Connecting People with Nature

I caught a fascinating session Thursday morning at 8:00am that is central to our conference theme: how to keep parks relevant in a changing world. Alan Latourelle, CEO of Parks Canada, led off. “We are the largest landowner in terms of parks organizations in the world. We were the first parks agency. At our centennial we had a lot of time to reflect.” He set the stage with points we all know but too often lose sight of, “It’s really about hope and inspiration. It’s really about the hearts and minds.”

Alan Latourelle, CEO Parks Canada

Alan described the changing face of Canada: “Almost three-quarters of Canadians live in one of the 33 major cities of Canada, with 40% in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. After Australia we have the second largest immigrant population. New immigrants account for over half of new population growth. Few of our [park] visitors are new Canadians. We are very dependent currently on less than 20% of our population.” Park visitors are increasingly older and more affluent. And he drew the link between visitation and public support for parks.

“We’ve developed a new concept of national park, Rouge National Urban Park, which will be available by transit, ‘the people’s park.’”

Parks Canada has launched the “Learn to Camp” program, partnering with Mountain Equipment Coop, in about 40 parks, targeting urban populations. They give free park passes for grade 8 students, about 400,000 of them. And they are online: “Over the last three years we have become the highest followers on Facebook and Twitter of all federal agencies.” And they are working where they do not have real estate, developing a strategy with provincial parks by August whereby Parks Canada will be participate in provincial park programs near urban areas.

“As we look to the future, there are two key ingredients. We need abundance of wild species, but we need abundance of people in parks. We want Canadians to become the stewards of our special places.”

“If we don’t act quickly park supporters will become the endangered species of the future.”

Alan was followed by two excellent presentations from Australia, Sally Barnes, Chief Executive, Office of Environment and Heritage, Government of New South Wales; and Greg Leaman, Director of Natural and Cultural Heritage, South Australia. Both spoke of programs to connect people with nature, including the dispossessed. “In Australia we have had 200 years of dispossession; it has taken us 200 years to acknowledge their stewardship,” said Sally. She described a variety of programs, from urban parks to lowering the threshold of visitation at sites. She showed several applications of technology. Answering concerns that people, especially young people, spend too much time on electronics and not outside, she said, “We’ve given up! It’s not a war, they won.” She showed an app for crowd-sourcing whale sightings along the coast near Sydney, and WilderQuest an engaging and fun computer program that engages kids, then leads them outside to take photos of their back yard, a local park, and finally a national park.

“If you are too focused on the greater good you can become disconnected. We are trying to become more customer focused.” “People feel disconnected.”

Greg Leaman took a bit more of a philosophical approach. “We often hear that parks are a middle-class construct. They are the ones who can get to parks, afford the equipment to experience them. There is a social justice question. How do we make it possible for others to be able to [benefit from parks]; how to make them relevant to all society? I don’t know the answer but we are starting to ask the question.”

“We should be out there engaging in different sectors … health sectors, mining sector, aboriginal communities….Let’s look at the glass half-full and not half-empty. What are the new paradigms, what should we be doing that is innovative?”

Ernesto Enkerlin, Chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas, spoke both about his native Mexico and from a global perspective. In Mexico’s National Conservation Week “we are recruiting the conservationists of the future.” 

“We sometimes forget that most of the world is different than North America, or different from Australia. ….We need to have people incorporate nature into their lives, maybe not in a recreational way but in their livelihood. “We need to make urban populations understand that people on the land can be the best allies” to conserve the land.

“As WCPA we create ways that the urban population is in the countryside and is in contact with rural life.”

All the presentations and discussions demonstrated excellent examples of efforts to make parks more relevant, and to ensure that both visitors and park agency staff reflect the demographics of each country. But I still detect a basic premise of working to bring people to our perception of parks and nature. I’m not sure we have fully come to terms with a reality that many people simply have a different world view, and different perceptions of nature. Truly understanding the cultural bases of those views and attitudes is more important than ever, and will prepare us for making parks more relevant in the future. But the efforts described in the session left me very hopeful.