“There are so many people in Detroit; there’s so many people in Chicago, there’s so many people in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. and Cleveland and L.A. that don’t realize that whatever is ailing them potentially could be cured by a visit to a place like this.”
Those are the words of Yosemite National Park Ranger Shelton Johnson. Johnson is a renowned advocate for diversity in our national parks. As a community engagement specialist for the park, he sees it as his duty to connect people with nature and our national parks—especially people who, in their communities, may not historically feel a connection to them.
Recently, Johnson welcomed a group of high school students from his hometown of Detroit and the same high school he attended, Cass Tech, on their first visit to Yosemite. They were on a trip organized by Detroit Outdoors and the Sierra Club. He told them:
“You own this. This is your property. Yosemite is your property and your family’s property. Yellowstone is your property and your family’s property. The Grand Canyon is your property and your family’s property.”
Ranger Johnson is right. America’s public lands belong to all of us. That goes for the more than 640 million acres of land that make up our more than 400 national parks, 560 national wildlife refuges, 154 national forests, more than 130 national monuments, and millions more publicly managed acres.
Diversity in our national parks is a tradition as old as the parks themselves. Decades before the National Park Service was created, the famed African American Buffalo Soldiers served as the first rangers for the country’s early national parks like Yosemite and Sequoia. (Ranger Johnson happens to be an expert on that topic.).
The Biden-Harris administration has advanced initiatives that recognize this. In April, a new public lands rule recalibrated the Bureau of Land Management’s mandate from a nearly exclusive focus on resource extraction to giving equal weight to conservation. The U.S. Forest Service just concluded a public comment period on a proposed plan that could protect the country’s remaining old-growth forests.
Mature and old-growth trees can absorb and store carbon pollution, making them one of nature’s most powerful climate solutions. This is near and dear to my heart. The first protest I ever organized as a high schooler was an anti-clearcutting rally in Sacramento, California.
There are boundless examples of why protecting public lands is so important. I recently visited the Western Arctic in Alaska, where an effort to add so-called Special Areas would preserve millions of acres of public lands in one of the last untouched ecosystems in the United States.
It would safeguard a vital habitat for imperiled species and help protect the Arctic from the devastation of fossil fuel extraction. I am convinced that witnessing the migratory paths of caribou and the ancient stone fences of the Inupiaq people would drive home for anyone the urgency of protecting our planet and conserving wildlife and wild places.
Our national monuments recognize sites of not only natural but also historical and cultural importance. Our newest national monument—designated by President Biden in August—commemorates the 1908 Springfield Race Riot, which sparked the creation of the NAACP, a national reckoning with racial violence, and the birth of the modern civil rights movement.
This week, we celebrated National Public Lands Day. Let us use the opportunity to break down barriers of race, income, and geography when it comes to enjoying America’s public lands.
As Ranger Johnson told those kids from Detroit, he was so excited to see them because by simply being there, they were “changing the whole sociological dynamic right now, just being present.”
He told them, “That’s why it’s powerful that you’re here. Because this is a sign of change, and this is what the future looks like. You are the future.”
Ben Jealous is the executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.