Conservation Diaries: Evelyn Moreno, Telling the Story of Conservation

Conservation Diaries is a National Park Service podcast in which young people who came to the Park Service as interns, volunteers, fellows or employees talk about conservation and why young people should help look after public lands. Nicole Segnini interviewed Evelyn Moreno for it in 2022. This page draws on the episode and the profile published with it.

In a field at Shenandoah National Park. Credit: National Park Service.

From journalism school to the Park Service

Evelyn Moreno was born in Chicago and moved to Texas at 10; she thinks of Texas as home. Both of her parents came to the United States from Mexico. At the University of Texas at Austin she majored in journalism and minored in geography — two subjects she had cared about since childhood. What she wanted, she said, was to write about the environment, about environmental problems in communities of color, and about wildlife.

Her route to nature did not run through national parks. She did not visit one until college. Her father took her to their local community park, and on family visits to Mexico she came to love the landscapes of the rural areas her parents are from.

During and after college she held several internships with publications and organisations, mostly writing about the environment and wildlife, social justice movements and immigration. Then she found a communications fellowship with the Park Service's Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance Program (RTCA), offered through the Hispanic Access Foundation, a Park Service partner that connects Latino people with career opportunities and civic engagement. Before that, she knew little about RTCA or the Park Service.

The fellowship lasted 11 months. She wrote articles and produced newsletters about conservation and outdoor recreation projects to make the program better known. Partway through, her supervisor asked whether she would like to stay on afterwards. She said yes at once — to her it was a dream job — and by the end of the fellowship she had Public Land Corps hiring authority.

At the Green Latinos conference in 2019, with David Vela (centre) and Christian Gallegos-Alarcón, a former RTCA communications fellow. Credit: National Park Service.

What RTCA does

RTCA gives free help to communities working on conservation and outdoor recreation projects anywhere in the United States: developing or restoring parks, conservation areas, rivers and wildlife habitat, and building programs that bring the next generation outdoors. It gives no money and no grants. Its staff work as collaborative partners, offering technical assistance through an application process held each year. Community groups, nonprofit organisations, tribal governments, national parks, and local, state and federal agencies can all apply.

Once hired full time, Moreno carried on with the same work. As a writer and editor based in Washington, DC, she writes articles and social media highlights and produces a magazine-style publication that looks more closely at the program's work on healthy communities, conserving lands and waters, and cooperation among public land managers. Projects usually run for one to two years and end with a plan; partners sometimes come back three or four years later to say the park is built and the community loves it. The people she works with, she said, are what she values most — staff who get visibly excited about new projects and about their partners' successes.

Reaching communities that have been left out

Much of her job is helping RTCA reach underrepresented communities and communities of color. One project she pointed to is the Sankofa Wetland Park and Nature Trail in New Orleans's Lower 9th Ward, a mostly Black neighbourhood devastated by Hurricane Katrina, where RTCA's help was part of an effort to make the area more resilient to future storms. In her view, such communities need and deserve support, and the program should make it easy for them to reach out, feel safe and heard, and gain the kind of access to the outdoors that wealthier communities already have. She regards that access as a basic human need and a matter of fairness, and wants these communities to know that public lands belong to them too.

With the RTCA Southeast Region at its project selection meetings in Apopka, Florida; besides her communications work, she was to help the region with three community assistance projects. Credit: National Park Service.

Why more people like her should work in these places

She had never pictured herself in the federal government. Apart from park rangers, she had no idea what jobs the Park Service had; at journalism school she was thinking of news networks and magazines. Her mother had long urged her to work for the government, and she had answered that she had no idea how anyone got in. The Park Service's jobs, the profile notes, range from interpretation in parks to scientific research and community assistance, and its youth programs exist to help young people from diverse backgrounds find their way in.

Moreno thinks it matters that the Park Service keeps reaching communities of color and bringing their young people into the workforce. People from those communities have their own connections to the land and their own ways of enjoying the outdoors — a carne asada, for instance. She and her colleagues of color have advised others at RTCA that working with Latino communities may take more time: meeting over a cafecito, talking the project through, making people feel safe and heard. Perspectives like these, she said, can push leadership to rethink outreach and conservation, and to produce Spanish-language materials that bring more people to national and local parks and more applications for help.

In New York's Adirondack region. Credit: National Park Service.

Her advice

Federal job applications can be complicated and wearing, which is why she wants young people to know about fellowships like hers. She has two pieces of advice: search everywhere for opportunities in what you care about and do not give up; and do not be afraid to ask for help. She had to ask how to write a federal résumé — hers was one page, and she found it needed to be something like ten — and how to find her way around USAJOBS. The people around her, she said, were there to help. Be confident, share what you care about, and take risks.

More about RTCA and how to apply for its help is at nps.gov/rtca; Park Service jobs, internships and volunteering are at nps.gov/youthprograms.

The host, Nicole Segnini. Credit: National Park Service.

About the host

Nicole Segnini, born in Venezuela, created Conservation Diaries in 2021 during a Latino Heritage Internship Program placement with the Park Service's Office of Communications. Drawing on her background in journalism, as a social media influencer and as a television news producer, she set out to let young people in the Park Service tell their own stories, so that the next generation of stewards, whatever their background, could picture themselves in conservation careers. She has said that many young people in underrepresented and minority communities care deeply about conservation, history, nature and parks, and that their work is often overlooked.

Sources

Based on "Conservation Diaries: Evelyn Moreno, Communicating the Importance of Conservation and Outdoor Recreation," a Conservation Diaries podcast episode (2022, host Nicole Segnini) and profile, published by the National Park Service.

• Evelyn Moreno's words from the interview are paraphrased throughout.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.