Climate and History with Elizabeth Villano

A conversation with Elizabeth Villano, from the NPS Climate Change Response Program, about telling climate stories and finding hope. This episode was recorded in June of 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Climate change in Glacier: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate-change.htm Climate change across the NPS: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/climatechange/index.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. You're listening to Headwaters, a show from Glacier National Park.

Peri Sasnett: Glacier is usually thought of as a nature park, but it's also steeped in human culture and history dating back thousands of years. My name is Peri, and this episode is an interview with climate change interpreter and park ranger Elizabeth Villano. She talks about how climate change isn't just a nature or science story, but is also a history and culture story, and about how national parks and historic sites across the country can lead that conversation. This episode is part of a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. These episodes don't have to be listened to in any order, each one stands on its own. And they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate over one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives and our futures. [drum and synth beat starts to play] This is an interview that surprised me. Each turn in the conversation went in directions I didn't expect. I've always known that climate change is a big story that connects to pretty much everything, but I'd never heard it explored this fully. If you enjoy visiting national parks, or especially if you like going to ranger programs, this conversation is for you.

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Daniel Lombardi: Elizabeth, welcome to headquarters.

Elizabeth Villano: Thanks so much, Daniel. It's great to be here.

Daniel: Will you introduce yourself? Where do you work?

Elizabeth: I work for the Climate Change Response Program, which is the centralized unit within the National Park Service that does climate change communication, resilience, adaptation work for all of the National Park Service sites.

Daniel: And before that, you worked for a bunch of national park sites in the San Francisco Bay Area, right?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I worked at Alcatraz Island, the Marin Headlands, Muir Woods, and Rosie the Riveter World War Two Home Front National Historical Park.

Daniel: Okay, so you're you are a park ranger wearing the flat hat, talking to the public, talking about trees, talking about the history of World War Two, talking about all kinds of stuff.

Elizabeth: And federal prisons.

Daniel: Okay. And now you're working with all the national parks around the country, four hundred-some of them. And you're helping them incorporate climate change into what they're already doing?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think at last count, there was 424 National Park Service sites across the country.

Daniel: Okay.

Elizabeth: And all of those interpreters have a really important job of engaging the public with their site specifically. Mm hmm. And so I am kind of in the next step up from that, where I help create training materials and actually facilitate and lead trainings that help those interpreters find their own site connection to climate change.

Daniel: Is there a park site that isn't connected to climate change?

Elizabeth: Definitely not.

Daniel: And that is exactly why I wanted to talk to you. We're having this whole series of conversations about climate change in the national parks. And I wanted to talk to you because you are talking to all these other national parks, talking about how climate change is connected to everything we do, including historical and cultural park sites. It's not just about the big nature parks like Glacier.

Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly. And in those big nature parks like Glacier, finding the unexpected connections that sometimes create the deeper meanings for visitors.

Daniel: So there for sure wasn't any like, you know, "aha" wake up moment for you on climate change. Like what underpins, you know, what's your motivation? Why do you want to tell climate stories at all?

Elizabeth: So the mission of the National Park Service is to preserve these places that we're in unimpaired for future generations. Mm hmm. And a lot of people understand when we say things like, don't feed the bears, right? That's not an unimpaired state. That is humans feeding bears. Mm hmm. They understand when we say don't throw litter on the ground. Right. Because that's not unimpaired. If we really want to stay true to our mission statement, then we absolutely have to talk about here's ways that we can reduce our carbon footprint so that these places remain unimpaired for future generations, for people to continue enjoying these beautiful places that we love and cherish so much. That's just another form of advocacy that we absolutely need to do.

Daniel: Especially in a place like Glacier that's so easy to see. And such an important point you're making is that. Climate change is impacting and changing in a negative way. Glacier National Park. And we have to acknowledge that and we have to explore it. We have to talk about it. We have to tell the climate stories of Glacier National Park and of all the other park sites as well.

Elizabeth: Mm hmm. Yeah. Even if your park site doesn't have a glacier to melt or, you know, a sea level rise that will destroy your resource, you're still a part of this larger interconnected system across the nation where if we are protecting the National Park Services resources, you're a part of that movement. So part of my work is developing training tools so that anyone across the Park Service can say, How do I talk about climate change more effectively? And then the other part of that is actually leading and facilitating trainings.

Daniel: And that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, is because I know you're working on a a big resource, a big toolkit called History and Hope, which is a tool that's going to help more national parks, especially national historical parks, talk about climate change and talk about climate change in places that maybe they haven't a lot in the past. Is that right?

Elizabeth: Yeah. The full title is History and Hope: Interpreting the Roots of Our Climate Crisis and Inspiring Action.

Daniel: Okay. I'm I'm really excited to talk to you today. And I want to talk to you about how the national parks can interpret climate change into the future. Maybe a new approach to talking about climate change that's different than what we've done in the past. But let's start with you a little bit. Did you have a moment or a turning point where you started thinking about climate change a lot more or differently?

Elizabeth: Well, you know, I was thinking about if I had a wake up moment in thinking about climate change as a whole, and I realized the answer is no. It's just been a part of my consciousness since I can remember. Mm hmm. And I think that unfortunately, that's just how the trajectory of climate change, knowledge and understanding is going to go. And as you talk with people who are younger than me, especially, there's no wake up moment. It's yeah, I was born into a world that is increasingly in hospitable and is going to change in ways that we can't imagine or comprehend. Mm hmm.

Daniel: You could imagine a climate scientist 30 years ago or something, and they do some experiments or finally read some new research, and they have this wake up moment. But for people, for millennials, for Gen Z, for younger people, there's not moments like that. It's sort of you learn about it before you really understand it. And it's just climate change is kind of an ever present thing. Is that what I mean? That's how it feels for me too.

Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. It's just a part of how I view the world. Any time I'm in the outdoors, it's always kind of there in the back of my mind. And I think a part of my journey with the Park Service was figuring out, okay, we have this massive systemic issue and we're only really talking about it in spaces we think of as natural. But of course, this problem is so much bigger than just in natural spaces. Mm hmm. So how do we use park service sites that are more than just natural? All the cultural history embedded into them to help us think through those really challenging issues with climate change?

Daniel: Yeah. Why? Why And how do you think National Park sites, whether they're cultural or historical or natural, like why are park sites so well-suited for communicating climate change?

Elizabeth: I think first I've noticed in myself and other Park Service interpreters that we kind of hold a false binary of what's natural and what's cultural. Mm hmm. We say, like, this park is natural. There's glaciers, there's trees, there's rocks. And this park is cultural. It talks about wars and World War Two. And yeah, every park site has all of it.

Daniel: Like Glacier National Park is known as a natural park. We have grizzly bears. We have glaciers. Right. But of course, there's a lot of cultural and history here. And I imagine in the same way a site like Rosie the Riveter