Ken Burns and Dan Wenk discuss the National Parks and climate change. (Kellen Henry/MNS)
WASHINGTON—From the snowy vistas of Alaska’s Denali National Park to the lush hardwood forests of the Great Smoky Mountains, the country’s national parks are as diverse as the American people. But the demographics of visitors to the parks don’t reflect that diversity.
A report released last week by the National Parks Second Century Commission, chaired by former Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee and former Sen. J. Bennett Johnson of Louisiana, showed that white tourists comprise 36 percent of park visitors, while Hispanic visitors, at 27 percent, and African-Americans, at 13 percent, are disproportionately small compared with the U.S. population breakdown. Native Americans and Asian-Americans visited parks in larger proportions compared with their numbers in the overall U.S. population.
Documentarian Ken Burns speaks to the National Press Club about his new film series, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”(Bridget Macdonald/MNS)
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The report, representing more than a year of hearings and research by the commission, stressed the need to increase the parks’ focus on education and requested a bump in funding for the parks.
The National Park Service said it wants to ramp up its efforts to draw in more minority visitors by its 2016 centennial celebration.
“[We’re] trying to provide outreach in areas that are not our traditional visitors, but (those) visitors, as Ken Burns has eloquently talked about, don’t see themselves at our national parks right now,” said National Park Service Acting Director Dan Wenk.
The commission’s report highlighted a need to use new social networking strategies to bring in younger and more diverse groups, including making multi-lingual park resources available to visitors. It also stressed using new technology to make the parks more appealing to visitors and emphasizing the variety of cultural heritages and histories within the parks.
The parks are getting a boost from Burns, the American director known for film histories of subjects like baseball, jazz and the American Civil War.
In a new, 12-hour, six-part film called “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” Burns has turned his lens on the people who worked to found and preserve the country’s 58 national parks. The series is showing this week on PBS stations nationwide.
In addition to the series, Burns is pursuing a research effort called “Untold Stories” with funding from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, aimed at highlighting stories of people of color who are part of the park system’s history.
“We still have some populations in our country that do not yet feel the ownership of the national parks and it has been our commitment, indeed our mandate to try to reach them, to show them heroes of the national parks that look and sound like them,” Burns said in a speech at the National Press Club on Monday.
Burns included such stories as that of Capt. Charles Young, the third African-American graduate of West Point who was born into slavery in Kentucky and who led the black Buffalo Soldiers to protect the national parks.
Burns has received some of the credit for reinvigorating public interest in sites like Gettysburg National Military Park, where visits increased by as much as 300 percent after his “The Civil War” documentary drew an audience of 40 million during its premier in September of 1990.
“The Ken Burns documentary definitely got a lot of people interested in learning more about the American Civil War and coming to Gettysburg,” said Gettysburg spokeswoman Katie Lawhon.
Lawhon said the new Burns documentary publicity will coincide well with the park’s initiatives to draw in new audiences of underserved demographics. The park revamped its visitor center last September to tell the broader story of the causes and consequences of the Civil War.
“It’s about the battle of Gettysburg and also about why we had a civil war in this country and the aftermath issues related to citizenship in the nation and ongoing civil rights in this country,” she said.
“We tend not to have visitors from minority groups in some of our national parks and we’re working hard to change that because we belong to all of the American public.”