Children participate in a hands-on environmental education program along the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument (Colorado and Utah). The Young Naturalist Program gives participants a chance to discover river organisms like aquatic insects, identify their habitat needs and food webs, and relate them to changes in river flow from dams upstream.
Download a PDF file of this section of this report (327 KB).
Resource protection that hides in the woods and does its thing shyly, silently, and without explaining what it’s doing is not protection at all. Unobserved, it will be unsustaining, unappreciated. Resource protection has to walk out of the park in the heart of the visitor.
—Roger Kennedy
14th Director of the National Park Service
Countless Americans first stepped into wilderness and developed a better understanding of themselves and their country’s fine natural heritage in a unit of the national park system. The National Park Service facilitates this role by stimulating a sense of public ownership, understanding, and appreciation of parks through its educational programs. This lasting and powerful effect has the potential to become even greater. As the following articles for 2000 indicate, the National Park Service is developing innovative educational programs that reach people beyond parks, encourage their involvement in natural resource management, and invite them to develop and share their own meanings for parks. To do this properly requires scholarship and inclusion of all people and perspectives. By following this approach, outreach education, like effective in-park interpretation, can enable the National Park Service to help people see their own reflections in parks and to contribute to their care.
Articles
Developing ambassadors for endangered fish
By David Whitman
Watershed science program unites park and neighbors
By Dave Kronk
Student stewardship in Glacier National Park
By Joyce Lapp
Sidebars
Black Canyon of the Gunnison opens new exhibit about the Gunnison River
Scouts and Park Service collaborate on resource conservation
This material is from Natural Resource Year in Review--2000, published by the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, in May 2000 (publication D-1459)
/YearInReview/yir/yir2000/pages/06_outreach_education/06_001_outreach_education.html
Last Updated: 06/17/2001
Direct comments on this website to jeff_selleck@nps.gov