Episode 34: Women and the National Parks
Hosts: Anna Reser, Rebecca Ortenberg with guests Emily McCartan and Lexie Briggs
Producer: Anna Reser
Music: Smokey the Bear, Department of Agriculture Office of Public Affairs, 1952.
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In this episode, Anna and Rebecca are joined by guest hosts Emily McCartan and Lexie Briggs to talk about the history of the National Parks Service, including a mildly unsettling conversation about Smokey the Bear.
Show Notes
“Ethnic Cleansing and America’s Creation of National Parks” by Isaac Kantor
Agency Report: National Park Service
Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks by Mark David Spence
National Parks and the Woman’s Voice: A History by Polly Welts Kaufman
Ranger: The Journal of the Association of National Park Rangers, Vol. 1, No. 4, Fall 1985
“These people of color transformed U.S. national parks” by James Edward Mills
"Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream” by Kathryn Joyce
“Ranger’s voice spans East Bay History” by Lee Hildebrand
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Rebecca: Welcome to episode 34 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is the monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Anna: And I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor in chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: Leila isn't able to join us this time around, but we have brought on a couple of fabulous guest hosts to help us talk about this episode's topic, which is women in the National Park Service. Emily McCartan works for a conservation nonprofit in Washington State on the traditional lands of the Nisqually and Squaxin Island peoples.
Rebecca: And Lexie Briggs is a communications professional in Washington, DC. A little more relevant to what is bringing us all together today, though, is that she also happens to be one of the biggest Park Service nerds that I've ever met. Emily and Lexie are also old friends of mine, and I'm very excited to have them joining us today. So welcome, guys.
Lexie: Thanks for having us.
Emily: Thank you.
Lexie: Yeah. You couldn't see it, but I was doing the rock and roll hand symbol when you said biggest Park Service nerd.
Rebecca: When I mentioned this idea, Lexie sent an email in which she listed her various qualifications, which included promising to watch the whole Ken Burns documentary again.
Lexie: Yeah. Again. Yeah. When life just gets really stressful, sometimes all you wanna see is scrolling pictures of Yosemite National Park and the Grand Canyon.
Anna: It's so soothing. I watch it when I'm having a panic attack. It really works.
Lexie: It does.
Rebecca: Speaking of panic attacks, 2020 is obviously a super weird, awful time for people around the globe. And I think one thing I found myself wanting to do on a regular basis was just disappear into the woods for a while and go hiking or camping or just be outside somewhere.
Rebecca: I think one of the things that is terrifying me as we descend into fall is the idea that being outside will be less pleasant. But I did get the impression that I wasn't the only one who really just wanted to run for the hills literally. I'm pretty sure this wasn't just me, but this wasn't just me, right?
Emily: No. It was not just you.
Lexie: Absolutely not. Nope.
Emily: Just I was gonna say I work for a conservation organization that has partners with natural resource and parks lands throughout the western Washington area. Big shout-out to the managers of national and state and local parks because they had such an enormous job this summer of balancing incredibly high numbers of use with having to deal with reduced staff and trying to keep people distant.
Emily: I've seen more creative ways of describing six feet apart in wildlife terms, like "140 toadlets" or "one bald eagle with its wings spread." So yes. So, so many people were outside this summer where I am.
Anna: Yeah. And this is the case for lots of places. This summer saw the most significant increase in Google searches for "camping" in nearly a decade, and the campground search app The Dyrt had a 400% increase in traffic compared to this time last year. So a lotta people correctly are seeing camping as a safe alternative to other kinds of vacationing, and hiking is a good way to get exercise without going to the gym.
Anna: And I think we're all just going a little bit stir crazy, and being outside sounds really nice. I definitely have been tromping around the desert a lot more than I usually would. I haven't had a chance to go camping yet, though.
Lexie: Yeah. I take a nightly quarantine walk at least once a night, and there are a couple of parks near my house and a couple of different places that I've gone and just wandered for an hour at a time. And that is probably the most helpful thing that I've done for my mental health.
Anna: All of this got us thinking about the history of running off into the woods, so to speak, and an American institution that has made camping and hiking a big part of their life, National Park Service. Particularly we wanted to explore how women experience the parks, both as explorers and visitors and as employees. So let's get right to it.
Emily: So before we talk about the Park Service itself, we should look at the history of white Americans going west to explore the "untamed wilderness." I know this isn't a visual medium, but I am doing big, bold air quotes with that 'cause that's obviously a very constructed concept by white Americans.
Emily: Isaac Kantor notes in the article "Ethnic Cleansing and America's Creation of National Parks" that early 19th century thinkers who were writing about the North American wilderness, including people like George Catlin and Henry David Thoreau, wrote about indigenous people in what they considered positive terms but were still incredibly racist about it, with ideas of noble savages and treating indigenous people as part of the natural world to be preserved. Thoreau, for example, once wrote that the preservation of natural land in North America should include "the bear and panther and even some of the hunter race." I promise not to get into a rant about Thoreau.
Lexie: Can we just have a back of the paperback novel summary of if you were to give a blurb about Thoreau?
Emily: I have a lotta feelings about Thoreau. I had to read Walden in 11th grade, and it was a whole thing. The idea that Thoreau and I think for me 19th century white dude naturalists encapsulate was this huge appreciation of the natural world but a real lack of understanding about their own personal relationship to abundance and stewardship and the fact that there might be a collective responsibility besides this being a place that they could just go out and enjoy at will and not have to work very hard ever.
Lexie: Yeah, and also somebody else was doing his laundry.
Emily: Big time. Yes. Definitely.
Rebecca: The thing that popped into my head in reading that quote is the Twilight Zone episode. I think it's called "People Are the Same Everywhere." It's the one where the guy goes into space and they meet aliens, and then he ends up in a zoo as a human. And they're like, "Oh, we've given you this beautiful apartment, but actually this is a zoo now." And it feels very much like that, like, "Let us study the humans in their natural habitat."
Emily: Yeah. I hadn't known really about that very pre-parks, pre-conservation, pre formal conservation, that there was this idea that there should be a giant nature preserve in the middle of the continent for both indigenous people and indigenous wildlife. That's very interesting.
Emily: I wanna just point out that "wilderness" is a technical designation now for the National Park Service, and it implies lands that are maintained to be not developed with very limited infrastructure. Usually you can only access it on foot as a back-country experience, but that idea of wilderness, and especially unpeopled wilderness, from Thoreau on forward just completely consciously is designed to obscure the indigenous history of people who lived and traveled and used and actively managed those landscapes. To say that they were in a pristine, natural state and they should be preserved that way is something that the National Park Service and other management agencies are really trying to work to unpack now, but it's very much at the root of their mission
Anna: There's a really good book that I read when I was working on my dissertation by Mark David Spence called Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks that really gets into this concept of wilderness and how it gets deployed in this early pre-conservation period. It's really good, and it's really readable for an academic book. I'll put it in the show notes for sure.
Lexie: And then also to your point, Becca, about that Twilight Zone episode, Wild West shows actually had Native Americans as exhibits in a lotta them.
Rebecca: Hey, natural history museums actually had Native Americans as exhibits.
Lexie: Yeah. Also that. Also that. Yeah. So by the time the parks were founded, conservationists weren't thinking about indigenous people at all, though, except as a nuisance or as a danger to be eliminated. This was in part thanks to good old Manifest Destiny, the popular idea that the United States should claim the entire North American continent from coast to coast, and also thanks to people like John Muir, who wanted to promote this idea that the American West was an untamed wilderness completely free from humans.
Lexie: And in the second half of the 19th century, white Americans flocked west, some of them seeking land, some of them seeking the spiritual experiences with nature that Muir talked about. And none of them were thinking much about the people who had lived in those supposedly unpeopled places for thousands of years.
Rebecca: And white women also went west to explore America's quote-unquote "untamed wilderness," though their experiences do tend to be much less well known than those of men like John Muir. I think we definitely have this idea that the only people exploring Yellowstone or the Yosemite Valley at this time were these rugged, fearless mountain men, but it actually wasn't that uncommon for women to go on expeditions either. In 1857 Harriet Kirkland and Anna Park, who were teachers from San Francisco, became two of the first white women to travel to Yosemite. To put this in perspective, the first tourist expedition to the valley had happened in 1855, so just a couple years earlier.
Rebecca: And I think that's interesting because it just gives the sense that white women were out here doing this at about the same time that men were. And in her book National Parks and the Women's Voice, Polly Welts Kaufman wrote about the experiences of these two women and the many others who came after them in the decades that followed.
Anna: In the second half of the 19th century, it actually became very popular for a certain kind of progressive, middle-class white woman to go hiking. Hm. By 1870 there was even a particular kind of blue flannel women's suit that was dubbed the "Yosemite suit" because so many women wore them when traveling to Yosemite. And outfitters in San Francisco would sell them under that name.
Emily: Where can I get one?
Rebecca: I know.
Anna: I know. I was Googling it earlier. I just found a bunch of Land's End flannels for men that were called Yosemite. I was like, "This is not what I want."
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. That delights me.
Anna: So women also flocked to join mountaineering clubs. And many of these clubs, including the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Sierra Club, the Mazamas Club, and the Colorado Mountain Club, actively recruited women. And around the turn of the 20th century, about half of the membership in each of those clubs was women.
Emily: Yeah. It's remarkable. There was a mountain climbing expedition that summited Mount Rainier during an exposition in the 1890s in Seattle. And this group of suffragists took suffrage banners up Mount Rainier. There was a big crowd of them.
Emily: And they later published the packing list that they'd suggested for these women, which was phenomenal, like the number of underclothes you should bring. And you wear your skirt, and then definitely make sure that you have breeches so that you can get rid of your skirt when it becomes inconvenient. You were supposed to bring a gross of safety pins, which that was my favorite tidbit. That's so many safety pins. Were the men just not bringing any safety pins and so you had to bring extra?
Emily: As places like Yosemite and Yellowstone became more and more popular, women were also working at lodges and outfitters that were catering to hikers, and so many of them employed women to serve as guides and just in service capacities, something that several of my dad's sisters did in the 1960s and '70s at Mount Rainier. Unfortunately, none of that meant that women were particularly welcome as employees in the early days of the National Park Service. That has to do in part with the origin of the parks. Have you guys ever noticed that there's something a little military-esque about the park ranger aesthetic?
Anna: There's cool hats.
Rebecca: Yup. Yup. That's a military uniform, and it's weird.
Lexie: I hadn't. I hadn't at all, and then in preparing for this episode, Becca had mentioned this. And I was like, "Oh, my gosh. The scales have fallen from my eyes." I was thinking like, "Well, I always thought of them as more like scouting uniforms." And then I was like, "Wait a second. I know that the Scouts were developed as young men's military outfits."
Emily: And particularly when you look at military uniforms from World War I, when the National Park Service was established in 1916, all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, yeah. I can see the resemblance." So in 1916 when the Park Service was created, there were already a lot of federal- and state-managed parks, including Yosemite and Yellowstone. And since there was no designated agency to look after them, they were often maintained by the military.
Emily: At the turn of the 20th century, Yosemite was maintained by the all-Black cavalry unit known as the Buffalo Soldiers. In an interview with National Geographic earlier this year, a Black park ranger at Yosemite observed that in those early days, there were probably more African Americans working at the park in an official capacity than there are today.
Lexie: After the National Park Service was created, many of those same soldiers became the first rangers. At first the rangers' jobs were just about patrolling park land and doing things like arresting poachers, which is good, and chasing off indigenous people, which is bad. Boo.
Emily: Both things that the military was also doin' a lot of in the American West.
Lexie: Yes. [Unclear 14:54]. But pretty soon the National Park became pretty interested in the idea of hiring rangers who could educate and entertain visitors. Stephen T. Mather, the first director of the NPS, and Horace Albright, who came after him, both believed that in order to get buy-in from the American public for the parks, the parks had to offer a unique experience for the people who visited. And they both focused on hiring educators, naturalists, and tourism professionals.
Lexie: It's interesting to me to think about this as a tourist experience, right? That somebody looked at this and said, "Just having people who take care of the place is not enough. We need to have an educational and tourist experience."
Rebecca: And also it just being—I think it's interesting that it's sort of a political decision. This is a time especially people are like, "I wanna start a farm somewhere with cheap land," and then a buncha people are saying, "No, we're preserving all of these areas." And yeah, they have to build in this value to citizens that we still hold up as part of why. I mean, I feel like we still use it today as that you have to protect the National Park Service not just because all these things are important without humans, but because they make us better humans. That's really built in.
Emily: It's a savvy political move, too, for the Park Service. Even today the Park Service is one of the most popular branches of the federal governments, and that gives them a huge amount of credibility and staying power in terms of resilience from budget cuts and things like that.
Rebecca: As you can imagine, the cavalrymen, though, who were already there absolutely hated the new guys and pretty quickly made it clear that they thought they were a bunch of effeminate losers. According to Kaufman, the older class of military-trained rangers would call the new naturalist rangers things like, quote, "pansy-pickers" and, quote, "butterfly chasers." So that just sounds really great, doesn't it?
Emily: Super fun. So fun.
Rebecca: Yay, toxic masculinity. Honestly, though, the naturalists weren't that much better. Many of them were also very concerned about preserving the masculinity of their work, and I imagine even more so because there was this long-standing military tradition. And so as one early park ranger put it, they were determined to make sure that the public saw rangers as, quote, "the embodiment of Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, the Texas Rangers, and General Pershing."
Rebecca: Yeah. This, guys, though. So, I mean, I feel like all of you will know exactly what I mean, but certainly Emily and Lexie, but as someone who went to a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest, the idea of a dude who really loves nature and wants to tell you how masculine it is that he really loves nature is a thing that still exists.
Emily: I don't know what you're talking about. That's never happened to me.
Rebecca: No, no.
Emily: Ask me about men with kayaks at some point.
Rebecca: I was just gonna say, ask me about men with pictures of them bouldering in their Tinder profile.
Lexie: Oh, my God.
Rebecca: Yes. It's like there's the whole thing about men with giant fish and putting them on their Tinder profiles.
Lexie: It's the Southwestern fish guy.
Anna: Oh, God, they're everywhere.
Emily: There's something really interesting about this sort of game and masculine relationship and goes back to this idea of managing and dominating the wilderness. One of my favorite jokes is that America's default solution to a natural resource problem is like, "Okay. We have a problem. Can we fix it by putting trout in it? If we stock trout in this, will that fix it?"
Emily: At many of the western parks in the mountains, they were stocking trout in lakes that did not have trout in them historically as bug control to make it more tourist friendly and also because it provided this outlet then for dudes to go out and catch really big trout and hold them up at arm's length and look like dudes. Just people love trout. They just love 'em.
Anna: Despite all this masculine chest-thumping from the ranger corps, a number of national parks did actually hire women early on. As was the case in industries across the country, the number of women working for the parks went up during World War I when many men were serving in the military.
Anna: One of the first women was Claire Marie Hodges, a grade school teacher who worked at Yosemite during the summer of 1918. Hodges was born in Santa Cruz, California, in 1890, and she first visited Yosemite when she was 14. And as a ranger, she wore the same uniform that the men did, including the Stetson hat that we still associate with park rangers today, and she performed the same duties as her male counterparts.
Emily: I'm fascinated by the number of teachers who are showing up in this story 'cause that's an association that is still really—there's a lot of people who are both teachers and rangers or start in one profession and go to the other. So in the 1910s and '20s, a number of other women were hired, often as guides and interpreters. Many of them were accomplished scientists in their own right, including people like geologist Isobel Bassett, who served at Yellowstone; Pauline Meat Patraw, who served at the Grand Canyon and published a book on the flowers of the Southwest mesa; and Enid Michael, a naturalist who served at Yosemite for almost 20 years.
Emily: Wives of male park rangers also played a significant but almost entirely invisible role in the maintenance of the early Park Service. As Polly Welts Kaufman has put it, "even though wives performed virtually every function in a national park, demonstrating a range of talents, they were still considered surrogates without authority working under the direction of their husbands." Coverture is fun, guys.
Rebecca: Yeah. This just reminds me. This is so our wheelhouse I don't even know how much I have to say, but this reminds me so much of we've talked about on the podcast before about wives and other women helpers/relatives of famous male scientists. So just a good reminder that as always, across history and across fields, there have been so many women who participated in their husband's profession without pay and without recognition, and the Park Service is certainly no exception. If anything, I'd say it was probably even more significant in this case because you gotta remember these are people who are living in the middle of nowhere sometimes, so it's not like you can go and do another thing.
Lexie: There's a national monument outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, called Wupatki National Monument, and it's a two-story, free-standing ruin of a Native American community from many centuries ago. And it's significant because it's not a cliff dwelling. It looks like a neighborhood a little bit. And the story of the first park ranger to go out there was just this couple got in a Model T Ford, maybe even a Model A, and just bumped their way out from Flagstaff for a couple of hours, basically, and then lived in the ruin.
Lexie: Yeah. And their job was just to greet the people who managed to get out there, I guess. This is the beginning of vehicles, and there were not a lot of roads leading that direction. It just was wild to me to think about how would that even work? And then also you're living a solitary existence homesteading in something that has traditionally been a homestead but forever just alone and what the wifely duties in that case entailed, right? She was doing all the cooking over an open-flame grill, basically.
Lexie: In 1960 the NPS finally issued a statement saying that they encouraged the appointment of women, but they included one enormous caveat. They said, quote, "Women cannot be employed in certain jobs, such as park ranger or seasonal park ranger, in which the employee is subject to be called to fight fires, take part in rescue operations, or do other strenuous or hazardous work." End quote.
Lexie: But don't worry, ladies. The Park Service still has a place for you. The statement went on to say, quote, "Participation by women employees in lecture programs, guided tours, museum and library work, and in research programs would be entirely appropriate and very helpful to many parks. Increased attention may also be given to children's programs in some parks and to extension work to schools, for which women interpretive employees may be even more effective than men."
Anna: Ooh, boy. It's fun when they say the quiet part out loud. They always do.
Emily: I will say I looked at the pictures of women's National Park Service uniforms that is gonna be linked in the show notes, I think, and in the '60s it would be hard to fight fires in those pencil skirts.
Rebecca: Yes. Yes. Yeah. I'm really glad you brought that up because those uniforms are amazing. I think the Twiggy-style shift dress is my favorite in terms of terribleness.
Emily: Mm-hmm. The '70s one? Yeah.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. The '70s one.
Emily: It's a little Star Trek. I'm not gonna lie.
Rebecca: That's what it is. That's what it is. It's Star Trek. Yeah. Yeah.
Lexie: It's the least practical option for going around and hiking and stuff. Yeah. Any sort of a bush. That sort of outfit is the natural enemy of any sort of bush, I feel.
Anna: Right, and everyone's wearing pumps.
Rebecca: Yes!
Lexie: Yeah. I mean, I guess it would be hard to mount a rescue operation if you were in pumps. That is true.
Rebecca: It's true.
Emily: Where is the gross of safety pins?
Rebecca: It really makes you respect those Yosemite suits, man.
Emily: I mean, I will say that when you think about the way that both the male Park Service Ranger Corps is defining this masculine identity, and then you have women being involved, and they're deliberately trying to feminize their participation, that sure, you could lead a children's interpretive program in pumps and a shift dress. There's a synergy between the way they're dressed and the roles that they're being told to take on.
Emily: And I think it's interesting that as the Park Service—there's a back-and-forth little dialectic going on in my mind about the Park Service increasingly taking on these interpretive outreach and education roles, which are historically more—that space in itself is more dominated by women, at the same time as women are being admitted or encouraged into the Park Service, but in this specifically one track.
Lexie: I feel like there were probably a lot of people in Washington, DC, or in boardrooms—and by "people" I mean "men"—who were patting themselves on their back for being so inclusive and finding ways for the girls to be able to work at the Park Service and just really that they had developed this women's work that they decided that it was important and that right at the same time they were able to hire all these women.
Rebecca: Yeah. It calls back somewhat to the comment you made earlier, Emily, about the interconnection between teachers and people in the Park Service. And they're both roles in which women are maybe allowed to do science particularly but do it in a way that is coded as feminine. So you can be a scientist if you're primarily teaching science, maybe, and you can be a park ranger if mostly what you're doing is guiding children to appreciate the outdoors. It just, again, this fits into all of these themes that we've talked about before on the podcast.
Rebecca: Another one that jumps into my mind is our discussion earlier this year about women in science museums and the way that gender plays out in the construction of roles at science museums and how you get a lot of educators who are also—and this is also true in the Park Service—more likely to be part time and temporary and how that can then play into the gendered nature of the work.
Anna: I think the word "appropriate" is doing a lot of work in this statement. It just reminds me of the Botany for Ladies, like, "What would be a suitable activity for ladies to do that isn't too strenuous and that draws on their natural proclivities and strengths for child care and explaining things to young people?" Things like that. Yeah.
Emily: Also it's such an interesting, and again, as someone who works in an environmental education field, it's such a patronizing way of describing work that is so central and so vital to not just the park mission, but to, as we were talking about earlier, the public relations capacity that the Park Service has is so built on doing kids' ranger programs or making these experiences accessible and interpreted to all kinds of people.
Emily: And especially now, as parks are working on inclusivity and equity and diversity issues, that the interpretive mission is so, so, so core to the preservation, to the furthering of the research, to public support for all of those things, and that it's still packaged in this way that's like, "Well, because it's women's work, it's lesser and if appropriate." That it is really vital. There is really creative work being done by people of all genders in those fields, and the language around it is still so constrained in such a weird, patronizing way.
Emily: Still not as important as trout, basically. And trout are important. Do not get me wrong. I'm very pro-trout in the right setting.
Lexie: But it's true. It feels like the difference between education and public outreach, naturalism, studies of botany, studies and interpretation are vital to the parks' mission. And saying that it's appropriate that women are doing this because here are the things that are vital to the parks' mission, those two statements are just so different.
Lexie: When it's defined as women's work, it becomes less important, it feels like, and it becomes an afterthought, and it becomes secondary to the real work of fighting wildfires and rescuing people and being extremely American manliness Walt Whitman-style in the wilderness. And like Emily with trout, I am very pro-Walt Whitman in the wilderness, but.
Anna: I just wanna bring up one thing that lives in my head rent-free, and that is the shredded Smokey the Bear. Why is he so ripped?
Rebecca: Oh, God.
Anna: Just as you were talking, the image was swimming into my mind, and I couldn't get it to go away. And I just have to exorcise that demon. Why is Smokey so ripped now? I don't like it.
Rebecca: That's not okay. No.
Lexie: Do we want a slightly deep dive, a medium deep dive into Smokey the Bear? Because this was one of my hyperfixations a couple years back.
Anna: Please do. We're at 36 minutes. We have time for Smokey.
Lexie: Okay. I always have time for Smokey. Smokey the Bear began life as a real bear. This was a real bear that lived on a national park, I believe. And then there was a song that was written about him.
Emily: Mm-hmm. So Smokey is a DNR.
Lexie: Oh, please explain what that means. Please.
Emily: He's a Department of Interior Forest Service property, I think. And there were a ton of mascots that were adopted in the mid-20th century to do various natural things.
Rebecca: Yes.
Emily: I think Becca was probably the one who introduced me to Johnny Horizon, who was another public lands figure with a folk song.
Rebecca: Yes, Johnny Horizon.
Emily: Who became a big thing in my office for a couple of weeks.
Emily: I've done events with Smokey present in the mascot suit. There's a 70-page document of official guidance on how Smokey is presented. Again, the fact that he's shirtless and has pants and a hat is, yes, there's a huge amount to unpack there. He does have to have an interpreter with him at all times. Smokey does not talk, so the interpreter has to anger-translate for him, if you will. The rules. He has to have a shovel. I think the shovel has to be pointed and it can't be rounded, or it has to be round and it can't be pointed. Everything else. I have a lotta feelings.
Emily: Smokey is, again, a really great PR success story and a really recognizable symbol, which is awesome. There's also something, and I've had a lot of mixed feelings this year of seeing Smokey brought out during the terrible, terrible fire season on the West Coast to say, "Only you can prevent forest fires" when so many of these fires were—I mean, definitely don't reveal your baby's genitalia with a pyrotechnic display if you can possibly avoid it. Just buy a cake if you have to do that.
Emily: But so many of these fires were not actually caused by individual human recklessness. They're caused by infrastructure failures or by lightning strikes and by generations of management that has created these conditions in addition to climate change. And so this messaging of like, "Preventing a forest fire is something that only you can do." Yes, you need to be careful about fire in the wilderness, but Smokey's really starting to feel like he's up against a lot.
Lexie: Right. It's very true that not only you can prevent forest fires because a lotta the forest fires specifically in Oregon this year were started by lightning strikes. And lightning does not listen to Smokey the Bear. I'm sorry. Smokey is a very powerful, very ripped bear-man with a hat and a shovel, but he does not control the weather.
Lexie: And that the forest fire issue has been reduced to this mascot-level public awareness campaign is both great because I do feel like Smokey is watching me every time I put out a campfire—and he is. He's always watching.
Anna: Smokey's always watching you.
Lexie: Anytime you deal with fire. But also it does displace, as we've seen with so many other public awareness campaigns about recycling and about personal responsibility and about straws and things like that, that it does displace the responsibility from megacorporations and systems of management and governmental entities to the individual, and that that may have a limit to helpfulness.
Lexie: Maybe the CEOs of tomorrow will be watched by Smokey today, which would be great, but I would really like to get some Smokey up in some boardrooms. Use that big, powerful bear muscle for some good.
Anna: This is now a Smokey the Bear fanfiction podcast. Sorry, Leila. I don't know what to tell you.
Emily: You invited us here. Also can I just say maybe if they'd had Smokey in the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau would not have felt the need to burn down 300 acres of forest land outside of Concord because he couldn't be bothered to douse his fire. Which is a real thing that happened.
Rebecca: Good Lord.
Lexie: I said that Smokey the Bear was originally a bear, but I feel like Smokey the Bear was originally the judgment that we all feel at David Henry Thoreau.
Rebecca: Just manifested into creature form.
Lexie: Manifested into a buff bear-man, yes. So wait. Have you guys ever thought about the phrase "US Government Sanctioned Furry"? Because I now have.
Anna: All right. That's it. We're done. I'm ending the call. I'm ending the podcast. I'm ending the magazine.
Rebecca: Lexie Briggs, what have you done?
Anna: That's it. Thanks for joining us. We had a good run.
Lexie: I'm so sorry.
Anna: That's all. Oh, God.
Rebecca: So to loop us back to misogyny and actual humans and particularly ladies who work in the Park Service and not bears who work with the Department of the Interior, another fun fact that goes along with that story about all the jobs that women should and shouldn't do from 1960. Women park rangers weren't uniformly called park rangers until 1971. So sometimes they were and sometimes they weren't. And it was something that was instituted mid-century, I wanna say maybe even post-World War II.
Rebecca: There was a big post-World War II "Oh, we're gonna hire all of these veterans to work for the Park Service, and we have to get rid of all of these ladies who are in the way." That was part of the culture in the mid-century as well. They'd often be given titles like park guide or park naturalist. And this is even when they did have the same duties as male park rangers. And it was also in the 1970s that women rangers were finally considered equally qualified for all park positions and not just those that were considered safe or appropriate for women.
Rebecca: And this was basically when around the same and was a response to the fact that the federal government could no longer discriminate in the hiring of various federal roles, so they held out. But all of that was 50 years ago, and we still do, of course, tend to picture park rangers as white and male. And most of them are. As of 2018, the staff of the Park Service are 79% white and 62% male, which makes them significantly more white and male than the rest of the federal government.
Rebecca: Something that we haven't talked about a lot here is, of course, race and park rangers and especially African-American women in the Park Service. As we note here, it's still very white and still very male. There is certainly a whole other podcast we could do about the relationship between African Americans as visitors to the Park Service or the story of African Americans as visitors to the Park Service and the fact that a lot of parks were segregated for a long time and also just that there is a broader history of African Americans feeling left out of environmental education and stewardship in general.
Rebecca: But basically, there isn't a good through line about how that is being addressed because it's still such terrible shape. I mean, I think the idea from the beginning about the park ranger who said, "Well, back in the era of the Buffalo Soldiers, there were more Black rangers at Yosemite than there are right now" is very telling. So I just wanted to make sure that we addressed that 'cause we mostly talked about white people in this episode.
Emily: I actually had the experience in graduate school of working for a summer as an intern at a national historic park, the Rosie the Riveter Park in Richmond, California. Which is a pretty recent park and part of a recent trend in the last, I don't know, I'll say 20 years or so of the National Park system expanding from conserving these natural, wilderness-oriented areas to places that are of historical and cultural significance. Which is an interesting tangent to get into.
Emily: One of the really foundational people behind that park, who is still working there at age 99 and is currently the oldest park ranger in the service, and she's someone who's gotten some media attention for being the oldest park ranger in the service and for being such a powerful speaker and spokesperson for the kind of interpretive work that she does is a woman named Betty Reid Soskin. And so I had the huge privilege of getting to know her a little bit when I worked there.
Emily: She's somebody who is a woman of color who was born in Louisiana and raised from an incredibly long-lived family, so raised in part as a child by her great-grandmother, who had been in her teens or early 20s at Emancipation. So somebody who is still living and still in the Park Service now who had a lifetime relationship with her enslaved ancestor, which is a pretty powerful thing to think about.
Emily: And then when her family relocated to California during the World War II period was a young woman who worked in a Jim Crow union hall, which was an institution created to allow people of color to work in more industries in part of a deal that was cut with white unions so that they were technically union members and allowed to work but were exempted from the negotiated benefits that white members of the union received. And because of Betty's role in that process and then later on throughout her life as a civil rights leader and a community leader in the Berkeley/East Bay area ended up working for a local congressman who put her on the task force as this national park was being designed.
Emily: And she was really just instrumental in framing the mission of the park from being something that was initially conceived of as intended about the traditional white-centric narrative of people pulling together in World War II to something that is much, much more profoundly explores and is critical and inclusive of all of these stories of labor and civil rights history that were encapsulated in that moment. And so her presence in the Park Service, I think, is an example of some really powerful new directions that things can go when the right people are in the room.
Rebecca: It'll be interesting to see. I think the Park Service is still trying to figure out, now that they've acknowledged there is a problem, what to do about it.
Anna: Okay. So I think we'll wrap up. But I wanted to say, Emily and Lexie, if you want to plug anything or tell people where they can find you and your work. Or if you don't wanna do that, that's fine, too.
Lexie: Let's see. I would like to plug the concept of Smokey the Bear. You can technically find me on Twitter—I'm not the most active poster—at @lexieroseme.
Emily: And I would encourage people to check out a lot of diverse voices that are speaking out in conservation and natural history and this idea that I think as we just talked about is gaining traction, that natural history and natural resource management are things that are themselves subjects in the history of science and that it needs some subjectivity and thoughtfulness in unpacking how those things intersect with current issues of equity and inclusion for all people. So things that I've really enjoyed this year have been the Black Birders Week and Black Hikers Week movements and a lot of related movements of people of color in the outdoors. There's so many great nonprofits and individuals who are doing a lot of wonderful communication about that.
Emily: You can find me on Twitter at @adventurstorian. Don't tweet a lot these days, and mostly I'm talking to Becca. But you can also find my organization is the Nisqually River Foundation, and you can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at @nisquallyriver.
Anna: Thank you both so much for—
Emily: Thanks for having us. I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller, and this was so delightful.
Lexie: Same. May I plug a book in particular? So I've been reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. And I've actually been listening to it through Libby. I can also plug Libby, the library audio app. And it's been really wonderful in talking about a lot of these themes and in thinking about humans as part of the ecosystem and how we can positive-relationship with the outdoors and with the environment and not thinking about it as such a black and white, like either the environment is serving us or we are serving the environment, and those are the only two ways that we can think about it.
Anna: Okay. If you liked our episode today, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions about any of the topics we discussed, tweet us at @ladyxscience, use the hashtag #LadySciPod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read articles and essays, pitch us an idea, and more, visit ladyscience.com.
Anna: And we are an independent magazine. We depend on support from readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. Until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter and Instagram at @ladyxscience.
End Music: Smokey the Bear, Department of Agriculture, Office of Public Affairs, 1952.
Acoustic guitar
With a ranger’s hat and shovel
And a pair of dungarees
You will find him in the forest
Always sniffin’ at the breeze
People stop and pay attention
When he tells them to beware
Smokey the Bear, Smokey the Bear
Prowlin’ and a’ growlin’ and a’ sniffin the air
He can find a fire before it starts to flame
That’s why the call him Smokey
That was how he got his name
