Description
National parks are made up of many unique and beautiful places that offer visitors chances for recreation, enjoyment of natural resources, and education. One main way parks educate visitors about the parks and conservation is through conversation. Rangers parks reach out to visitors to provide safety, offer needed information, and provide tours and scheduled talks. Additionally, rangers are charged with helping to enforce the rules in the parks to protect the resources they contain. This research focused on one national park in the western United States, to better understand rangers’ methods of communicating with visitors to promote conservation. Interviews with rangers revealed an ongoing binary, or a dualism, between the need to promote both recreation and preservation in the park. Furthermore, sub-tensions resulting from this dualism arose. Rangers expressed the paradox in wearing their uniforms, which could come across as intimidating to marginalized populations. They also described a tension between a need to educate visitors while enforcing the rules. Additionally, there was a tension between what the NPS and Department of Interior allowed rangers to say in the park, and what the rangers really wanted to say. Lastly, there was an apparent tension, or duality, over the use of technology in the park, with some rangers believing that technological education was not as impactful. Discussion surrounding these results indicate that the role of neoliberal values and colonial history is highly relevant in the parks. The discussion also highlights the potential for science-based communication to be promoted in the parks, and shows the importance of future research in studying rangers’ communication in national parks. Keywords: national parks, environmental communication, park rangers, dialectical tensions, neoliberalism, science communication, conservation communication
