Cody Sanford: This is the Livable Future Podcast. I’m Cody Sanford and I’m here with Kaydee Barker. Today, we’re telling the story of what’s referred to as America’s best idea, the National Park System. In this episode, you’ll learn about ecosystem science, what co-management practices of the parks look like, and understand how the national parks are an evolving idea that has grown with our understanding of science. 

Kaydee Barker: So to begin, we’d actually like to take a moment to acknowledge that we are creating this podcast on lands that were traditional and ancestral homelands of the Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne people. We would like to honor these people and their contributions to this region with respect.

CS: For this episode, it’s important to understand a little bit about the National Park system in the United States. President Woodrow Wilson signed the service into act in 1916. The idea was to provide the American people with nature unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. Historian Wallace Degner called the National Parks the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic. They reflect us at our best rather than our worst. Since its inception, the national parks cover 84 million acres in all 50 states with more than 20,000 employees providing enjoyment to millions of people each year. All of this information can be found at the nationalparkservice.gov website. But the national parks in the United States also has a complex, sometimes painful history.

We have an honest discussion with Dr. Brian Forist on how the National Park Service is evolving to holistic land management, which can be inclusive to the historical ties to the native people. Dr. Forist is a professor at Indiana University, who has had a 40-plus year-long career in the National Park Service across eight branches. Now Dr. Forist teaches outdoor recreation, parks, and human ecology. Dr. Forist and I have a thought-provoking discussion about what’s happening with the embrace of new ideas with a greater cultural understanding, which is connecting more communities to the national parks. So, let’s jump in. 

Dr. Brian Forist: The National Park System in the United States is Mythical in a lot of ways and we kind of swallow the myth that it is America’s best idea. And on many levels, I think that’s true. But one of my literary sheroes, Terry Tempest Williams, says maybe it’s not the best idea, but an evolving idea. And frankly, it’s the evolution of the idea that I find really interesting today. You know John Muir just had his birthday. Many people are totally enamored with Muir, and he did some really good things. He also did some really rotten things. He did have quite a bit of a disregard for people of color, for Native people, for Black people. And my biggest concern beyond that, which is kind of, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Beyond that, he also had a real disdain for park visitors, for the common person. The people he referred to as the world and his ribbony wife untroubled by a spark. He didn’t really think much of tourists. So the point is that there are these iconic individuals that we have elevated to almost the status of a deity, and they’re flawed. We’re all flawed in our own ways, but by challenging the origin myth of parks and the mythology of folks like John Muir, I think we’re beginning to get a more accurate view of the parks and who they are for. In John Muir’s vision, parks were for people that shared his mindset, that kind of wanted to get away from people and saw them, saw parks as a platform to get to a spiritual pinnacle, if you will, for his own use. That evolved over time and he was more of an advocate for others, but it’s hard to set aside that. And along with his vision that the parks were for people like him, which has been very much in play for more than 100 years. And the like him, like them, like me, it was basically white folks. Middle and upper middle class and higher white folks. And what we’re now learning collectively, maybe as a nation that’s beginning to learn how to listen, particularly those of us with privilege, we listen to other voices and understand certainly there’s a strong indigenous connection to these stolen lands that the United States government now claims. And there are ways to sort of re-endow those indigenous claims. Similarly, we’re seeing a real movement of people on the margins claiming space in parks, claiming safe space, with the emergence of things like Afro and Latino outdoors, LGBTQ groups that are really claiming parks as their own, disabled hikers, and unlikely hikers. We’re seeing a real evolution. What’s really exciting to me is the National Park Service, an agency I have a great affinity for and a deep passion for, is riding that wave. We’ve talked for years about relevancy and sort of changing the face of who we are. And I think we’re slowly making progress and opening the doors, if you will, for a greater diversity of people and really beginning to challenge some of those status quo mindsets that kept us enamored with John Muir and the like, rather than finding other voices that share wisdom about these really special places. 

CS: You know, I keep on seeing this discussion about giving this land back to the Native people more and more online. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on this? 

BF: Yeah, you know, very contemporary idea. There’s actually, I understand there’s a series of articles in the Atlantic right now on what is wilderness. And I know there’s one that came from an Indigenous perspective of returning these lands to Native nations. I have not read that, and so I can’t offer any kind of a learned opinion of that. I know there’s a counter that came out in New Republic perhaps as well. I’ve just been seeing them through social media. That said, there are some pretty exciting things going on, and have been for a number of years of co-management. For instance, the North or the South, one of the units of Badlands National Park is now co-managed between governments, the Lakota government and the United States government. And just yesterday in the New York Times online today in print is a really amazing opinion piece by Women of Bears Ears National Monument in Southeast Utah.

The article, the opinion piece basically talks about the re-matriation of that landscape. And when Bears Ears was designated at the tail end of the Obama administration as a national monument, it was the culmination of international advocacy. And I say international because it was the United States government, but also Navajo Nation, Pueblo Nation, Mountain Ute, and I think another Ute Nation. I think there were five Native Nations as well as the United States that had been involved in advocating for the Bears Ears National Monument. And what I’m an advocate of right now, I guess maybe is a practical reality, but it’s co-management. Certainly, these are traditional lands that have great significance to indigenous nations. They have also shared lands that have great significance to many other people. And maybe I’m selfish, maybe I just don’t want to give up that claim. But also, I tend to favor a more collaborative rather than all-or-nothing approach to the stewardship of lands. It’s interesting I have an indigenous friend and colleague here in the Midwest, a member of the Pokégan band, a Potawatomi. And whenever we go for a walk, we always challenge each other, it gets a little heated. And we always come away learning a lot. And she’s challenged my thoughts on even using the word manage because it’s something that doesn’t really exist in her language. And steward may be a better term that implies a relationship with as opposed to lording over. But I am, I guess, an advocate of more collaborative approaches, a multinational approach if you will. So I’ve got some things to read and see if my opinion changes in that process. 

KB: We were talking about this idea of co-management and sort of some of the benefits and costs of different approaches here. And I was thinking that, you know, another important aspect of this is that the National Park Service actually has, I think, more protection from the United States federal government for the lands than Native American reservations and sometimes tribal lands that aren’t officially reservations. Sort of a weird gray area that happens and this is a product of a lot of anti-Indian laws from the history of our relationship. And these gray areas create an issue where it’s possible for perpetrators, such as corporations or criminals, to do things on tribal lands and there’s this big, like, who has the authority to do something about it?  And that’s an issue, of course. That’s something that we ultimately need to address as well, and hopefully soon. 

But when it comes to environmental issues, corporations are essentially required to consult with tribal governments, but they are not accountable really for that. And they don’t need permission really from tribal governments. They just have to consult. So they can essentially say, well, we consulted with them, and then go ahead and do what they were going to do anyway. And this has happened with some of the pipeline issues.

So I guess the point of bringing this up is that I think ultimately we really need to address these issues that create these gray areas that take away the authority from native nations to manage their resources and to be able to say no and exercise their sovereignty. I do have hope, though, in the co-management system. Because as Dr. Forrest said, we’re finally at a point where the National Park Service and, I guess, society, non-native society, is starting to actually listen and hear these other voices. And I think that we can find a common ground here and work together to protect these important natural resources. 

And there have also been some cool examples of native, non-native alliances that have been getting some stuff done, such as the Cowboy Indian Alliance, which sounds like a very unlikely mixture, right? But they are working together to carve out some common ground and protect some rural areas in the USA. I don’t wanna harp on this too long, but if you’re interested in learning more, as I mentioned, there is the Native American Rights Fund, and also the National Congress of American Indians has some great resources on their website.

CS: Dr. Forrest, I really appreciate how candid you were with how the park system is grown. And I guess I wanna ask, Have you seen it grow in any other ways?

BF:  Yeah. And I can, I can think about on a couple of, um, a couple of fronts. When I started my career in the national park service in the late 1970s, and then for another 10 or more years in the environmental field, after I left the park service, we never talked about invasive species, uh,

It was all about protecting everything and creating these boundaries were ways to protect a piece of ground. 

Perhaps the broadening of environmental impacts, meaning that an impact here, in this place, has ripple effects that impact other places. The transport of species from one place to another creates conditions by which one species may, whether it’s native or non-native, it can become an invader. I mean, it becomes a bully. It becomes a species that is not held in check by the environment that it now sits in. We are seeing that boundaries are artificial. And the way that has really affected the stewardship of parks is that we now have an ecosystem view. 

So look at things like the greater Yellowstone ecosystem as a management idea, that there’s this park, but the park is part of a dynamic ecosystem that goes well beyond those political boundaries in the early 2000s, like 1999, and then early 2000s, I was part of a team led by Gary Mackless, who you met last week, who started something in the federal government called the Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit Network. And these units, based at universities, were public and private, or public and university and nonprofit partnerships that would cooperatively look at ecosystem research and technical assistance and practical applications of knowledge. And they were based on biogeographic regions. And so that view that has really changed, that it’s not just this piece of ground, but it’s the entire ecosystem and having that much broader view that I think maybe, and for me, it was invasive species that taught me that.

But that view, I think, is a much-needed change, having that much broader landscape view. Thinking about it in terms of Bears Ears again, as a national monument, a presidential proclamation of federal land, the initial Antiquities Act of 1906 that Theodore Roosevelt lobbied hard for says that it is the president’s purview areas of natural and scientific interest, but the minimum amount to protect a feature.

And so we have places like Devil’s Tower, the first national monument designated where it’s a small piece of ground to protect that pillar. Hovenweep National Monument, where I worked, is only 800 acres and it protects these amazing ancestral Pueblo structures, towers on Canyon Rim. But it’s just a little postage stamp here, a little postage stamp there. 

Moving on to the Bears Ears as a national monument is that knowledge that to protect the Bears Ears, which is a feature, but it’s an entire ecosystem and that is the minimum necessary that then of course was reduced by 85% by President Obama’s successor, and I think we’re now on the path to re-steering, re-protecting the full designated amount. But it’s really that landscape view, that ecosystem view that has changed. So from a management or stewardship point of view, that may be one of the most significant changes. And certainly, as we look at climate change, it’s that broader view, that understanding and studying and managing for climate change affords us, or it’s just the magnitude of the problem.

CS: We continue our discussion with Dr. Forrest in the next episode where the focus turns to the power of connecting people to nature. We’d like to give a special thanks to all of our listeners. Please share the Livable Future podcast to help us spread quality information. Give us a follow on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Stay notified on episode releases and our online discussion series by following us on social media and thank you for listening.