U.S. has grown more diverse, but park visitors remain overwhelmingly white
“The National Park System Comprehensive Survey of the American Public,” conducted by the Wyoming Survey & Analysis Center at the University of Wyoming, is a follow-up to a much-cited report on race/ethnicity among park visitors conducted in 2000.
Taken together, the two surveys show that while the American public has grown increasingly diverse in the last decade, black and Hispanic-Americans remain underrepresented in visits to the 394 National Park Service (NPS) properties.
Conducted by telephone in 2009, the survey queried 4,103 respondents across the U.S. The results showed that non-Hispanic whites comprised 78 percent of park visitors in 2008–2009. By comparison, Hispanics accounted for 9 percent of visitors, while African-Americans were 7 percent of visitors.
In contrast, the U.S. population in 2010 was 64 percent non-Hispanic white, 16 percent Hispanic, 13 percent African American and 5 percent Asian.
“The national parks represent the American story, and there are groups of people who don’t identify with that,” said Carolyn Finney, assistant professor in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. “For some people, there’s a sense that the parks are pretty white.”
The reasons would easily fill a book — Finney, in fact, is currently completing one called “Black Faces, White Spaces: African Americans and the Great Outdoors” — but the end result is that the national parks run the risk of losing their connection to the American public.
In roughly 40 years, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that non-white minorities will constitute at least half of the American population, up from roughly one-third in 2008.
And, as numbers in the new report reiterate, the impending majority tends to engage less with the national parks than the existing one, for a whole host of reasons, ranging from the obvious — such as cost and accessibility — to more subtle ones dealing with imagery, identity and what constitutes the “appropriate” way to experience the parks.
One problem, is that unfamiliarity breeds apprehension: Another is that outdoor recreation tends to be portrayed in very specific ways that don’t speak to all ethnic groups. “People think that if you go to the parks, you have to hike and camp,” said Finney. “Some people just want to be outside or hang out with their families, but those things aren’t necessarily included under ‘recreation’.”
The challenge is ultimately a two-fold one — getting people of color to come to the parks and ensuring they’re welcome once they do. Regarding the former, the new survey suggests that the single biggest impediment for non-visitors was that they didn’t know much about the National Park system (60 percent).
When asked if “NPS units are unpleasant places for me to be,” just 5 percent of white respondents agreed. By comparison, 9 percent of African-Americans and 23 percent of Hispanics did so.
The good news is that efforts to expand involvement, and hence ownership, are underway, both within and outside the National Park Service.
In California, the Park Service has partnered with the Yosemite Institute on WildLink, a program that introduces high-school kids from Oakland, Stockton and other cities to the outdoors through five-day wilderness trips.
Source: msnbc.com, Rob Lovitt, August 3, 2011.