Q&A with National Park Service Director Jarvis: ‘The outdoors are good for you’: Promoting positive connections between parks, public health

There is a growing recognition of the connection between parks and public health, and it was also the focus of National Park Week this past April. What is driving this trend?

It goes back to Frederick Law Olmsted, who is really the father of landscape architecture, the manager and designer of Central Park and one of the first folks to go out and review the potential of Yosemite National Park. Olmstead understood that the public needed places to escape from, (which) at that time were pretty bad urban environments. We still need that. There is a growing body of evidence within the parks community, and even starting in the medical community, that the outdoors are good for you in a variety of ways. Whether you are talking about obesity or heart disease or cancer or depression, we are really looking to connect the role that we play in national parks and in the parks community with the health community. And this is a worldwide phenomenon, frankly.

Your agency has taken a lead role in a groundbreaking new initiative called Healthy Parks Healthy People U.S. What’s it all about?

There are really three parts to the Healthy Parks Healthy People initiative. One is that the National Park Service and its iconic status has a particular role as an indicator of environmental health. People look to the national parks to be well maintained and well taken care of. We have these extraordinary places like Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, and they expect them to be good stewards of the environment. The second is that we know that human health is directly linked to environmental health. Air quality, water quality, pollution — all of those things have a direct effect on human health. The third piece is that we are recognizing that active contact with the environment is additionally good for you. It’s not just that we have a clean environment out there that allows us to be healthy, but active participation in the outdoors — being in national parks, being in state parks — has a positive benefit as well. So it really links that healthy parks and healthy people are inextricably linked.

What are parks doing in connection with Healthy Parks Healthy People U.S.?

There are some great examples across the system where parks are reaching out to the community and inviting them specifically to come to the parks for activities that are good for them. Badlands National Park has a program called Walking the Badlands, where local fourth-graders come out and make healthy choices. And at Muir Woods National Monument in California, we ask that new concessioners provide locally grown healthy menu options. And so in the café at Muir Woods you get really good food that is also organic and locally grown as part of your park experience.

How does Healthy Parks Healthy People U.S. tie into the Let’s Move! program?

When the first lady launched her Let’s Move! initiative, it really focused on physical activity and healthy eating. And we offered her a sort of second component to that, which is Let’s Move Outside Junior Rangers, offering that national parks and state parks and community parks across the country provide an opportunity to not only provide the physical place to exercise but to gain the benefits of being outdoors at the same time. And then we took Let’s Move Outside and endorsed our Junior Ranger programs. We now have over 50 national parks that have Let’s Move Outside Junior Ranger programs where kids come and learn about that particular park. The learning exercise also has some outdoor activity to it that gives them some exercise, and they get the Let’s Move Outside certificate as well as part of the Junior Ranger certification.

Park ranger Larry Perez teaches students how to identify plants during a field trip to Everglades National Park in Florida.

Photo courtesy National Park Service

What private sector partners have stepped forward in support of the National Park Service’s goals?

There’s a group of medical practitioners — doctors — that are pioneering this effort across the country. We have a number of individual doctors, either they work for a public health sector or there are individuals that are developing park prescriptions. They are literally prescribing to their patients “Take a hike and call me in the morning.”

How can we make national parks a daily part of a healthy lifestyle?

There are 394 national park units across the country and they are not near everyone. We do have some extraordinary urban park systems here in Washington, D.C., and in New York and in San Francisco, Atlanta and other places. But there are many communities that do not have a national park system, but they do have a state park system or a regional or city park system. The National Park Service works cooperatively with each of those park systems to develop and provide facilities, access bike trails, restrooms and parking. National parks generally are where you go on vacation or on the weekend. The local parks are where you go after dinner, and the key here is to connect them all in the minds of the American public — that all of them are good for you.

The National Park Service has an Office of Public Health. What role does it play?

Our partnership with the Public Health Service has been around a long time. In 1918, the first public health officer traveled to Yellowstone to test the water, and we’ve maintained a very strong interagency agreement ever since. Principally, the Office of Public Health has been focused internally to monitor the public use of the parks, our water systems, our food systems, all of those kinds of things. But the outgrowth of this initiative is to really recognize that we have a one-health approach to this now. It’s the health of the environment and the health of the American public, and the Public Health Service has been an extraordinary partner in this process because they walk in both worlds. We have our own epidemiologists, we have wildlife biologists and we have folks that are working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and when we bring all of that together I think there is extraordinary public benefit.

The theme of APHA’s 139th Annual Meeting is “Healthy Communities Promote Healthy Minds and Bodies.” How does the work of the National Park Service fit with this?

I think it fits in perfectly. What’s really interesting in this whole initiative is that the health community has been sort of talking to itself, and the parks community has been talking to itself and the community planning side of our country talks to itself, and what’s great about this is that it begins to integrate them all — that good community design that includes parks, safe places to recreate, good access to those places — is integral to a healthy community.

— Interview conducted, edited and condensed by Teddi Dineley Johnson