Welcoming Minorities to State Parks

Transcript

As minority populations grow and public lands shrink, state officials are faced with a problem - how to promote cultural diversity in the great outdoors. In a series of public meetings, Pennsylvania policy makers are beginning to ask how they can engage non-traditional users of parks, forests, and other amenities. Here's Deborah Weisberg with report, the final installment in our series on connecting people to the outdoors.

Weisberg: Although the crowd at Venture Outdoors' recent Great Outdoors Festival was largely white, minority teens were a presence, too, as they fished the Allegheny River from the sea wall near Downtown Pittsburgh. Fifteen year old Charles Stewart was among them.

Stewart: "Most people in the city they've never been fishing and hunting...once you do you'll like even if don't catch anything...it's fun."

Weisberg: Stewart is from Youth Places, a program that helps inner city kids stay off the streets and out of trouble. According to his mentor UveCalloway, one of the best ways to do that is through fishing and camping, something few have experienced before.

Calloway: "The most outdoors they do is go to the basketball court or what not. You tell a kid to stay all night in a tent all night and get warm by a campfire and he'll look at you like you're crazy, so you start them out small and get bigger and bigger with it."

Weisberg: Calloway's goal is to get urban kids into state parks and forests, although experts say it's a tough sell, because parks officials traditionally haven't reached out to minorities.

Eubanks: "The system has always been dependent on the user coming to the gate, so as long as recreationists show up on cite then they appear on the radar screen, if they don't come to the gate they don't exist."

Weisberg: Ted Lee Eubanks is president and CEO of Fermata, Inc., a Texas-based firm helping Pennsylvania state parks officials make outdoors areas more welcoming.

Eubanks: "The Governor and Secretary DeBerardinis and others are interested in building a broad-based constituency that supports this incredible tradition of conservation in this state. This was the state that created conservation Gilbert Pinchot made up the term. And so they're interested in seeing this continued forward and it will depend on all citizens, not just those who've historically been involved."

Weisberg: Eubanks says there are probably hundreds of reasons why minorities feel disenfranchised from the great outdoors, including state and national parks. There, you seldom find ethnic diversity among rangers or management.

Eubanks: "It's something we've talked about many, many times, is how do we recruit more African American kids to pursue resource mgt or forestry and those sorts of things when for most African Americans this doesn't seem to be a career path they want to follow. Until you can drive into a state park and be greeted by someone like you, it's going to be very difficult for us to grow this much larger."

Weisberg: Nina Roberts, an assistant professor at San Francisco State University. She's also troubled by minority disengagement from the great outdoors. She says historic barriers, such as poverty and lack of transportation, are still a problem. But, she says, burgeoning middle class African American and Latino populations are also being ignored.

Robert: "Part of what we're seeing in this country is that land management has come from a very traditional mindset, and so when people speak of...well if you want to enjoy the lands...if you can't read the signs learn to read English...or if you can't understand the rangers, learn English...and that's a very Euro-centric way of thinking."

Weisberg: What Youth Places is doing for Pittsburgh kids is seen as a model approach to a problem plaguing states nationwide. Ernie Gammage runs an urban angling program in Austin, Texas.

Gammage: "Our challenge now is to find those organizations...community partners...that will embed our programming...that is camping, fishing, hiking...into their programming, so instead of a community center taking their kids to play basketball or baseball...where do they take them? They take them to a state park, a county park...and they camp...they learn about the outdoors...and so they've become our clones...and we've become very successful at that."

Weisberg: Gammage says the future of the public parks and forestry systems depends on attracting new users.

Gammage: "We need to build a constituency and we need to build customers. It's just like any business....A basic paradigm for what we do in outreach is. If you play in it, you care about it, you want to take care of it."

For the Allegheny Front, I'm Deborah Weisberg.