By Nathan Rott / NPR
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Flooding and the combined traffic of thousands of cars, trucks and RVs have torn up the roads at Joshua Tree National Park’s Black Rock Canyon Campground. The majority of the park’s $60 million maintenance backlog is for roads like this.
The reason: The type of people who visit the park don’t reflect the type of people living in the community. Tucson is about 44 percent Hispanic or Latino. Of the park’s roughly 650,000 annual visitors, less than 2 percent self-identify as Hispanic. “If we’re not being relevant to almost half of the population, then 30, 40, 50 years from now, the park isn’t going to matter to them,” Sidles says.
A Call To Action
The disconnect between Tucson’s minority populations and Saguaro National Park is striking given their proximity, but it’s hardly unique.
The National Park Service overall has a diversity problem. There were a record 307.2 million visits to U.S. national parks in 2015, and it’s fair to say that the majority of those visitors were white. The National Park Service doesn’t track the demographics of its visitors, but the most recent survey commissioned by the Park Service to see how different population groups related to the parks found that 9 percent of American visitors were Hispanic. African-Americans accounted for 7 percent. Asian-Americans were 3 percent. Collectively, minorities made up just over 20 percent of the visitors to national parks, despite the fact that they made up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population.