History & Hope for Climate Action: Illuminating the Role of Energy in National Parks

Every NPS site faces the realities of climate change’s impacts and has an enduring responsibility to communicate about climate change with the public. However, some sites struggle with this mandate, as interpreters find it difficult to identify relevant connections between climate change and their park story. Others forego storytelling in favor of a “just the facts” approach, which is often insufficient for expanding visitor perspectives. To help bridge this communication gap, Graves and Villano developed History & Hope for Climate Action: An Interpretive Toolkit with support from NPS’s Climate Change Response Program and the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education. This essay will explore three NPS examples that can interpret the unseen threads of energy and connect them to climate change using the History & Hope framework. First, we will show how the historic house of a prominent American leader can be used to illustrate the growing separation of energy production and consumption at the turn of the 20th century. This separation has made energy sources largely invisible to most people today. Next, we will examine how energy is intertwined with the way people travel, recreate, and experience parks through the development of “Mission 66” infrastructure in the NPS. The initiative had long-lasting consequences, embedding fossil fuel-based transit into park visitation to this day. Finally, we’ll explore the unintended consequences of World War II (WWII) mobilization, when the need to organize the nation as an “arsenal for democracy” led to increasing use of fossil fuels that persisted and grew throughout the post-war era.