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For more than a century, America's parks have been places for all. At the federal level, the National Park System protects some of the country's most fragile areas-remote, rural, and urban spaces alike. The national parks are complemented by state, regional, county, and municipal park systems that provide opportunities to be in nature, engage with cultural heritage, and-crucially-learn about both. Together, all these parks provide a canvas to tell our shared stories as a nation- both easy and difficult ones. This is the legacy that public lands provide our nation, generation after generation.
Today, these places also tell the story of a rapidly changing climate. The earth is warming faster than scientists can measure and predict. People are losing their homes to wildfires, communities are flooded, and livelihoods are threatened with each catastrophic storm, which are becoming more and more frequent as our climate system becomes more and more unstable. For decades, America's public lands have been the brave "canaries" giving us bold warnings about the accumulating effect of our changing climate. The observations, evidence, and narratives of climate change abound. There are thousands of studies on hundreds of species at hundreds of sites-there is no shortage of science. Today's challenge is translating and sharing this information with a variety of audiences, including the next generation.
The theme of this special issue of Parks Stewardship Forum, "Park-Based Learning: Youth Engagement in Climate Change Education," has evolved over the past several months, but the focus and the goal remain the same: there is tremendous potential to facilitate learning about climate change with and within US national park sites and in other parks across the country. This special issue focuses on partner agencies and organizations that have developed innovative approaches to engaging learners to better understand natural science, climate change, and sustainability ethics. There are hundreds of examples of this work and these types of partnerships across the country, and this...