This clothing brand is a great way to bring awareness to the issues surrounding national parks. It kind of ties into what the group last week presented on.
This clothing brand is a great way to bring awareness to the issues surrounding national parks. It kind of ties into what the group last week presented on.
One of the unresolved questions I have about national parks is whether the locals, who visit the park frequently, are really part of the problem. I’d like to know whether they frequent the same parts of the park as tourists, or whether there are local “hot spots” in the park that most tourists do not go to. Additionally, I wonder whether they are likely to drive to the park, or find other entrances. Finally, I wonder whether they are more or less likely to create litter and otherwise “love our parks to death.” Depending on the answer to these questions, I am not convinced that capping the number of times an individual can enter a park is the correct solution to the “overcrowding of parks.”
Furthermore, I am not sure that there is an “overcrowding” taking place. These parks tend to be vast. I think that the real issue may be a lack of funding for our park system. Increasing fees and/or devoting more of our tax budget to the parks and using these funds to increase the number of access points, etc. to our parks would be beneficial and spread out the tourism to proportionally fill the parks.
With that said, there are certainly issues with the current regime that our peers and that clothing brand help to highlight.
Richard, I appreciate your thoughts on some of the points we discussed in our National Parks presentation. Although we came across some evidence to suggest that people who live near parks tend to visit them frequently, contributing to the overcrowding. However, we did not find much on the other concerns you addressed, such as where local folks visit in the parks and whether they drive or travel to the parks by other means. Data on those points would provide a valuable contribution to this discussion.
Ha, Shandice – your posts crack me up, you definitely have a brand. I was just at a national park, Bryce Canyon, and I saw that there were a ton of goods being marketed with incredibly gorgeous designs on them. Someone had created art deco looking renditions for t-shirts, postcards, and tons of stuff. I actually loved it and bought a ton, I think combining fashion here with the need to brand our national parks is great. This might be an idea for the group who covered the monetization of national parks, perhaps combining a rebranding with a price adjustment is in line.