Funding Lags for Historic, Cultural Parks Compared to Large, Popular Parks This headline, from a recent article in the National Parks Traveler, was no surprise to the Living Landscape Observer. The story goes on to document funding and staffing inequities in the National Park Service (NPS). Some reasons for this disparity are:
The Origin Story – While the founding legislation spoke to multiple values, the early national parks were branded in the public eye as great scenic landscapes.
The Nature/Culture Divide – Early parks were often wrongly depicted as places of "untrammeled" nature. As the NPS professionalized, its research and management focus was on natural issues. This disciplinary gulf between nature and culture is reinforced by academia and by governmental organizational charts.
The Ever Shrinking NPS Budget – The Traveler’s article records the agency's growing fiscal deficit and demonstrates how cultural programs took the biggest cuts.
Is it the New Stories? – The challenges faced by the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument are used in the article as an example of the problems that can confront recently designated park units. Telling vitally important national stories of the Civil Rights Movement, labor struggles, and more, these places face barriers including budget short falls, public expectations of what a park should look like, and perhaps most problematically,discomfort with facing these parts of the past.
The Living Landscape Observer is a website, blog and monthly e-newsletter that offers commentary and information on the emerging field of large landscape conservation.
If ever there was a cultural landscape worthy of being a national heritage corridor, it is this one. The landscape tells stories of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Right Movement, among others. Low Country local and regional leaders hoped national designation would bring badly needed public exposure; funding to preserve, interpret and market the corridor’s sites and communities; and greater clout when advocating for the community preservation. The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor was finally designated in 2006. The process of creating the corridor management plan has been managed by the National Park Service in cooperation with the 21-member Commission established to oversee the corridor. Read More Here.
This year marks the bicentennial of Fredrick Law Olmsted Sr.’s birth. Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War. Abolition, and the National Park Idea is the latest book to examine his life and legacy, with an emphasis on Olmsted's views of park making as an act of great civic value. It provides a concise overview of his career and, most significantly, his central role in creating public parks starting with Central Park and continuing to his sojourn in California where he applied his ideas to the future of Yosemite Valley. The book sets his work and writings in the ferment of social change in the pre and post-Civil War period and examines how and if his ideas still resonate with us today.
Please join us on June 15, 2022 from 1:00pm to 1:45pm ET for a discussion with Alan Spears, Senior Director of Cultural Resources in the Government Affairs department of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) and Sara Capen, Executive Director of the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area.
The program will explore what makes the National Heritage Area model unique and how its emphasis on partnerships and collaboration can inform the future of preservation and conservation.
We are pleased to partner with the George Wright Society (GWS) on this event. The GWS promotes protected area stewardship by bringing practitioners together to share their expertise. Register now, space is limited.
Pennsylvania Conservation Landscapes: Success at Scale
Want to learn more about an innovative state-based large landscape initiative? Watch our recent webinar on the Pennsylvania Conservation Landscape program with Cindy Dunn, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and Ernest Cook, Director of the Network for Landscape Conservation.
News and Notes
2022 Marks the 200th Birthday of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr
A year long bicentennial commemoration is underway to consider his works and legacy. Learn more at https://olmsted200.org