing their own local programs. Theoretically they could also be used by Congressional leaders or their constituents in developing grants to enable new national initiatives within parks that would teach approaches to global sustainability.

Both long and short-term planning is ongoing in the NPS nationally, regionally, and in most park units. For those planners who understand that park resources can only be preserved and protected by a public educated in issues of global sustainability, I have highlighted a few Federal documents that can serve as rationales when seeking funding or upper level approval for developing programs, interpretations, and exhibits.

NEPA

Whenever I asked NPS interpreters and educators and their partners about their experiences with the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, they expressed familiarity with the law and explained to me its often significant impacts on their work. What they invariably referred to was actually the part of the Act which most occupies their pragmatic concerns: subsection (C) of the Act's Section 102, requiring detailed reporting of environmental impacts based on corresponding studies; they often find themselves involved in such an EIS, or Environmental Impact Study.

However, I found none who were familiar with the subsection (F) requirements that "all agencies of the Federal Government shall - recognize the worldwide and long-range character of environmental problems and, where consistent with the foreign policy of the United States, lend appropriate support to initiatives, resolutions, and programs designed to maximize international cooperation in anticipating and preventing a decline in the quality of mankind's world environment." (National Environmental Policy Act)

As little known as subsection (F) appears to be, it derives directly from Congress's intent when it promulgated NEPA:

"The purposes of this Act are: To declare a national policy which will encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment; to promote efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and biosphere . . ." (same)

If my limited number of interviews are representative, it is possible that no NPS official has ever been asked to comply in any way with NEPA’s subsection (F). Perhaps for all practical purposes, the Congressional mandate might as well not exist. But for those justifying the development of interpretations for global sustainability within their parks, this subsection of the milestone Congressional legislation of NEPA provides significant rationale.

National Historic Preservation Act of 1966

According to Section 2 of this Act, "It shall be the policy of the Federal Government, in cooperation with other nations and in partnership with the States, local governments, Indian tribes, and private organizations and individuals to . . . provide leadership in the preservation of the prehistoric and historic resources of the United States and of the international community of nations  . . ." (National Historic).

The Endangered Species Act of 1973

Section 8 of ESA encourages Department of Interior personnel to pursue global sustainability in several ways.

Subsection (b), ENCOURAGEMENT OF FOREIGN PROGRAMS, states that “In order to carry out further the provisions of this Act, the Secretary [of the Interior or the Secretary of Commerce], through the Secretary of State shall encourage-

(1) foreign countries to provide for the conservation of fish or wildlife and plants including endangered species and threatened species listed pursuant to section 4 of this Act;
(2) the entering into of bilateral or multilateral agreements with foreign countries to provide for such conservation”

Subsection (c), PERSONNEL, allows that “After consultation with the Secretary of State, the Secretary [of the Interior or the Secretary of Commerce] may-

(1) assign or otherwise make available any officer or employee of his department for the purpose of cooperating with foreign countries and international organizations in developing personnel resources and programs which promote the conservation of fish or wildlife or plants, and
(2) conduct or provide financial assistance for the educational training of foreign personnel, in this country or abroad, in fish, wildlife, or plant management, research and law enforcement and to render professional assistance abroad in such matters.”

At least one NPS-sponsored program, Park Flight, appears as if it were responding to these provisions by locally hosting Latin American scientists who help research tropical birds with migratory routes that take them through the US. (Park Flight)

A senior staffer for a park partner informed me that unfortunately, the current Presidential administration (Bush, 2001-2004) has placed a cap on the number of NPS staff it sends to international conservation conferences as part of a general move away from Park Service participation in international dialogues about conservation issues. He mentioned the World Parks Congress that is held once every ten years and was attended in 2003 by 2500 conservation leaders from the world’s national parks and protected areas to share information and to develop park-based global conservation strategy. (World Parks Congress) The US Park Service founded a national park system that, it is proud to claim, is modeled around the world - yet it sent only six representatives to this critical conference. The tiny nation of Belize sent more people, he told me. The ESA provides justification for funding and encouraging exchanges between personnel from the Interior Department – of which NPS is part - and international conservation groups as Congress intended.

Section 8a of ESA contains unambiguous language enjoining the Secretary of the Interior to implement the Convention on Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation  in the Western Hemisphere (Convention On Nature Protection) using specific means. She or he shall: “act on behalf of, and represent, the United States in all regards as required by the Convention on Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation in the Western Hemisphere; . . . take such steps as are necessary to implement the Western Convention. Such steps shall include, but not be limited to

(A) cooperation with contracting parties and international organizations for the purpose of developing personnel resources and programs . . .

(B) identification of those species of birds that migrate between the United States and other contracting parties, and the habitats upon which those species depend, and the implementation of cooperative measures to ensure that such species will not become endangered or threatened; and

(C) identification of measures that are necessary and appropriate to implement those provisions of the Western Convention which address the protection of wild plants.”

Personnel can be identified and funded to assist in international sustainability projects pursuant to these Congressionally mandated provisions of the ESA.

Appendix II:
The  Survey Process

I conducted two types of surveys: 17 personal (face-to-face) interviews with NPS and partner staff at the GGNRA and Yosemite NP and at a few independent partners and conservation organizations resulting in about 12 hours of audio recordings, and over 400 individualized survey emails to which 90 NPS personnel responded with anything from a few sentences to complete multi-page documents with photographs of their exhibits.

All personal interviewees and email respondents signed confidentiality agreements as required of all UC Berkeley researchers by the university's Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects. Survey materials provided to all respondents included warnings about possible consequences to participants as well as the researcher's and Committee's contact information. A few respondents specifically mentioned that the warnings intimidated them, perhaps making them reluctant to offer a response. Three personal interviewees, and about a quarter of the email respondents, opted to provide all their commentary anonymously. Personal interviewees were offered the option of designating any designated portions of their discussion as "off the record," allowing me to report those portions but without associating them with the speaker's name or location.

Whenever email respondents did not sign either consent line, I emailed them back to ask if they had forgotten – in several cases they had and subsequently signed the consent. Whenever a respondent signed only anonymous consent I assumed it was by intent and did not email him back for confirmation, but used his comments, if at all, without attributing them to a person or location. Quotes from these respondents are designated "(attribution withheld)".

Many participants expressed interest in interpreting global sustainability in parks and asked to see the results of my research, but no respondents were given the opportunity to review my use of their comments or any other portion of this thesis prior to its final publication. Consequently none have expressed approval for the context in which I have quoted them or for any aspect of this thesis.

I asked each personal interviewee to interpret my questions broadly, and to add whatever he thought relevant to my central theme without being restricted by my questions. I varied my personal (face-to-face) interview questions quite a bit for each interviewee depending on her job, trying to find out how that interviewee impacted what the public experiences, and what she felt were the possibilities for global interpretations on sustainability. Here is the text of a representative set of personal interview questions, asked in this case of an educator in the GGNRA:

1. What do you feel is the mission of the National Park Service in this park?

2. What are the overall goals of your work in this park?

3. How many people learn something new as a result of your work each year?

4. Do you know of any conservation issues in this park that involve global sustainability?

   Are these brought to the attention of the public?

   Are there global sustainability issues that you feel should be brought to the attention of the public, but are not?

5. How is it decided which issues will be part of NPS educational programs?

   Who develops education programs?

   Who delivers the education programs?

6. Have providers of grant money influenced the content of education programs? How?

7. What organizations other than the NPS educate the public in this park?

8. Are any Congressional or NPS national management plans used as rationales in planning for educational programs at the park?

9. Some people feel that in order to educate people about global sustainability, it is necessary to criticize some actions of the United States government and of United States corporations. Whether you agree or not, do your believe that your organization is limited in its ability to make these criticisms? Why or why not?

10. The constituency of the GGNRA is highly international, with large numbers of recent immigrant visitors and students participating in education programs, plus visitors from all over the world. Has this constituency raised global issues? If so, which ones? Do education programs address these?

11. Can you think of a specific program or exhibit in the park that would be more interesting or informative if we added global connections to its content? If so, what might that new content be?

I sent individual surveys to every email address in the NPS phone book (Phone). The content of the emails differed from one another only in the name of the park unit copied from the address book, and the email address. This is the text of the email:

Hello from the University of California at Berkeley! This email requests your help in answering thesis research questions.

Please be so kind as to forward this message to the Chief of Interpretation, the Education Specialist, or a Site Supervisor at {name of NPS unit}.

As a long time NPS volunteer and park-partner employee in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, I understand how precious your time and personnel resources are. I thank you in advance for your indispensable help.

-------------------------------------

THESIS PROPOSAL   My name is Rob Weinberg. I'm a masters student in Society and Environment at the University of California at Berkeley. The topic for my thesis is "Interpretations for Global Sustainability in National Parks." It asks: To what extent are the 300 million annual visitors to national parks shown that sustainability of natural resources must be addressed on a global level?

As an example of what I mean by a conservation issue involving global sustainability being brought to the attention of the public, here is text from an exhibit that is seen annually by approximately one million visitors to Muir Woods National Monument:

"It is probable that today human activity plays a role in the current rapid progress of global warming. Scientists estimate that a three to four degree increase in global temperature could eliminate the cool, moist coastal zone in California. What, then, might the future hold for Coast Redwoods?"   It would be of great help to my research if you could respond to my questions below - even to one. Please be sure to sign (type your name after) the Consent Form at the end of this email and send your response to:

     weinberg@nature.berkeley.edu

-------------------------------------

QUESTIONS   Please read and sign the Consent Form below after responding to one or more of these four questions - otherwise I cannot use your responses in my thesis.

Here are my questions:    1. Do you know of any conservation issues in {name of NPS unit} that involve global sustainability (examples might include ecosystems or natural features dependent on stable climate; migratory species; tidal areas subject to rising ocean levels; natural and cultural resources dependent on atmospheric pollution)? *Which, if any, of these are brought to the attention of the public? *How? *Are any discussed in a global context? *Are visitors informed that human actions impact these issues? *Are they told what actions they can take to have a positive impact?

   2. What is the goal of your work in {name of NPS unit}?

   3. How is it determined which issues will be interpreted (as public programs, waysides, etc), and who determines their content? If this question is too broad, please provide one representative example of how one program or wayside was conceived and developed.

   4. What are some major organizations other than the NPS who interpret for the public within {name of NPS unit}?

  Please feel free to add any comments:

 -------------------------------------

CONSENT FORM - please type your name at the end.   If you take part in this research you face the following risk: If you optionally allow your name to be used, your comments might reveal criticisms of your employers in ways that could be detrimental to your career.    This research provides no foreseeable direct benefit to you. However, it is hoped that the research will benefit others who are looking for new ways to help conserve the natural and cultural resources of our planet by making people more informed.    Your participation in this research is voluntary. You are free to refuse to take part. You may refuse to answer any questions and may stop taking part in the study at any time. If you have any questions about the research, you may telephone me, Rob Weinberg, at {} or contact me by e-mail: weinberg@nature.berkeley.edu. If you agree to take part in the research, please type your name in one or both of the places indicated below. Please keep a copy of this agreement for your future reference.    If you have any question regarding your treatment or rights as a participant in this research project, please contact the University of California at Berkeley's Committee for Protection of Human Subjects at {}, subjects@berkeley.edu.

 Please sign one or (optionally) both:

 **** (Required) I authorize the use of my answers in your thesis, as long as they are not associated with my name or location.

Signed (typed):

  **** (Optional) Further, I authorize you to use my name and location in your thesis.

Signed (typed):

 -------------------------------------

           Thank you very much for your help!

Appendix III: Interview Responses

My interviews and emails to staff in parks and their partners were designed to elicit thoughtful responses rather than poll data, and did not constitute a scientific survey. Nevertheless I will attempt to provide some window into the scope and aggregate content of the responses.

Superintendents, chiefs of interpretation, natural resource interpreters, chief rangers, education specialists, and field staff from these eighty-eight NPS sites provided informative responses via email: Agate Fossil Beds NM; American Memorial Park, Saipan; Andrew Johnson NHS; Arches NP; Bent's Old Fort NHS; Big Bend NP; Biscayne NP; Brices Cross Roads NB Site; Buffalo National River; Cape Cod NS; Carl Sandburg Home NHS; Casa Grande Ruins NM; Catoctin Mountain Park; Chesapeake & Ohio Canal NHP; Chiricahua NM; Congaree NP; Cowpens NB; Crater Lake NP; Craters Of The Moon NM & Preserve; Cuyahoga Valley NP; Cuyahoga Valley NP; Effigy Mounds NM; Ellis Island NM; Eugene O'Neill NHS; Everglades and Dry Tortugas NPs; Fort Laramie NHS; Fort Larned NHS; Gauley River NRA; Gila Cliff Dwellings NM; Grand Canyon NP; Great Smoky Mountains NP; Gulf Islands NS; Haleakala NP; Harry S Truman NHS; Hawai`i Volcanoes NP; Hopewell Furnace NHS; Hot Springs NP; Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore; James A. Garfield NHS; Jamestown NHS in Colonial NHP; Jefferson National Expansion Memorial; John Day Fossil Beds NM; Kenai Fjords NP; Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens; Klondike Gold Rush NHP; Lava Beds NM; Little River Canyon National Preserve; Mammoth Cave NP; Manassas NB Park; Martin Luther King Jr NHS; Minuteman Missile NHS; Missouri National Recreational River; Mojave National Preserve; Monocacy NB; Nicodemus NHS; Nicodemus NHS; Niobrara National Scenic River; Ocmulgee NM; Oklahoma City NM; Padre Island NS; Padre Island NS; Petroglyph NM; Pipestone NM; Port Chicago Naval Magazine NM; Presidio NP; Rocky Mountain NP; Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front NHP; Ross Lake National Recreation Area including North Cascades NP and Lake Chelan NRA; Salem Maritime NHS; San Juan NHS; Santa Fe National Historic Trail; Saratoga NHP; Saugus Iron Works NHS; Shenandoah NP; Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve; Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural NHS; Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve; Tonto NM; Tumacácori NHP; Tuskegee Institute NHS; Vicksburg NMP; Western Arctic National Parklands; Whiskeytown NRA; William Howard Taft NHS; Wilson's Creek NB; Yellowstone NP; and Yucca House NM.

Staff from two national parks provided face-to-face interviews: Yosemite NP and Golden Gate NRA (including Muir Woods NM).

These abbreviations are used in the above site names: NB National Battlefield; NHP National Historical Park; NHS National Historical Site; NM National Monument; NMP National Military Park; NP National Park; NS National Seashore; NRA National Recreation Area.

Two NPS partners provided multiple face-to-face interviews: Yosemite Institute and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

One goods manufacturer provided correspondence: Earthsongs of Cottonwood, AZ.

One major national conservation organization provided an interview but declined attribution.

Email survey responses are summarized below. Some respondents referred me to web sites, but I confine the summarized data to that which was explicitly stated within the email responses themselves. Many parks identified conservation issues that are addressed or managed within their parks, but I only tabulated those issues when a respondent specifically stated that they are brought to the attention of the public. Each unit in the left-hand column represents one park that identified one or more instances of the issue in the right-hand column. For example, if a respondent identified six instances of water quality being interpreted to the public at her park, I incremented by one the number in the column to the left of the entry for "Water quality and abundance" under Question 1.

Question 1: Global Conservation Issues – identification and action

Global conservation issues brought to public attention but not identified as global issues:

Global conservation issues brought to public attention and explicitly identified as global issues:

Human impacts which visitors are told currently affect these global conservation issues, whether or not those issues are explicitly identified to visitors as global in nature:

Actions suggested to visitors around global conservation issues, whether or not those issues are explicitly identified to visitors as global in nature:

Question 2: What is the goal of your work?

Question 3: How is it determined which issues will be interpreted?

Question 4: What organizations other than NPS interpret to the public?