By Nathan Bierma
Chicago Tribune staff reporter
September 27, 2002
In between sweeping views of vast vistas and jagged cliffs at Badlands National Park this summer, visitors may have noticed one element of the surroundings that didn't have to do with the scenery -- the visitors were as uniformly white as the cottony clouds.
A 2000 survey by the National Park Service found that 95 percent of visitors to Badlands were white, while only 2 percent were Asian, 2 percent Native American and 1 percent African-American.
Audrey Peterman, of Jamaica, Fla., didn't need a survey to tell her that the national parks were not drawing a diverse crowd. Seven years ago, she and her husband, Frank, embarked on a tour of the major parks out west. After 14 stops, they were baffled by their own statistic: They had seen only two other African-American visitors the entire time. It was enough to persuade the Petermans to cancel a move out of the country and go on a domestic mission.
"We decided there was a job to be done here," Peterman says. "We found in talking to our friends and people in general that nobody had a clue that there was such a thing as a National Park System. . . . So we started a newsletter as a way to raise awareness in our community about these incredible national natural treasures that people come from all over the world to see, that are right here in our own back yard and we don't know about."
Don Murphy, deputy director of the National Park Service, says he's also on the case. In 1998 the NPS started a program called "Cultural Diversity Initiative," which increased the number of exhibits on ethnic history, boosted efforts to recruit minority rangers, started a newsletter called Heritage Matters, and set up partnerships with historically black colleges to develop a curriculum in historic preservation and cultural resources stewardship (see http://www.cr.nps.gov/crdi).
"The National Park Service recognizes that parks have historically been used by a relatively narrow segment of the population, and that many parks have not offered experiences meaningful to visitors from varied ethnic backgrounds," Murphy wrote in his 1998 report. Since then, he says he has seen improvement.
"We here in the National Park Service want to make sure that when people visit parks they understand that there are programs and facilities here that represent a variety of views, and . . . particularly in the last 15 years we have made a conscious decision to tell the whole story of America," says Murphy, an African-American.
Murphy points to this July's "Mosaic in Motion" conference in Atlanta as an example of the growing dialogue about diversity in the parks. The conference featured workshops on outdoors exploration, promotion of the parks through community organizations and a trip to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. The conference was hosted by the National Parks Conservation Association, a decades-old NPS watchdog, where Iantha Gantt-Wright became the first director of enhancing diversity in 1995.
"I'm satisfied that an effort is being made [by the NPS], where 10 years ago there was none," Wright says. "But there's a lot more that the Park Service can do. . . . Right now [they're] doing great work with colleges and universities . . . but there also has to be more of a focus targeting community-based projects."
No one claims the issue is simple. In a system as wide as the NPS, whose 389 natural and historical sites stretch from Denali in Alaska to the Dry Tortugas in Key West, from Gettysburg to the Golden Gate Bridge, "the `average park visitor' does not exist," says Gary Machlis, professor of forest resources and sociology at the University of Idaho and visiting chief social scientist for the NPS.
Machlis' research for the NPS on park visitation has found that income and education are the most reliable predictors of park visitation among Americans -- as each increases, so does the likelihood a respondent has visited a national park recently. He also found that the proportion of whites who reported visiting a national park in the last two years -- 35 percent of all whites - is only slightly higher than that of Asians (33 percent) and Latinos (27 percent). But it is more than double the percentage for African-Americans, 17 percent of whom have recently been to a national park.
The question of why African-Americans in particular aren't visiting the parks is a perplexing one for the NPS, which suggests that lack of proximity of African-American communities to prominent Western parks and lack of wilderness exploration as a cultural heritage may be involved. It remains a pressing concern for Murphy.
"It's a struggle for me; I'm African-American and I grew up going to national parks in the United States and Canada . . . and there were other folks in our community that chose not to visit national parks for a wide variety of reasons," Murphy says. "Just by observation, if you go to Yellowstone or Yosemite or Glacier, where I was earlier this year, some of our more remote parks you're certainly going to see predominantly white visitation."
"There is a greater disconnect in the urban population, where people don't have a lot of discretionary income to travel to the Western parks," Peterman says. "But then again, many of our affluent friends, who have taken trips to Europe and Asia and regularly go to the Caribbean didn't know about the National Park Service until we introduced it to them."
Murphy says the NPS is working on making national parks more logistically accessible and culturally inviting to minorities.
"The NPS has outreach programs where rangers go into urban communities and talk to people about some of these more remote parks, talk with people about the programs, and then partner with our cooperating associations and other groups like Outward Bound to actually provide the transportation for kids to come and visit parks who otherwise wouldn't," Murphy says. "We're getting kids used to enjoying this form of outdoor recreation . . . and then, as they reach adulthood, hopefully bringing their families back, so that over time you cultivate this kind of connection between people that don't traditionally visit parks."