Jesse Baum

Dr. Geoffrey Godbey is an expert in the field of Parks and Recreation, and a professor emeritus at Penn State University in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism management. In addition to consulting internationally on the subject of outdoor recreation, he has advised the department of the interior on policy and authored ten books on the subject of parks, recreation and leisure.

Geoffrey Godbey (source: FinishingLinePress.com)

As well as doing interviews with Al-Jazeera, Wall Street Journal and the National Science Foundation, he was willing to speak with me on his research on Park’s therapeutic effects on the public.

 Hi, thanks for doing this interview with me. I’d like to start by just asking you a little bit about you –  how you got into Parks and Recreation?

I actually got my start working a summer job in South Delaware, just by chance. I was an assistant playgrounds director, then I started to see a lot of things that related to how people use leisure nature and what roles parks can play, so it wasn’t a very glorious start, but I related to it into it instantly.  I also worked for Philadelphia’s Department of Parks and Recreation as a research analyst. Both of those experiences were important to me and understanding the role that community recreation and parks can play in people’s lives.

With parks and backcountry recreation activities, there can be negative impacts: litter, changing wildlife behavior, changing the environment around them. But at the same time, parks can increase people’s environmental awareness, make them care more about the world and environment around them. So where do you see trade-offs here?

Well most of the environmental negative impact people have is not from visiting parks. There are always impacts from people visiting anywhere, the idea of no-impact tourism is a myth, I think. Generally people in parks don’t have a huge impact. I spent  lot of time in China, and right now the air is toxic there, killing people from the burning of soft coal. Those are the issues that will decide the fate of the planet. And parks, they can educate, but there’s always going to be some impact, the design of the park can play a role how much impact there is. In Costa Rica, for example, people walk on raised wooden paths… so park design can play a role in lowering environmental impact as well.

 People say that spending time in a park can contribute to environmental awareness, and I was wondering how we can channel that energy into making sure people are good stewards to their parks?

Well, there’s a big disconnect between what people say and what they do. There’s a wonderful book called Bobo’s Endurance about this… There are people that support all kinds of environmental issues but they live in a five thousand square foot home and drive a mile that gets 20 miles per gallon, so people’s attitudes sometimes determine their behavior, but a lot of times they don’t, and it’s a continual process to try and get people to behave and consume in a ways that have less impact. Environmentally, parks are somewhat important, but parks are islands, and for an issue like extinction, parks are often not big enough. If birds are dying from pollution from burning coal, a park can’t solve that problem. So I think that there are real limits. They are islands of hope; they’re symbolic of this comparatively natural world. But most of the big issues in terms of climate change have to do with fossil fuels, and open-ended consumption. So parks have this symbolic importance… but even most of the national parks aren’t big enough that they really provide environmental shelter. Here’s an example: a lot of the particulate matter in the air LA on a cloudy day, maybe 20 percent has been blown over from China! We’ve been the biggest environmental polluters on a per capita basis, and actually we still are, and parks can educate and remind people, let them make connections between plant and animal and human life, but they are usually not enough to provide a buffer against environmental damage.

Maybe that’s too harsh… they may have trees that can catch particulate matter- sycamores and sticky-leafed trees. They do good. But the problems we face are fundamental- as in if humans will even be here in 100 years.  So parks have to be devices that educate.

 I agree… I’m a student and I work with the divestment campaign on my campus to get endowment money out of fossil fuels because I agree that the conversation should be about the fossil fuel industry… as opposed to steps like re-using plastic bottles.

It doesn’t mean that parks aren’t important – they are.  It just means that they are not the solution to our environmental catastrophe.

So let me ask you, what are your thoughts on the inequality within park usage? I know that in state parks the average visitor is white middle class person, so do you think that the parks department can work to change this, or is this part of a problem too big for the parks department to work effectively against?

Well generally parks are indicative of the areas that they exist in that live around them.  Most state parks, to visit them you need to know that they are there, and you need a car. In cities, in lower income neighborhoods, parks are generally not somewhere that you would want to go. If it’s a dangerous neighborhood, the park is generally going to be dangerous, although there are things that can be done to make them safer. They reflect the conditions of the neighborhood. In the US, generally the people that value parks the most tend to be white, middle class families. But the quality of the park is everything. In Cleveland, the parks get a whole lot of African American visitors, but they are safe, well maintained and the people that I’ve talked to, done studies with, they take it as an indication that the government cares about them. But if you went into North Philly and saw a park, you wouldn’t want to get near it. They‘re falling apart.

So parks have always been used the most by the middle class- rich people have their own natural playgrounds, and poor people often don’t know that they’re there.  In some cases, they’re not interested, or the park is dangerous. This is nothing new. What’s new is that the majority of the population will be non-white in twenty five years. Forty five percent of 17-29 year olds are non-white now, and historically these groups have supported parks less, and used them less. This is a huge issue.

 I’ve been hearing that hanging out in parks has the potential to help mental health, particularly with respect to attention span and stress, but then you contrast that with how ADD is on the rise.  Do you think that trend was due to people replacing outdoor activities with screen time?

Yeah, well there are several people including a woman at the University of Illinois that study this, and while it’s a complicated issue, one thing we know is that seeing green in nature has a calming effect and a mood elevating effect. And doing green indoors can do the same thing. How that relates to ADD, I’m not an expert, but it does seem like, from a lot of research that looks at everything from endorphins to public housing and stress measurements show that being in areas that are comparatively natural shows a cortisol decline- so there is a stress reduction effect The belief is that this is what we recognize, that the brain has not adjusted to artificial light and indoor living, and we recognize this natural setting as where we belong.

 So in the future, with trends in urban migration, do you think that the trend is still towards suburbia, even though it is a less sustainable model?

Well, in this case design is everything. The benefits of “nature” doesn’t mean wild area, there is almost nowhere on earth not affected by humans. I mean, there are jet planes flying almost everywhere, air quality is generally affected. However, the way that nature is created in cities differs. I mean Minneapolis has a great urban forest, but urban forests aren’t always a positive thing- in high crime areas they tend to be dangerous, and give people a place to hide, so how you incorporate animal and plant life in urban areas requires imagination. But we know that generally more trees is better than less trees- visually, aesthetically and also they improve air quality, mitigating temperature extremes. But these things cost money, and these things are generally politically divided, people on the left tend to be in favor of these things, and people on the right tend to be against it- not always, but often.

 To me this is interesting, because I’ve read a lot about trees having monetary value- that they provide these “services to communities”

They certainly do! And it’s how you measure it. In short term profit, they don’t do much, but in ten, fifteen years they have huge value- lowering health costs, the “proximity value”- that if you’re in an area with trees, the value of the homes go up. So there’s a lot of ways they increase value, but they require initial expenditure, and some people don’t want to spend for it, with the taxes.

 I mean for me, I’m from Brooklyn, and I’ve seen the million trees initiative, and I can see that neighborhoods look better, even two years after they started the initiative.

Oh yeah! Urban tree initiatives are stunningly important, and some of them are really well managed, and some of them are unbelievably stupidly managed. A lot of contractors and developers know nothing about plant life- they plant the wrong kinds of trees in bad places, they don’t know about different types of soils that they can use. Minneapolis has one of the best shade tree programs in the country, and you can see how important it is. If you come from a city, you can feel the difference bteen a street lined with trees versus one without any. It lowers the temperature and lowers particulate matter, and it doesn’t cost much… but it does require some work, especially initially.

 So what kind of work are you doing right now- you work in China?

I spend two months every year with a University in China where there is this obvious environmental crisis, I often have to wear a respiratory mask when I go outside there. They are burning huge amounts of coal for energy, and there is not a lot of environmental regulation, factories dump all of the chemicals that they don’t want into the waterways- but China is not going to have a park system lit the US, because land in cities can be a million dollars per square yard, but they’re beginning- I hope they’re gonna have time, because it’s hard even to imagine. Our oil and coal companies have tried to create doubt about climate change, but the impacts will be stunning- they already are, but we don’t quite get it yet. My own state might look like Florida in a few years- and that means that trees will die, they might burn and throw more smoke in the air. So this is probably the biggest issues that  faces humanity now, and China is in a bad situation, so we’re not leaving you the world we should be, but that’s the story.