Environman: The National Park Service's 1970s Push for Environmental Education

From the NPS History Collection's series "50 Nifty Finds".

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's … Environman? It sounds like a Saturday-morning superhero, but Environman was the National Park Service's symbol for its environmental education work in the 1970s. From 1967 the NPS became a leader in the field — something Director George B. Hartzog Jr. saw as vital to the survival of the parks and the planet — and many of its ideas echo in today's NPS climate change education.

Looking outward

Education has been part of the NPS mission since its creation on August 25, 1916. In 1917 Robert Sterling Yard became the first chief of its Education Division, his salary paid by Director Stephen T. Mather himself when the budget fell short.

But from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, interpretation mostly described a site's features rather than its meaning. In spring 1967 Interior Secretary Stewart Udall urged Hartzog to carry "the new conservation" to the whole country, citing Ansel Adams's view that NPS interpretation should reach people everywhere.

Hartzog also had a practical reason. Through the 1960s parks saw rising visits, traffic jams, overflowing campgrounds, rising crime and growing damage to plants and other resources. The NPS recognised, perhaps for the first time, that people could love their parks to death — so it needed to raise environmental awareness before people arrived.

NPS Director George B. Hartzog Jr., about 1968. NPS History Collection; photo by Cecil W. Stoughton.

A plan for environmental education

• July 1967: an NPS task force report, A Plan of Cooperation for Environmental Conservation, urged working with schools, youth groups and conservation organisations to teach children awareness of how natural and human processes interact.
• December 1967: Bill Everhart wrote that interpreting park resources to park visitors was not enough — the NPS had to carry "the general cause of conservation" beyond its parks.
• February 11, 1968: in a speech at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, Hartzog announced two programmes — curriculum materials for schools and environmental study areas in parks — to be run with local school systems, and a new Office of Environmental Education in Washington.

In a 1969 letter to The New York Times, Hartzog called environmental awareness "an idea whose time has come", warning that "we are running out of time" — but facing it "not with the long faces of doom".

NEED: learning through five "strands"

National Environmental Education Development (NEED) aimed to help each child develop a personal environmental ethic, from kindergarten through grade 12. It wove five "environmental strands" into existing school subjects — a sequence meant to help children see, feel, know and finally make decisions about their world:

1. variety and similarity — cataloguing what can be observed;
2. patterns — organising it into manageable sets;
3. interrelation and interdependence — studying the parts in action;
4. continuity and change — processes over time;
5. adaptation and evolution — continuing change that may lead to adjustment.

Outdoor time was essential — at least a week at three grade levels. The National Park Foundation funded the materials and published the Adventure in Environment series for kindergarten to grade 8.

A sixth-grade class at a NEED camp at Prince William Forest Park, 1968. NPS History Collection.

The NEED kit: four filmstrips, four audio cassettes and a teacher's guide. NPS History Collection.

A growing urgency

The 1970s opened with a national focus on the environment: President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act on January 1, 1970; the first Earth Day followed in April; and the Environmental Education Act of October 7, 1970, funded programmes to educate citizens about environmental quality and ecological balance, and called for "outdoor ecological study centers".

Environman

How the symbol was created is unknown, and so is its designer, but by May 1970 Environman appeared beside the NPS arrowhead on internal interpretive newsletters. On December 31, 1971, a rule in the Federal Register declared the name "Environman" and the symbol — officially the "Human Figure and Design" — government property, and set out how to get a licence to use them. A 1972 newspaper described it as a stylised man within concentric lines — a person amid forces that both conflict and harmonise, affecting and affected by him. It marked National Environmental Study Areas and the NEED landmark programme.

Environman pins, 1971; whether the different colours meant anything is unknown. NPS History Collection.

Seventh graders at Garnett-Patterson Junior High School, Washington, D.C., learn about Environman. NPS History Collection; photo by Cecil W. Stoughton.

The programmes

A class at Catoctin Mountain Park working through Adventure in Environment*, 1971. NPS History Collection.*

Marley Thomas shows EXPAND materials to NBC's Joe Garagiola on the Today show, 1972. NPS History Collection.

Envirovan and Noah's Park

The Envirovan, dedicated on May 12, 1971, was a $40,000 converted motor home, 12 by 60 feet, named by 11-year-old Marian Whittaker. Run by naturalist Dean Clark Einwalter, it took 35 students at a time, with 20 displays, live animals and field equipment. About 6,000 people a week visited it near the Washington Monument in June and July 1971. Costly to run, it was removed in 1983.

Noah's Park was the former Coast Guard lightship LV116 Chesapeake, launched in 1930 and acquired in August 1971. After a year's refit it became a floating classroom on water as a precious resource — its red hull and light warning that pollution threatened the environment. Moored off East Potomac Park from autumn 1972, with aquariums and a laboratory, it hosted schoolchildren on weekdays, college projects, and Sea Explorers who crewed it. More than 8,000 students took part between December 1971 and June 1974. It went to Baltimore in 1982, became a National Historic Landmark in 1989, and can still be visited there.

Lightship Chesapeake fitted out as an NPS environmental education centre, 1972. NPS History Collection.

Peak and decline

For the 1972 centennial of Yellowstone, the NPS set up an Office of Environmental Interpretation and declared the week of September 17 Environmental Education Emphasis Week ("Who will help Environman in triple E week?" asked one headline). By then there were more than 90 study areas in NPS units, and Environman tie tacks on the men's dress uniform. By the end of 1977 there were 127 in parks and 53 outside; in 1976 more than 400,000 teachers and students took part, and 5,000 teachers attended workshops.

Environmental Education Emphasis Week poster, co-branded with the national parks centennial logo. NPS History Collection.

But when President Nixon fired Hartzog in December 1972, the programme lost its champion. Some blame the Bicentennial's shifting priorities, others say the programme was ahead of its time; the article argues the numbers above point instead to a lack of political will. His successor, Ronald H. Walker, did not share his enthusiasm, some staff felt traditional interpretation had suffered, and the Washington programme office was eventually closed, though many parks carried on. In the early 1980s, amid budget cuts, Director Russell E. Dickenson circulated a paper arguing that the NPS's job was to interpret park resources, "not to function as subject matter educators or as spokespeople for special causes". On September 4, 1996, the NPS dropped the regulations protecting Environman, noting it had not been used since the early 1970s.

The Environman tie tack, added to the men's dress uniform for the 1972 centennial. NPS History Collection.

The legacy

Hartzog's efforts echo in continuing programmes such as those at Everglades National Park, in "Parks as Classrooms" (1991), and above all in the NPS's National Climate Change Interpretation and Education Strategy (2016), whose conviction that every national park is a place to learn about climate change "could have been written by Hartzog himself".

Sources

• National Park Service, NPS History Collection, "50 Nifty Finds #43: Environman." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/50-nifty-finds-43-environman.htm
• Its sources include NPS newsletters from 1967 to 1974, the 1976 brochure Environmental Education in the National Park Service, oral histories of Wayne Bryant (1973) and George Hartzog (2005), Dwight Pitcaithley's National Parks and Education, and newspaper articles of 1971 and 1972.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.