Parks are forever
Rick Smith
Spectrum 1 News (Austin, TX)
Friday, March. 15, 2024 12:17 PM CT
‘Parks are forever’: SXSW panel discusses innovation in America’s national parks
By Katharine Finnerty Austin
AUSTIN, Texas — South by Southwest brought America’s national parks to downtown Austin with a discussion about how the National Park Service is modernizing and changing with the times as more and more people are visiting the parks.
Last year, the National Park Service reported that 325.5 million people visited its parks, sites and monuments, and it is predicted that by 2050 that number is will reach half a billion every year.
When the world started opening up again after the COVID-19 pandemic, visitors returned to the national parks at pre-pandemic levels. Many of the bigger parks like Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Zion, Arches, Canyonlands and Big Bend all saw a record number of visitors during 2021.
NPR reported on the “explosion” of visitors back in 2021. The article talked about mile-long lines of cars trying to enter Yellowstone and an almost 100-person line to take a picture with Delicate Arch at Arches National Park.
All of this buzz has brought up questions about the future of America’s national parks and how they will grow, so SXSW held a panel Wednesday afternoon called “Reimagining America’s National Parks.”
Lena McDowall, who is the deputy director of management and administration at the National Park Service, was on the panel and talked about how the park service is trying to manage the influx of visitors to the larger parks.
But McDowall also noted that the top 40 most-visited national parks make up approximately half of the total visitation of all 429 park sites, and she said some of the smaller places have even seen a decrease in visitors.
“We are having to take a much more tailored, I guess, view to how we manage these places,” said McDowall. “We are moving far from that one-size-fits-all approach to management of public lands, management of historic sites, and you see us doing things to try to accommodate crowding or larger visitation in some of these larger parks, but you also see us experimenting with a number of things in some of these smaller places to attract more people to visit.”
For example, the Blackwell School, Big Thicket, Chamizal and Waco Mammoth are just some of the smaller sites across Texas that don’t get as much love as Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains.
To get more visitors to these sites, the National Park Service partners with people like Will Shafroth, the president and CEO of the National Park Foundation.
Shafroth said he has been a park enthusiast his whole life, and one of his goals is to make the national parks more accessible to the public.
“I think 70% or more of the landmass of the national parks’ system is in Alaska, and yet, 1-2% of the visitation is in Alaska,” said Shafroth. “Most people are never going to get to these places.”
Armed with those statistics, Shafroth and his foundation gave the parks service the tools it needed to bring virtual experiences to people who can’t visit in person, which all started because of the pandemic.
One example Shafroth gave was a live feed that was set up in the Channel Islands of a scuba diver monitoring the coral. The diver had an earpiece on so students could ask questions to them in real time to learn more about the aquatic life around the national park.
Shafroth also discussed the National Park Foundation’s Open OutDoors for Kids project, which allows students and classrooms in Title I schools to connect with national parks across the country through virtual and hybrid programs.
Shafroth said the program is “a way to expose different communities to the parks and the opportunity from them to experience the curiosity of these places and really open up their aperture of life.”
But, these innovations require cold hard cash.
McDowall said investing in national parks has been a bipartisan effort.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that $195 million would be earmarked for climate restoration and resilience projects in the national parks over the next decade. The funding is a part of President Joe Biden’s $2 billion Investing in America agenda, with the funding coming from the American Rescue Plan, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.
But Shafroth says the amount of money Congress is budgeting to the parks, about $3.8 billion a year, is not enough to meet the demand of all the park service’s needs.
“Honestly, the Congress is not the quickest to act on these things. No offense to them, but they just approved the budget for the park service last Friday for this fiscal year,” Shafroth said. “For the park service to rely on Congress to fund things that are coming in the future is just not practical.”
Shafroth said his foundation put a call out to nonprofits to help meet any budgetary gaps, and it seems to have worked. Shafroth announced last week that a $40 million anonymous donation was made to complete all the housing projects in Yellowstone National Park.
And companies, including L.L.Bean, have stepped up to meet the park service’s needs.
Amanda Hannah, who is the director of brand engagement and external communications at L.L.Bean, was also one of the panelists, and she discussed the different ways the company partners with the National Park Foundation.
Hannah explained that L.L.Bean’s mission has always been to get more people to spend time outdoors, and the company honors that is through supporting the Parks of the Future initiative, which looks to make the parks more accessible “while protecting the stunning natural landscapes.”
All three of the panelists emphasized the importance of keeping the national parks natural and authentic, while also making them more inclusive and accessible, as the number of park sites continue to grow every year.
The park service added 10 additional national park sites over the last fiscal year, McDowall said.
“Simply put, parks are forever, and they are for everyone,” Shafroth said.
Rick Smith
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