No Show

The Impact of National Parks with Lise Aangeenbrug

• Jeff Borman and Matt Brown

Share episode

Lise is Chief Program Officer of the National Park Foundation, leading program and partnerships teams responsible for delivering more than $89 million in grants and other support to national parks. We talk about the NPS' overall economic impact on communities and regions, keeping a healthy symbiosis between public and private interests, combatting overtourism, and hidden gems in the park system.

National Park Foundation
Leave No Trace
Recreate Responsibly
NPF Instagram

Matt Brown:

Hi everybody, welcome to no Show. I'm Matt Brown. Typically, I am joined by Jeff Borman, my co host, but I'm flying solo. I am so excited today for our guest. I have been looking forward to this for a long time.

Matt Brown:

Lisa Angerberg was named Chief Program Officer of the National Park Foundation in 2022. She leads the NPF's program and partnerships teams, which are responsible for delivering more than $89 million in grants and other support to national parks. She oversees strategy for protecting parks. She connects people to the natural and cultural heritage of the parks, and she also works on strengthening the network of nonprofit partners that support the more than 400 national parks in the country. Before this, she was Executive Director of the Outdoor Industry Association and for several years she was Executive Director of Great Outdoors Colorado.

Matt Brown:

She is also a semi-regular visitor to the White House. Essentially, she practically has a key. She's an adventurous cyclist and she's encountered all manner of wild animals both on the trail and on K Street, where the most dangerous animals of all reside. And perhaps the thing to envy the most, especially from Jeff and I, who are typically depicted in pictures online in a shallow state of disrepair every photo you find of Lisa online, she is both outside and looking absolutely joyous, celebrating a life well-lived. Lisa, thank you so much for being on no Show and welcome.

Lise Aangeenbrug:

Thank you so much. I love sharing the joy, beauty and wonder of national parks. I'm thrilled to be here.

Matt Brown:

Let's start with some of the basics here. What does the NPF do?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

So the National Park Foundation is a congressionally chartered nonprofit that raises private funds to match federal dollars to invest in protecting our natural parks and connecting people to the national parks. It's largely individuals, foundations and corporations. We get a little bit of money from the federal government, which we match four to five to one, but the bulk of our funding are small dollar donations from people just love the parks up to very wealthy individuals that want to make a really significant investment.

Matt Brown:

How many pledges do you get a year Are we talking about? Do you get big stuff? Do you get small stuff? Is the dollar amount just all over the map?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

They're all over the map. Probably our largest donor has given us more than $20 million over time to invest in new sites and repairing places like the Lincoln Memorial. To the $50 donor that just has visited a national park, loves it and wants to give back, it ranges across the board.

Matt Brown:

Are there big numbers about the national park's overall economic impact on particular communities, states and regions? Are there any numbers out there that you always kind of go to whenever we talk about how the parks can affect our national economy?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

Yeah, there are two numbers that are regularly reported which I think will be of interest to your listeners. One is tracking that's done by the national park system. We had 312 million visitors last year, putting $23.9 billion into the surrounding communities, resulting in a $50.3 billion benefit. I just think that's amazing. The other statistic I often go to because national parks are a big part of it is data that is actually tracked by the government. The Bureau of Economic Affairs tracks every kind of business output in America. This is really related to the outdoor industry, but parks and travel and tourism are a huge component in this. That contributes $1.1 trillion to the US economy and was growing faster than the rest of the economy as a whole last year.

Matt Brown:

Whenever there's a government shutdown. It seems like there's a government shutdown essentially every three to six months. What is the first shot that the news goes to when the government shuts down? It is always a park in the system. We always wonder does the government actually realize how much money the parks generate for the communities that are in their states and communities?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

You know, I think two things. Parks are beloved. They are non-partisan. People love them. We share a lot, as do our local partners, with our congressional representatives and the administration, just how much it's contributing to the economy, and so I do think they recognize just how important parks are to people.

Matt Brown:

Has the NPF ever studied the park systems impact on US health, like overall benefits, including social?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

We don't have specific park national park figures for that, but there is a growing body of evidence. There's been a lot of attention on this over the last five to 10 years in the academic community. Looking at both physical health, mental health, agency grit for children, resiliency, it contributes to all of these things. I can't quote any specific statistics, but it's something I think we've known intuitively for those of us that go outside. You mentioned earlier that I always look joyous. It's because I spend a lot of time outdoors, and so I think those of us that get outside a lot and have access to nature have known this intuitively. But now the academic data is really proving out the strong, deep connection between people's access to nature, the ability to recreate outdoors, on both our physical and mental health.

Matt Brown:

Over the last 10 years, visitation to the parks has skyrocketed. Why do you think we've seen such a spike in visitation?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

Well, we saw big numbers even before the COVID situation, but we really saw an escalation during COVID. More people than ever were getting outside, just in general, whether it was a neighborhood park or a national park, and I think that's pretty common sense. You couldn't go anywhere else, so people discovered places that they've maybe forgotten about. Maybe they've been taken to a national park as a child and hadn't been back. We're looking for a place to vacation, and the outdoors became one of the few places where you could safely get outside or felt like you could safely get outside, and the population is growing. I think people are realizing the health and wellness benefits. It's also an extremely low cost place to take your family and I think people you know. Particularly again, during COVID, people were worried about finances and so having a low cost way to have your family enjoy the outdoors was really important.

Matt Brown:

That growth has led to a spate of articles over the last couple of years that used the term overtourism. The Utah parks and some of the heavy hitters like Yosemite and Yellowstone in particular, often get callouts in these articles. How do you define overtourism, and is that even the correct way to be thinking about what's happening with visitation and staffing at the parks right now?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

When I think about the park system in the US, we have 425 sites in every state and every territory, and what we have is we have people that may not know about all the different opportunities, and so they're concentrating their desire to go outside in a handful of really well-known parks like Yellowstone, yosemite, grand Canyon, the parks in Utah, as you pointed out. But what we really want people to know is there are so many places to go where you won't experience crowding, you won't experience a wait time to get in, and how can we help people find those other parks, those other places to get outside?

Matt Brown:

You've worked for organizations that represent both public interest and private interest related to outdoors, and it's become a massive, sprawling ecosystem of retailers and tourism boards and nonprofits and government agencies, and one of the things that we always talk about is keeping a healthy symbiosis between all these people, but not having economic drivers spoil the land or the experience. Some of the great stories of preservation in the 19th and 20th century centered on communities and activists working to keep natural spaces from becoming overrun by concrete, by too much tourism, too much capitalism for lack of a better word when it comes to staving off potential commercial exploitation of public lands. What are lessons that you've learned in keeping everybody on all sides of all aisles happy, including the visitors?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

The way I've talked about it in the past is you don't want to cook the goose that laid the gold neg, and we are really fortunate in the United States that they're the foresight to create this preservation of both natural and cultural wonders across the United States. And so the Park Service has a really unique mission, and it's a careful balance. They're both to protect these cultural natural resources and to connect and inspire people to enjoy them. We have the same parallel mission. So we think about this a lot, and, first and foremost, there are safeguards for the National Park System, where you can't go in and develop the National Park. That's not something that can happen, and so what we're really talking about is how do we manage what happens on the park sites? And so the Park Service itself concentrates on delivering both the protection and the good visitor experience. So when you think about the Park Ranger telling you about geysers at Yellowstone, or the Park Ranger is telling you about the geologic features at Grand Canyon and keeping visitors safe, and the thing that is outsourced or is done as a public-private partnership are the concessions for the hotels and the food service that exist within the National Park footprint, and so those are done on contract so that businesses that are set up to provide hospitality are providing those hospitality services. But there are very strict guidelines, rules and regulations about how that is to occur so that the footprint stays as minimal as possible.

Lise Aangeenbrug:

The other way that I think about this is what can we do to educate people so that when they're in the parks that they don't do things like stand too close to the rim of the Grand Canyon, try to get too close to a bison or a grizzly bear in Yellowstone?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

And that's a big part of what the Park Service has to manage and we really look to some partners. There are two campaigns that were a part of many of the federal public lands agencies and many of our outdoor industry companies are a part of it. It's both leave no trace and recreate responsibly, and these are campaigns to give people a sense of know before you go, plan your trip, know what you're getting into, what you need to enjoy the park safely and understand what's happening in that park. Before you get there, pack out your trash, treat the place respectfully, treat others respectfully. You know, when you get in situations where you've got large crowds of people all together, sometimes people aren't as respectful as they might otherwise be, and we want people to really enjoy the parks, but not over love them and not over run them.

Matt Brown:

Timed entry has become a big thing over the last 10 years and it elicits a variety of reactions. What are your thoughts on timed entries into the park?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

I think you know so my home park is Rocky Mountain National Park and it is. It does have timed entry now, and when it first came to be, it was a little frustrating for those of us that have always been able to drive up to a park entrance and go whenever it strikes us. But what you come to realize if you love the parks is that if everybody enters all at once and there's no timed entry or some way to control it, you're not going to have a very good experience. So I think what we're finding is, for those parks that have really significant demand, particularly in specific seasons, timed entry is probably a good idea to make sure a visitor has a positive experience. They might be disappointed they can't get their time slot, but if they were to go and wait in line for hours just to get into the park and then find that special place that they've always wanted to go to, overrun with others, I think they'd be equally disappointed.

Matt Brown:

Right, I think this is the timed entry method has kind of expanded. I think even you know, recently there was a letter drafted by the US Travel Association and it was signed by hundreds of members of the travel industry and I think it was sent to the Interior Secretary and the NPS Director and it called for kind of a larger reservation system to allow bookings that could be made like 10 to 12 months in advance. And you know the signage were hotels and cruise lines and destinations and tour providers. You know we've been kind of wondering what the impetus behind that was. Is it to sort of maybe help the businesses figure out how much money they're going to make? Is it to help protect the parks? Is it both? I don't know. Would you like to see a larger kind of reservations system take place with all the parks or is it a case by case kind of situation?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

You know, in general, when you think about the parks, they're facing a lot of challenges and one of the opportunities really is around technology. And one of the things we've invested in pretty heavily and we'll be rolling out with the park service soon is, overall, how can we use digital technology to provide a better visitor experience? Whether it is a reservation system or an ability to look up and plan your visit or real-time information on which places are experiencing the most demand Just being able to take better advantage of the technology tools that exist to help the parks manage the visitor and give the visitor a better experience.

Matt Brown:

You've worked outside of Washington. You've worked inside Washington. What are the biggest differences when you're working on anything environmental, when you're kind of inside the Beltway and outside of the Beltway?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

Well, the thing that's been a surprise. I will tell you so. So you know I spend my time in DC now, but also still have a place in Colorado. What I would say the thing and this is really true of all the national parks is, first and foremost, one of the best national parks in the country which is completely free is in Washington DC is Rock Creek Park, and it is amazing. You can be in that park in the middle of the city and be down in a stream corridor and a forest canopy, riding your bike, hiking or taking your kids for a walk. That you would never have thought was possible in a large city. It's amazing. So that's the really positive piece of it.

Lise Aangeenbrug:

I think the other difference is when you're working at the state level or the local level, you often know everyone you're working with well. They're your neighbor, they're your community. So when I think about communities outside of national parks, there's a huge need to collaborate across party lines, across economic barriers, across you know, all kinds of differences. They're your neighbor and they're your partner, and so we've seen a lot of success at the local level. I think the same could be true at the federal level. It's just, it's a little bit harder with national parks because you're really far from a lot of them. So I think about that all the time. If there were the ability for people in DC to really experience the outdoors more often and improve their mental health and reset their blood pressure, we might see more collaboration.

Matt Brown:

I'd like to test out a conspiracy theory that I've long had. I am on a quest to see every national park in America. Actually, when I say national park, I mean the 63 that are designated with the actual park name. That ends up frustrating NPS employees sometimes because they're like no, no, no, don't just concentrate on those, go see all the wonder and splendor of everything that the Department of the Interior has to offer. I totally agree, and I've done that as well.

Matt Brown:

But it's good to have goals, and this is one that I set out for myself a couple of decades ago. One thing that I have noticed is that we have spaces say the St Louis Arch, indiana sand dunes that get the park designation. I wonder if that is a representative or a Chamber of Commerce or a state that is pushing to get the name at the end of the space change so it will show up on a National Geographic List National Parks of the East, national Parks of the Midwest. Is there an economic driver you think to the way that our public spaces are named in the park system?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

I think that's certainly a part of it. The other driver for it is more resources often go to. They're managed slightly differently and eligible for more resources when you have that park status. So a lot of times that's why a community wants it. It's often really driven by a local community working statewide because the National Park, as you mentioned, when it gets that park status, more people want to go there. It's just a higher level of recognition. I think that's where this technology piece in my mind comes into play, because if you're going to Indiana sand dunes, we also hope you're also going to Payne and Rocks National Seashore. They're just these incredible. They're things that are near all of those 63 signature park sites that are fantastic, and so what I think about is how could you use that recognition for the iconic 63 park sites and use that to also talk about what else is nearby and how amazing it is?

Matt Brown:

Do you find Washington now receptive to environmental issues in a way that it maybe it wasn't five or 10 years ago, or is it still all the same?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

Yeah, I probably not qualified to comment on all environmental issues, which cover a much wider range. As far as national parks go, we have always enjoyed significant nonpartisan, bipartisan support for the national parks. Almost everybody in Congress has a national park story, so when you go into an office and visit, you talk about what's being funded in their district, what's happening in their state. Almost all of them can tell you a story about a park site they've been to. People love the parks.

Matt Brown:

It does seem like a rare political unifier that cuts across a bunch of different demographics and a bunch of different geographic areas, and I wish we could sort of replicate it At the end of our interviews. We have a mystery question. I actually have two mystery questions for you. First, what is a sneaky space in the park system, a hidden gem that you would recommend people go to? A non-yellowstone. It's beautiful as a yellowstone and you know somebody are. Where is a little hidden gem that you think people ought to travel to and experience?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

There are so many. I really love the hidden gems. I love all of our large parks and have been to many of them, but it really is the mid-size or hidden gems that you can really find solace, joy and wonder in as well. I think about painted rocks, point Reyes National Seashore A lot of the national seashores are not known and the idea that there's a national seashore on the shore of our Great Lakes really truly incredible and then some of our more urban parks.

Lise Aangeenbrug:

I and you know, living in Washington DC, it really is an amazing thing to be able to wake up at sunrise. I don't do this every morning, but go for a run and go down to the National Mall and watch the sunrise from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I think that's what I really really would like people to know is there are 425 sites in the National Park System and often people only think of those 63 that you talked about earlier. And if you think about the Blue Ridge Parkway, rock Creek Park, the CNO Canal, just those right in the Washington DC area, just these amazing attributes. But the National Seashores, the small historic sites like Nicodemus in Kansas or the Lincoln Boyhood Home in Illinois there's something to be learned in each of these places about what's made us a country, what brings us all together. It's both natural and cultural wonders, and there is as much joy in learning about the history of America as there is experiencing the natural history of America.

Matt Brown:

A great final question here. You have done a ton of cycling, as we said, a ton of hiking. What's been one of your biggest trail freakouts? Did you ever come like a bear? Like a bear is five feet away, or a cougar is, or it's like wait, I thought you packed the water. No, I thought you packed the water. What give me the biggest freakout moment?

Lise Aangeenbrug:

Yeah, so probably the most challenging thing I've ever. So I started out my career working in the Masamara in Kenya. I worked as a researcher and lived in the tent for almost a year working on a wildlife research project and it was really interesting makes. We were observing lions, hyenas, what you think of as these apex predators which most people are terrified of. The animal I was most terrified of and it would come through camp at night are the buffalo. They're not like our American bison. They are these very mean animals and I mean I was just terrified if I had to wake up with them all night and leave the tent. I was sure it was going to be gored the second time.

Lise Aangeenbrug:

None of these have happened in the United States. It's interesting. More recently I joined a friend on a bike trip through big chunk of Canada's National Park. So we started out outside of Banff and road to the Alaska Yukon border and I what I don't think I had thought about enough in advance of that trip was how exposed I would be traveling by bike and camping in grizzly country, and that was, yeah, we saw quite a few grizzly bears. I think the last day of the trip we saw 17 bears, you know on bikes, and that's just a really different experience.

Matt Brown:

It is as advertised. At least you got to. I mean, you got the show, you know yeah, yeah. Lisa, thank you so much for being a guest. We really appreciate it.

Lise Aangeenbrug:

Absolutely Pure pleasure to talk about parks.