UC Irvine

The National Park Service is a well-known, well-regarded government agency responsible for managing national natural and cultural resources, as well as for providing recreational opportunities for domestic and international publics. The Interpretation and Education Division of the NPS is designed to educate the public and help visitors make personal connections with lands and commemorative sites. Interpretive rangers and other publicly accessible interpretive materials tell stories of nature and country, encouraging visitors to reflect on issues of environmental protection, national history, and collective memory. How does the NPS mediate people’s understandings of such important yet abstract concepts, especially as anthropogenic climate change threatens National Parks and as society continues to question and reckon with difficult pasts? What tensions and complications do these contexts present to interpretive rangers and the NPS writ large, and how do they address them? More broadly, what service is the NPS to society?

To investigate how dynamics of mediation play out on the ground, I conducted observational fieldwork at Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California and the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, DC. I also drew from publicly available climate response reports, program briefs, and online interpretive materials to understand how the NPS manages its lands and communicates climate action strategies in the context of a changing global climate. Additionally, to contextualize contemporary interpretive messaging in the history of the environmental preservation movement and the NPS itself, I conducted a content analysis of literary and artistic products, news reports, and Congressional records.

Research at the National Mall and Memorial Parks finds that although the park offers visitors a wide array of opportunities to contemplate historically significant issues, visitors conceived of park resources as “spectacles” and rarely requested ranger interpretations; rangers nevertheless constructed consistent routines and lines of action to serve their audiences. Analysis of depictions of the natural environment show how cultural constructions of the environment provided the ideational and moral elements necessary to make preservation imaginable. And analysis of the NPS’s climate change response finds that the concept of environmental protection is shifting from rearward-looking models of preservation and conservation toward anticipatory models of adaptation and intervention; due to the NPS’s dual mandate to protect nature and facilitate enjoyment and recreation, it constructs and advocates for an individuated, civic mode of environmental responsibility. I discuss implications for scholarship on collective memory, street-level bureaucracies, institutional logics, and environmental governance and responsibility.