Case Statement, Public History Education and Environmental Sustainability
Edward Roach, Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park
How do we educate existing staff at urban historic sites to consider environmental
sustainability themes?
Environmental sustainability is involved in all public history projects at some
level, just as the environment influences historic events in general. Public history
practitioners need to be able to incorporate discussions about environmental
sustainability just as they need to incorporate other historical influences into their
programs and publications. When the National Council on Public History looks at how
to address best practices in public history education and environmental sustainability, it
needs to remember that limiting such a discussion to students enrolled in formal
undergraduate or graduate programs touches only a small fraction of those involved in
public history education. Many, perhaps most practitioners “teach” public history at
museums and historic sites. Oftentimes, issues connected with environmental
sustainability are not incorporated into a historic site’s main interpretive themes. This is
especially prevalent at urban historic sites, including those operated by the National
Park Service with which I am most familiar.
The National Park Service addresses issues of sustainability in a variety of ways,
supporting beekeeping projects, habitat restoration, and environmentally responsible
construction among its many offices and parks. Sustainability seems to be a relatively
easy topic to present at a site that principally recognizes natural resources, or at a
historic site with a relatively substantial land base – a battlefield or Native American
mound group, for example. And it is addressed at a management level, in such areas as
energy and water usage, or heating and cooling buildings, through executive and
director’s orders.(1) But it is not mentioned in the interpretive themes section of
foundation documents examined for a variety of urban historic sites throughout the
United States.(2) Foundation documents do usually contain charts that address how
climate change might affect a park’s “fundamental resources of value,” but these charts
are intended to help park managers make planning and resources management
decisions, not give interpreters and historians advice on program or publication
development. How does one broach the topic at urban sites with limited landholdings
and interpretive themes that, on the surface, have little to do with environmental
sustainability? How does one provide staff and volunteers long out of school the
education needed to do so? I do not come with answers; this is a topic I wish to discuss.
Training opportunities for existing staff to learn how to incorporate sustainability
themes are rare. The NPS offers interpreters the chance to take an online class on how
to interpret climate change, but gears that offering to staff at all sites throughout the
system, natural or cultural and does not advertise it well or provide similar training for
employees in other career fields. The American Association for State and Local History
offers a variety of training opportunities as well; its offerings on sustainability are
presently limited to a 1.5 hour webinar planned for April that seems geared more to
facility management.(3) The National Park Service’s Urban Agenda (2015) urges urban
parks of all types to forge connections and create new partnerships with groups that it
deems have traditionally had tenuous connections to parks, including African
Americans and people of Hispanic heritage, to enhance long-term sustainability and
viability.(4) Again, however, this document is directed at park managers and members of
the general public and has little to guide urban historic sites in interpreting
sustainability. Broad, service-wide documents tend to concentrate on climate change
specifically and, as a result of attempting to address the great diversity of resources
managed in the national park system, generally have little to specifically say about urban
historic sites.(5)
Guidance on how to incorporate sustainability themes into educational and
interpretive programming at urban NPS historic sites is not something overtly
forthcoming in park planning documents. While this does not prevent staff from
incorporating these issues into programming and publications, this lack of specific
advice may keep hesitant interpreters from addressing the question entirely, and may
cause others to simply forget to consider it. Moreover, institutional disconnection
between historians working in cultural resource-related jobs and front-line interpretive
staff at many parks (and, potentially, between historians in cultural resource positions
and people addressing sustainability from jobs connected with natural resources) can
make it difficult for NPS historians to get sustainability themes into interpretive
programming or to connect them with relevant training.(6)
To help staff at urban historic sites deal with sustainability issues and develop
relevant sustainability stories, a best practices document on public history education
and environmental sustainability should define public history in a broad manner and
look to connect with other organizations and ensure that the needs of interpreters and
historians who are not engaged in formal education are addressed. To the extent
feasible, the NCPH should look to partner with other professional organizations such as
the AASLH and the National Association for Interpretation. Many front-line
interpreters are more likely to be connected with those organizations than with the
NCPH. Similarly, the Eppley Institute for Parks and Public Lands at Indiana University
and the NPS’s interpretation and cultural resources training programs may provide
ways to educate as many site interpreters on ways to incorporate sustainability into their
educational and training programs. Any statement on public history education and
environmental sustainability adopted by the NCPH needs to consider the present as
well as the future and not neglect working staff, especially those at urban historic sites
where sustainability is not a stated interpretive theme.
1) See Executive Order 13693, “Planning for Federal Sustainability in the Next Decade,” Federal Register
vol. 80, no. 57 (25 March 2015), 15871-15884, and Director’s Order #100, “Resource Stewardship for the
21st Century (20 December 2016), available at https://www.nps.gov/policy/DOrders/DO_100.htm
(accessed 4 January 2017).
2) I reviewed foundation documents for Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park (2016), James
Garfield National Historic Site (2014), and William Howard Taft National Historic Site (2014) in Ohio;
Boston African American National Historic Site (2015) in Massachusetts; Hampton National Historic Site
(2016) and Fort McHenry National Monument (2016) in Maryland; Fort Sumter National Monument
(2016) in South Carolina; Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial (2015) in California; and
Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site (2016) in Missouri. I also reviewed interpretive themes identified
for future foundation documents for Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site (2015) in Pennsylvania and
Lowell National Historical Park (1981-2011) in Massachusetts.
3) http://learn.aaslh.org/event/environmental-sustainability/, accessed 13 January 2017.
4) “Urban Agenda: Call to Action Initiative,” https://www.nps.gov/subjects/urban/urban-agenda.htm,
accessed 22 December 2016. Laura Burd Schiavo challenges many of the NPS’s assumptions about
relevancy and diversity in “’White People Like Hiking’: Some Implications of NPS Narratives of
Relevance and Diversity,” The Public Historian vol. 38, no. 4, 206-235.
5) See Marcy Rockman, Marissa Morgan, Sonya Ziaja, George Hambrecht, and Alison Meadow, Cultural
Resources Climate Change Strategy (Washington, D.C.: Cultural Resources, Partnerships, and Science and
Climate Change Response Program, National Park Service), 2016, and National Climate Change
Interpretation and Education Strategy (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service), 2016.
6) See Anne Mitchell Whisnant, Marla R. Miller, Gary B. Nash, and David Thelen, Imperiled Promise: The
State of History in the National Park Service (Bloomington, Ind.: Organization of American Historians,
2011), especially “Finding 1: The History/Interpretation Divide,” 54-58.