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I'm John Poimiroo, Chief Executive officer Of the National Parks Promotion Council
America's national parks include 396 Of our nation's greatest
Treasure: natural, cultural, and
historic treasures.
With us today are several
representatives of those parks, and their supporting communities,
Who have helped
Bring today's lunch and
program to you.
It's my pleasure to introduce
Jeff Hents
from the Yosemite- Mariposa county tourism bureau,
Rich Whiteman,
Donnie Ledvetter and Desmond Lee
From the National Park Service
Rick Conninghousen
From the Yellowstone National
Park Lodge
Michelle Keen and Janet Tim of the Forever Resorts, Mark Ducharme from Glacier Park, Inc.
And Joel Sikendie,
From Brand USA
I encourage you all to visit with them during this convention
NTA has undertaken several initiatives to connect future generations
Of visitors to the parks
358 NTA tour companies now actively package tours
for student groups, and NTA sends guidebooks to twenty thousand student travel leaders.
NTA's Hispanic-Latino task force and ASTA will be joining together
In 2012
to create a plan that
combines NTA market research
and educational resources to build Hispanic-Latino tours
And NTA's strategic partnership
With travel professionals of color
is building connections, business opportunities, and
informing others about the heritage
and minority markets.
Still more can be done.
One of the most eloquent observers of this change is an interpretive ranger
from the Yosemite National Park.
You may have seen Shelton Johnson when he spoke within Ken Burns' PBS series,
"The National Parks, America's Best Idea"
he also encouraged Oprah Winfrey to visit Yosemite National Park this
past year.
So it is with great pleasure
That I introduce him to you,
ladies and gentlemen, Shelton Johnson.
Thank you.
I have worked as a National Park Ranger
For nearly 25 years,
And I've seen so many beautiful places And have had so many great experiences in the parks
but there's one thing that I can't forget even though
I may be in the shadow of the giant Sequoias
In Sequoia or Yosemite National Park
even though I may be near old Faithful Geyser when it's erupting
And feeling the thunder of that in my bones
And smelling that sulfur in the wind,
Even though I may be in all of those places,
I'm always thinking
Of the people who are not there,
the Americans who have not yet
Had an experience in a National Park, And don't know
what that feels like,
And don't know how that environment
Can reach down into you
And grab hold of you
And remind you that there is beauty In this world,
there's wonder in this world, and it is a great time to alive.
When I... thank you. I grew up in Detroit, And when I say Detroit, I mean Detroit,
I mean the inner city.
and where I grew up,
no one in my immediate family,
No one in my community
No one at my school,
No one at my church,
No one on television,
no one on the radio,
No one in the newspaper,
No one in a magazine, I mean absolutely No one
ever said to me, Shelton,
The national parks
Belong to you, you are owners of the greatest places and the greatest stories
in America.
I never heard that.
and my peers never heard that,
and as a result, the absence
of people of color, of
African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans,
Is frequently profound
In these environments
That draw people from all over the world. And so I've asked myself these questions:
Why is it that in Yosemite Valley's visitor center,
Yosemite, one of the most celebrated And iconic
landscapes in the world, I live in a place where I can say to folks, you know, where I work, there's a mountain, and it looks kinda like this
And people say, oh, you mean Half Dome?
If you can just move your hand
Through the air and trace the silhouette In the air, of a mountain
That's recognized all over the world and yet
You can drive an hour and a half
from Yosemite
Go to Freso, California and meet plenty of people
Who've never been there.
and my concern is
Not simply just the people, African-Americans,
Hispanics, who have not
Visited a national park,
It's the sense and thought
That the parks belong to them
That they're owners of the national parks,
And yet, they do not visit. And my thought is this: perhaps
that's the case Because they never felt
that they had received an invitation
How many people here, right now, Listening to my voice,
would not decline an invitation from me saying, please come
and visit me in Yosemite Valley.
Please come and visit me at the upper geyser basin
to Yellowstone National Park,
Please visit me at the South rim of the grand canyon
When the sun is rising high in the sky
And you realize the canyon keeps getting bigger
And bigger and bigger and you're thinking, "I'm a long way from that rail, but 0:06:45.120,0:06:48.119 Why do I feel like I'm falling in?
How can something
be so expansive
and be on this earth?" I need your help.
And I'm from Detroit, I'm not used to asking for help
Unless I'm crying out, "Help"
I have clear memories of that.
I need your help because I recognize
That this is precisely
The right group of people to talk to
It is very easy in this world, to feel like your efforts
Do not add up to anything, To feel as if what you have to say,
what you have deep inside cannot change the world around us.
And if that had been the case for so many People who came before us,
We would not have an America today
America exists today because people
believed in themselves, and in
Each other, and
I believe in you,
And I've been so looking forward to talking to you
because you folks can
make that difference. The tourism industry
The travel industry, that
You can make a huge difference
Simply by doing a few things. When I opened up a magazine as a little boy
and I saw people hiking
Enjoying the national parks, they were white folks
Enjoying the national park
And I remember the thought in my community was something like,
"well that's not something that black people do,
See, they're there doing that, we don't do that"
and I remember a year or so ago, I took a photograph
Of a couple of hikers,
European-American
And they were hiking in a wilderness area, And I showed that photograph to a group of
inner city kids who had never had the
sort of experiences that you've had
And the response from the kids was,
"Did they make it out?"
"Were they alright, Is everything ok?" And I said, no,
you don't understand,
They weren't lost.
they had actually found themselves
in the beauty of this
Continent. They looked at me, "What do you mean...
...they're there intentionally?" And I said, yes, they were
And that place belongs to you.
And they looked at me like, "Why would I go there,
Why would I do that sort of thing?" And I remember thinking to myself, Why would you not?
Why is it that so many people from all over the world embrace
Our national parks, why am I having
Conversations and swearing in Junior Rangers from France, From Italy, from Luxembourg,
But a family from Oakland, from Fresno,
From South-Central LA, from Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Brooklyn, they're not there.
And the problem is this,
America is changing, our demographics are changing, By 2050
our society and
The complexion, the literal makeup
Of that society will have changed.
We already have today, six
states that are on the verge, doesn't that sound like this?
Six states that are on the verge
Of becoming minority-majority cultures
We're on the edge of a precipice
Do we move forward?
Do we step back?
Do we take in the view, Or do we do one simple thing, Everyone, on the count of
Three, say the word, "welcome"
1, 2, 3, "Welcome" Ah, that feels so good.
Say that again,
Now say that with passion, come down from deep inside and say "welcome"
You know, there are people outside this ballroom That did not hear you
Say a sort of welcome that My ancestors would have loved to have heard
Such a long period of time ago
Ah, you made the journey all the sweeter, Hearing "welcome"
If you don't hear that word,
and it is addressed to you, you may not think
That that place is for you,
You may not think that's
A safe place for you. How many people
here choose
A locale
for recreation,
for vacation,
If that place
fills them with anxiety,
makes them nervous,
And it brings them questions of their own mortality? Is that a popular place? No,
And for many people of color,
We are talking about, I am talking about
A new world.
How many people here, show me your hands,
Have visited a National Park?
How many people have a
Favorite place, and that
Favorite place
is in a national park?
How many of you folks, when you find something new in our parks,
You can't wait to share it with friends and family
And take them there
And say, "I told you! Isn't this amazing?" Ok, this is why I need you.
if we were to do the exact same thing in these communities of color,
we will be ready by
2050, and our parks
will keep on going
John Muir's dream
will keep on going,
Steven Mather's hope
will keep on going.
The parks will exist in the past tense,
in the present and in the future perfect, doesn't that sound good?
The future perfect?
How many of you folks
Want that kind of future
For the national parks, parks that do not become or
have a short shelf-life
That live out the congressional mandate That created them, that live on in perpetuity.
How many of you would love that?
I would love that too, and that's why I'm here talking to you
because we cannot ever take upon
ourselves and have this thought that the parks will
Always be there, we don't have to worry about them.
They won't always be there
Unless
We all care.
All of us care, all of us know, And you don't necessarily have to be at the Grand Canyon
To appreciate the Grand Canyon. Right now,
For the next three seconds, everyone think about your favorite place in a park, close your eyes, now.
How many of you folks felt Your blood pressure drop?
How many of you, did you notice that some people started to smile?
You were having an even better time than you are having now. You're enjoying the food, but you
Are started thinking, "I'm not here,
I'm in Lake McDonald right now.
Keep on talking while the light is changing in the water,
Where'd that osprey come from, look how it dives into that water, boy I wish, oh, I wish...
she's not there, oh I wish...he's not there"
Well we all need to be there
Experiencing these places
for these places to always be there
if we do not, the only
Folks that we can say, "why did this happen?
How did we lose these great treasures?"
not that we stopped caring, but we stopped caring
That they do belong to all, As it said in that image,
"For the benefit and enjoyment of the people"
Transformative environments,
Transformative stories, and I've seen the look on children
that people would perceive as not having
the sophistication
to understand the beauty of a place like Yosemite Valley
And then I remember this young man, Who had
Never been to Yosemite Valley before,
he was sitting there
at the base of Lower Yosemite Falls, and he was just doing this
And we walked up to him and said, "Are you alright?"
And he said, "yeah"
we said, "what's wrong?", and he said, "nothing, I had no idea
That such beauty existed"
he should have had an idea, but he did not.
It's a wonderful thing to see that look
of transcendence
people's faces, it's the only environment where you can get away with looking like this
Imagine doing that here, In downtown Las Vegas.
Actually that happens here, I was just at the Bellagio
And I walked through there and I saw those flowers in that atrium, and I just sort of went...
We picked the wrong town.
So I'm going to ask you, because I know I'm running out of time, we're all running out of time. But we have a lot of time ahead of us
because the sun came up
Isn't that a wonderful thing?
The sun came up this morning. And the sun's job
is to illuminate the world
And there's a path that we can follow, and that path
Is inclusivity
And I'm thinking as I'm talking to you right now In this room, and I can't see
Out to the sky, I can't see
That it's daytime or nighttime, but I know from what I've read recently
That there's about to be an eclipse
that the moon is going to drift into the shadow of the earth
Disappear, become red, And in a bit,
A slow bit of time, it will
Find the light again, And that is my hope,
That we will all find the light
Of the national parks in our lives, That we come out of that darkness
And we realize that we don't need J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter to find
That there is wonder and magic In the universe
all we need is a good
Pair of hiking boots. We will find that we don't need to die to go to paradise, We get a map.
we talk to a ranger
that's where you'll find paradise.
That's the world that I want To walk into, that's the world
I wish to share
with you, and I wish to share that world with the people who are not yet here, but
Their astonishment is just
Below the horizon, waiting to be awakened. Thank you.