Focus on America

Visitors and staff use filling stations.

A few years ago, Zion National Park sold more than 60,000 plastic bottles of water annually to thirsty visitors. Most emptied bottles landed in trash bins and some littered trails in the pristine park. Today, thirsty visitors must bring their own bottles or buy reusable steel bottles at the visitor center and fill them up at one of six water filling stations in the park.

Rather than fighting over limited parking at the Zion visitor center, most tourists have also learned that it’s easier to take a free shuttle bus into the park. In 2009, 63 percent of visitors boarded a shuttle from a nearby town rather than drive into the park — a 229-square-mile (593-square-kilometer) treasure of deep canyons and towering red rocks in the Southwestern state of Utah.

Zion is one of 35 Climate Friendly Parks, an initiative to lower greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. national park system and to teach visitors how to limit their own impact on the environment. Each park that qualified for the program has conducted a greenhouse gas inventory and drawn up a plan that spells out goals for reducing emissions and energy use, and for conducting public outreach. The program is expected to swell to 65 participants by the end of 2010 as more parks complete their plans.

“Last year, we had 270 million visitors to our parks,” said Shawn Norton, the U.S. National Park Service’s chief of sustainable operations and climate change. “This started with the idea that national parks have an incredible opportunity to talk about climate change.”

Climate Friendly Parks also has an online tool known as CLIP that can be exported for free to other countries that want to measure their parks’ impact on the climate, Norton said.

And how do park visitors feel about not having access to conveniences such as bottled water?

“People come to the national park to be in a natural setting and to get away from the sounds of the city. They want to be inspired by things they’ve never seen before,” said Jim Gale, chief of interpretation at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Pacific island of Hawaii. “The public wants parks to be a legacy for their children and their children’s children.”

He said visitors are impressed by initiatives such as water filling stations that filter rainwater though sand and pump it to the tap using electricity generated by solar panels. When asked, Gale said, everybody supports the goal of conserving water and using renewable energy.

PARK CARBON FOOTPRINTS SMALL AND GETTING SMALLER

Zion’s goal is to lower its greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent by 2020, using 2004 as a baseline. The park vehicle fleet is gradually being converted to hybrid or electric, and the recycling program diverted 61,000 pounds of waste during the first seven months of the year. The park is also planning to make all of its operations energy-neutral. Just the removal of a water cooler from the visitor center, for example, has reduced energy consumption in that building by 10 percent. “We’re making progress,” said Ron Terry, the park’s chief of interpretation and visitor services.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park has committed to reducing transportation emissions 12.5 percent below 2006 levels by 2012. Two hydrogen-fueled shuttle buses have been purchased and are being tested for the park’s challenging terrain, which includes 6,000-foot elevation gains from sea level to the top of the park’s active volcanoes.

Meanwhile, park employees are transitioning to a central motor pool instead of each having a vehicle. Employees are also being encouraged to bike to work and work from home or at two satellite offices whenever practical. “We’re really trying to change behavior and we try to get our employees to walk the talk,” Gale said.

While such goals are laudable, parks and their staff have a relatively small impact on the environment considering that most parks are wilderness areas. Together, the nation’s 392 parks and their 20,000 employees produce carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to just 19,000 households, Norton said. The footprint swells considerably if you factor in the millions of cars, buses, cruise ships and planes that transport visitors, he added.

The next step for Climate Friendly Parks is to develop regional transportation plans that will assess how to get visitors to the park gate in a more environmentally friendly way. The first plans will be developed in 2010 for parks in the northeastern United States, Norton said.

By Karin Rives
Staff Writer
Washington, DC