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35 interns at 19 park sites: the National Park Service's Landscape Stewardship Corps
The National Park Service is teaching young people the trades that keep historic landscapes alive, from fruit-tree care to masonry. The Landscape Stewardship Corps, part of the Service's Traditional Trades Advancement Program, is supported by the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Conservation Experience. It is made up of 35 interns at 19 national park sites. They are 18 to 30 years old and work 26-week stints to preserve, conserve and beautify historical and cultural landscapes, maintain infrastructure and help parks adapt to a changing climate.
What the interns do
The source describes five interns' work at five sites:
| Site | Work described |
|---|---|
| Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, Georgia | replacing invasive vegetation with native plants and helping curb erosion |
| Yosemite National Park, California | caring for a historic apple orchard |
| Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, New York | tending vegetable gardens and gravesite gardens |
| Hampton National Historic Site, Maryland | maintaining grounds and machinery |
| Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas | testing spring water and keeping up trails |
The trades
Interns learn trades tied to cultural landscape preservation: horticulture (fruit, vegetable and ornamental plant management), arboriculture (tree management), turf care, masonry, and monument preservation or carpentry. These trades are in high demand in parks and beyond.
The Park Service manager who oversees the corps calls this a fairly niche part of the job market, one that combines preservation, landscape maintenance and design, some construction, and a historic lens, so it is an interdisciplinary field. Teaching young people early in their careers, the manager says, prepares the next generation of employees who will care for these places through climate change, and that is critical.
Interns quoted in the source talk about putting conservation training into practice at once on a very large site, about learning a lot without having to go to school, and about preserving the feeling of a place with hundreds of years of history behind it.
One of five programs
The corps is one of five youth and young adult programs supported by the Inflation Reduction Act to help fortify park sites against a changing climate. The other four are the Community Volunteer Ambassador Climate Cohort, Scientists in Parks, the YMCA Partnership and the Pacific Islands Conservation Corps. The Act gives the Park Service what the source calls a historic opportunity to address ecosystem resilience, restoration and environmental planning needs, with funded projects from Alaska to Florida to Maine.
Sources
- National Park Service, "Landscape Stewardship Corps", https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/ira-landscapes-stewardship-corps.htm; rewritten in hubnx's own words.