How Park Rangers Talk About Climate Change: Messages, Audiences and Methods

A 2022 study from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 64% of Americans are somewhat or very worried about climate change, yet 67% of those people admit they rarely or never talk about it with friends or family. Park interpreters are in a position to start that conversation, and an Alaska Park Science article by John Morris, Laura Buchheit, Jamie Hart, Laurie Lamm and Paul Ollig of the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service describes how they go about it in Alaska: explain the science, but also move people to care.

A sign in Kenai Fjords National Park marks where Exit Glacier ended in 2005, helping people see climate change impacts. Image: NPS/Jessica Weinberg McCloskey.

A shared method

Since 2004 the National Park Service has worked with NASA and other federal agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service, in the Earth to Sky Partnership. Interpreters, educators and scientists form a community of practice there to share findings and communication techniques and to develop science-rich programs for parks, refuges and other sites. The article says the best interpretive products are simple, letting observation and experience lead people to act, and that conclusions people reach through their own discussion and shared experience are much more powerful than ones they are told to draw.

When the story is complex, interpreters follow a deliberate process: define the key messages, work out who the audiences are, and customize the methods so each message lands. Most Alaska parks are subsistence parks, whose communities have lived experience of climate effects on the environment, fish and wildlife and way of life, so the article stresses audience-centered experiences grounded in both science and Indigenous knowledge.

Four examples

Cruise-ship passengers. The informal setting puts passengers in control of the conversation: they choose among scientific, historical and Indigenous topics, and rangers invite them to share their own experience. Visitors often call these contacts a highlight of their trip. Glacier Bay interpreters revised the traveling desk displays on the ships to focus on the science of how climate is influencing the park, to prompt curiosity and talk about glaciers.

Kennicott Glacier. It is one of the most easily accessed of Alaska's thousands of glaciers, is shrinking rapidly, and is typical of other non-tidewater glaciers in the state. One of the questions interpreters hear most is whether the debris-covered toe of the glacier is mining tailings, which shows visitors are drawing wrong conclusions about the roles of mining and glacier change in the valley. The 2020 plan has two parts: the first sets out purpose, audiences and themes; the second describes interpretive opportunities tied to the valley's existing or planned infrastructure, on site and online. The park began putting it into effect in 2023. One new product is a wayside sign that answers the "mine tailings" question with history and stories from people who lived there from the mining days to the present. The park is also considering Chronolog, a citizen-science station where visitors take photos that join an online time-lapse of the scene.

From science to a landslide

The partnership also links interpreters to climate scientists. Since 2015, NASA's Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) has involved hundreds of scientists in a large-scale study of environmental change across the Arctic, and interpreters have learned from it how field and process studies underpin predictions of change. As the campaign enters its third and final phase, new communication products are planned.

The Pretty Rocks landslide in Denali National Park and Preserve shows what is at stake. Geologists have documented it as active since at least the 1960s. Before 2014 it caused only small cracks needing moderate maintenance every 2 to 3 years, but its movement has gone from inches per year before 2014 to inches per month in 2017, inches per day in 2019 and up to 0.65 inches per hour in 2021. The article ties this to climate: based on climate data from 1950 to 2010, the park's temperature has risen by 7.7°F, and warmer temperatures with heavy precipitation are thawing permafrost and speeding up many landslides in the area. Since 2021 interpreters have been posted at the road closure to explain it, and visitors are encouraged to hike 2.5 miles to an overlook to see the site. The authors say those roving conversations have been one of the most effective approaches, and that time-lapse videos of the slope moving have worked well too.

The Pretty Rocks landslide in 2019 after a heavy rain. Image: NPS/Weebee Aschenbrenner.

Hope as the goal

The article ends with the message it says scientists and northern communities are sending: society must address climate change sooner rather than later. Explaining the science, the changes on the landscape and the reasons for them is only half of an interpreter's task; the other half is to provoke people to care for the resources at risk, and the authors count societal action as the ultimate measure of success.

Sources

• National Park Service, Alaska Park Science 22(1), Communicating Science and Inspiring Hope, by John Morris, Laura Buchheit, Jamie Hart, Laurie Lamm and Paul Ollig (National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service), 2023; the photograph of rangers with passengers and the report-cover images are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.