Why Do So Few Minority People Visit National Parks? Visitation and the Accessibility of “America's Best Idea”

Abstract

It has been said that national parks are “America's Best Idea,” they are among the most famous and instantly recognizable places in the country, and they attract visitors from all over the world. Yet visitors to these sites are overwhelmingly white. A number of theoretical perspectives have been proposed for the absence of minority visitors, including socioeconomic marginality, differing cultural norms, and the lingering legacy of discrimination, but geography is not one of the usual explanations. Given the strong associations between particular regions of the country and the locations of parks, as well as the uneven spatial distribution of population, the absence of geography as an explanation is striking. We examine this issue with the expectation that geography is an important part of the explanation for low minority visitation rates. Put simply, do potential minority visitors live anywhere near national park units? Are they more likely to visit the ones to which they live nearest? This study uses the geographic concept of accessibility to examine the spatial relationships between national parks and potential minority visitors. Accessibility was measured using driving times between each of 285 parks and county populations, with the results compared to a visitation database compiled for fifty-one park units. There is clearly a relationship between park visitation and the location of minority populations, in the sense that racial or ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented at closer and smaller national parks.

Se ha dicho que los parques nacionales son “la Mejor Idea de los Estados Unidos,” los que figuran entre los lugares más famosos y de reconocimiento instantáneo en el país, y que atraen visitantes de todas las partes del mundo. Con todo, abrumadoramente los visitantes de estos lugares son blancos. Se ha propuesto un cierto número de perspectivas teóricas para explicar la ausencia de las minorías entre los visitantes, incluyendo la marginalidad socioeconómica, normas culturales diferentes y el legado supérstite de la discriminación; pero la geografía no es una de las explicaciones usuales. Dadas las fuertes asociaciones entre regiones particulares del país y las localizaciones de los parques, lo mismo que la desigual distribución espacial de la población, la ausencia de la geografía en el estudio de tal cuestión es sorprendente. Examinamos el asunto con la esperanza de que la geografía sea parte importante en la explicación a las bajas tasas de visitantes de las minorías. Poniéndolo en términos simples, ¿es que los potenciales visitantes de las minorías viven en lugares cercanos a los parques nacionales? ¿Es más probable que ellos visiten aquellos parques más cercanos a donde ellos viven? Este estudio utiliza el concepto geográfico de la accesibilidad para examinar las relaciones espaciales existentes entre los parques nacionales y los visitantes potenciales de las minorías. La accesibilidad fue medida utilizando los tiempos de viaje en carro entre cada uno de los 285 parques y las poblaciones de los condados, comparando los resultados con una base de datos de visitas compiladas para cincuenta y una unidades parque. Claramente se estableció una relación entre las vivitas a los parques y la localización de las poblaciones minoritarias, en el sentido de que las minorías raciales o étnicas están desproporcionalmente representadas en los parques nacionales más cercanos y más pequeños.

Key Words:

• accessibility
• national parks
• race

关键词:

• 交通方便
• 国家公园
• 种族

Palabras clave:

• accesibilidad
• parques nacionales
• raza

Notes

1. This sentiment was recently popularized by filmmaker Ken Burns's PBS documentary and book (Duncan and Burns 2009) and is also well known from the 1983 essay “The Best Idea We Ever Had” by Stegner (1998) but apparently originated in a 1912 comment by Lord James Bryce, the British ambassador to the United States.

2. There is a debate about long-term shifts away from outdoor activities toward indoor, passive, digitally based recreation (Pergams and Zaradic 2008; Warnick et al. 2010), but this issue is not addressed here.

3. The idea of national parks has spread throughout the world, resulting in a proliferation of designations, management objectives, and standards, the meaning of which differs widely among countries (Frost and Hall 2009). The designations used here for U.S. park units will therefore not translate well into other contexts. The focus here is not on the level of protection for natural resources, as in the classification used by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN 1992), and the units of the U.S. national park system discussed here appear in several IUCN categories. We also recognize that the relationships between indigenous peoples or minorities and parks are an equally or even more contentious issue in many other countries (Zeppel 2009).

4. For long-distance travel incorporating airline travel times into accessibility calculations would be useful. The methodological and computational details of air accessibility would add considerable complexity to the study, however (Grubesic and Zook 2007). Multimodal accessibility calculation has been measured with travel times by appropriate mode between cities (Paez 2004), but for this research travel times must be calculated between each park to each county centroid. This would require a more sophisticated methodology, using either entirely highway or a highway–air–highway route, depending on distance, proximity to airports, flight schedules, and cost, similar to that used by Lewis and Ammah-Tagoe (2007) to estimate shipping routes using highway, air, rail, and water modes. This is beyond the scope of this work, but it is clearly an important issue for further research.

5. The racial categories used in the surveys are consistent with that of the 2000 census except that there are no Other or Two or More Races categories. Respondents were allowed to indicate multiracial status, however, by selecting more than one race, and the numbers do not necessarily add to 100 percent. Although the surveys do include respondents by country of origin, the race and ethnicity numbers are not broken down by origin and are assumed here to correspond to the U.S. population. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders were not examined in this study due to their extremely small visitation numbers, as they were present at only twelve of the fifty-one park units and averaged only 0.25 percent of all visitors at those.

6. The national parks are also at the forefront of many environmental problems that provide additional challenges to the future of the system. This research in no way denies these issues but suggests that increasing public support for parks is essential to meeting them. Although the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park has appropriately received tremendous attention, it can be argued that the presence of African American families in that park might be of far greater significance to the future existence and environmental health of Yellowstone.

7. Three Civil Rights Movement sites in Alabama not part of the national park system are currently under consideration for nomination as UNESCO World Heritage Sites (NPS 2010b).