Last updated: August 31, 2024
Article
How We Look at Science in National Parks Depends on Who’s Looking
Science in U.S. national parks suffers from and is diminished by the same social inequities as the rest of society. Conversations with community members helped us understand how and why.
By Michael Whiteman-Jones
Image credit: NPS
Ninety-three percent of U.S. national park visitors identified themselves as white in a 2022 National Park Service survey. Yet about 44 percent of Americans identify as non-white. Black people, for example, accounted for one percent of park visitors in the survey even though they make up 14 percent of the U.S. population. This disparity extends to science, whose legacy of discrimination has profound, far-reaching effects. As Emily Dawson wrote, “to continue with business as usual is to be complicit in practices that uphold and exacerbate racism, class discrimination, sexism, and other forms of oppression.” Dawson is a professor at University College, London, and the author of Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups.
A team of National Park Service science communication experts launched a three-year project, which ended in 2023, to help them understand how to avoid “business as usual” and be more inclusive when they interpret science for the public in national parks. The team learned it needed to consider the wide range of motivations, perspectives, personal—and sometimes harsh—stories, as well as the multiple pathways to science that people experience.
A Willingness to Listen
Earlier work on the topic of science equity indicated that the cultural biases of science communicators disproportionally benefit “specific (e.g., affluent, college-educated, non-disabled) audiences.” To help overcome these biases, the National Park Service team worked with private facilitators and park employees to learn about inclusive science approaches and language. Together, they developed themes for a series of community listening sessions. Up to 100 community members, six organizations and individuals, and four national parks participated in those sessions. These parks were close to urban areas and with diverse ecosystems: Rocky Mountain in Colorado, Cuyahoga Valley in Ohio, Congaree in South Carolina, and Everglades in Florida.
According to Tim Watkins, the National Park Service’s Science Access and Engagement coordinator, the team began the 2023 project hoping to collect data about minority and Indigenous views of science and the national parks. But they quickly realized they first needed to step back and build trust by listening to what workshop participants had to say without scripting the conversations. “Effective listening requires a willingness to completely put your agenda to the side in favor of prioritizing the direction communities need the conversation to go,” project participant Gillian Bowser explained. Bowser’s a former National Park Service wildlife biologist and ecologist. She’s now an associate research scientist in the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.
“I questioned if such a large organization with as many moving parts could be sincere in their effort to change.”
Lekeisha Harding, an educator and report co-author, said the non-directed approach to the listening sessions created emotional safe spaces where conversations could unfold organically. Team members, used to directing meetings and presenting information to passive audiences, mostly listened quietly while they took notes. Later, they shared their notes with the communities to make sure they had accurately portrayed those conversations. They summarized the conversations in a March 2023 report: Community Conversations Summary Report: Community Engagement for Inclusive Science Communication.
Daniel Aguirre, a community organizer and meeting facilitator who co-authored the 2023 report, was skeptical about the project at first. “I questioned if such a large organization with as many moving parts could be sincere in their effort to change,” he writes in his introduction to the report. “Taking on this work would force me to look at my own relationship with both science and national parks as a member of the ‘community’ they were seeking to engage with. I realized that this effort was indeed sincere and that they…were open and willing to learn and grow.”
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As we celebrate Native American Heritage, take a moment, wherever you are, to listen to the wind and the stories it carries. The history played out on public lands, like Grand Canyon National Park, has been dramatic and difficult, but learning from our shared past, present, and future will bring this nation together.
Harmful Hierarchies
Listening-session participants told the National Park Service team that colonialist models of power and methods of communication often leave minorities and Indigenous people feeling excluded from national parks. They felt that agency scientists often dismiss their direct and ancestral knowledge of how ecosystems work because it’s judged to be irrelevant. Worse, disenfranchised groups often mistrust or even fear land-management agencies. Why? Because those agencies rely on Eurocentric or Western concepts of science that have created hierarchies of power in the acquisition and application of knowledge. These hierarchies have been used to exclude, ignore, or even harm people of color.
A 2018 George Wright Society report points out that many Black Americans, unlike whites, “do not view wildlands as ‘therapeutic landscapes’ that provide a respite from society ills” but as “‘sick places’ which evoke horrible memories of toil, torture, and death.” Wild places were sites of lynching and other atrocities against Blacks. And prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, people of color were legally barred from or segregated within parks. Integration efforts in national parks sometimes even caused physical violence against minorities to intensify. Underlying all this is the fact that many national park sites were effectively stolen from their original, Native American inhabitants.
“Our own bias and belief about what makes for good science prevents us from hearing what many Indigenous and minority communities outside the Park Service already know to be true."
Ardrianna McLane, a manager in the National Park Service’s Intermountain Region, believes these historical biases against people of color linger today, impeding communication in ways that perpetuate mistrust and impair scientific progress. “Our own bias and belief about what makes for good science prevents us from hearing what many Indigenous and minority communities outside the Park Service already know to be true,” she said. “But as land managers, we have to ask ourselves, who are parks really for? Do parks exist for their own sake, for our sake as land managers, or are they for humanity at large? As a lifelong educator, I believe connecting community members to their park resources will strengthen our shared purpose. And the way we do that is by genuinely engaging diverse communities.”
Harding agrees. “People will be forgiving for what has happened in history,” she said. “But they won’t continue tolerating being ignored and abused.”
Image credit: NPS
A Long, Slow Journey Forward
It’s unclear how the 2023 project results will affect National Park Service science and how we interpret it, Watkins acknowledged. But he was hopeful, noting that the project aligns with Director Charles Sams’ Respectful, Inclusive, Safe, and Engaged initiative. This initiative embeds diversity competencies into supervisors’ performance evaluations, aims to ensure compliance with anti-discrimination policies, and bolsters transparency and communication inside and outside the agency.
Watkins said insights gained from the conversations also help guide the ongoing work of the agency’s Science Interpretation Community of Practice. That group includes about 200 members from across the service—mostly interpreters, science communicators, and natural resource managers. It meets monthly, in part to share inclusive practices and resources and develop competencies for professional development. It’s committed to helping increase diversity and shifting the agency’s thinking in a more equitable direction.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of the 2023 project is that the first step is a step back, to make space to listen.
We all like stories with happy endings, but in this case, there’s no easy path to one. That sentiment was echoed by the meeting facilitators, who expressed hope that the agency will progress toward greater inclusivity in science based on the project’s results but noted that institutional bias is powerful and difficult to overcome. “How the NPS responds to the growing focus on [science equity, access, and inclusion in national parks] will be telling,” said Sara Melena, a member of the National Park Service team that launched the project and participated in the community conversations. But she added that the agency is already "working on organizational changes that align with the participants' recommendations." Perhaps the greatest lesson of the 2023 project is that the first step in this—likely long and slow—journey is a step back, to make space to listen.