 |
 |
Former Director of the National Park Service, Newton B. Drury,
once observed that national parks are established not solely to preserve
scenic landscapes and historic places, but also to provide a greater dividend because of their unique value in "Ministering to the Human Mind and Spirit"Each National park site exists because it has some transcendent meaning. It was designated because an influential group of people saw the site as meaningful and significant to the values and interests of the American people.
Many park visitors understand this meaning when they visit national parks.
A key mission of a publisher-interpreter is to promote the protection and preservation of the resource. If the American public is to take a committed and active role in the protection and preservation of the resource, it is critical that they become sensitized to the value of the resource. When visitors care more about the resource, when they come to understand their own relationship to the resource, their values, loves, beliefs, and spiritual awareness, they may be motivated to action resulting in stewardship for that resource.
It is essential that interpeters-publishers realize their primary role is to cultivate this care and love for the resource and what it represents.
It is the job of interpreter-publishers to connect readers to the meaning of the resource and provoke care.
"While human technologies have temporarily remolded Glen Canyon, the canyon has most certainly remolded our ecological consciousness. It has awakened us to certain environmental questions and consequences: questions regarding humanity's right to reshape the world, and the consequences of running out of world to reshape.!"
"Yellowstone is not just a place, it is an ideal. While its original intent was to preserve geothermal" curiosities," it has come to symbolize something far greater. It represents one of the few times in the history of Western culture when voice and dignity have been given to wildness -- to plans, and animals and process."
". . . nothing short of defending this country in wartime compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our decedents than it is for us . . . "
"The Everglades are a test. If we pass the test, we get to keep planet earth."
The units of the National Park system preserve tangible resources. These three things generally represent the tangible, primary resources of National Parks.
Objects: Museum collections, exhibits, and research collections are filled with original objects of great significance. These objects only have meaning, however, in a larger context--their significance must be linked to ideas and values through education.
Places: From vast wilderness to intimate historic sites, the sense of place, as preserved and protected within the park system has the potential for powerful lessons. The National Park Service preserves much more than scenery. Just being in a place where something of great significance occurred can have a "transforming" effect.
Events: Often the preservation efforts of the National Park Service focus less on tangible resources and more on events that occurred over a span of time and geography. What happened may be as important as where it happened.
"Black Canyon is like no other place on earth--it has is own feeling, is own rhythm, its own life, and more than anything, its own pervasive timelessness. Time stands still here. We feel very small."
"The care of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart."
"In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls."
"Nothing speaks so eloquently of the tragedy of Georgia's Anersonville as the row upon row of headstones in the National Cemetery. They represent one of the greatest misfortunes of the Civil War. . . one of the by-products of modern conflict: massive numbers of prisoners. 'Thurn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope'." --
"Great Smoky Mountains National Park thus preserves no only life and land, but offers he proof and promise of society's commitment to improving the quality of human life." --
Now the door is opened
for you
What's Next?-You! . . .You've got
to step
through it -- Now!
