National Parks Can Improve Society by Revealing Destructive Historical Conflicts

Six of the eight essays focus on battlefields and other sites of conflict managed by the National Park Service: Gettysburg National Military Park, PA; Fort Monroe National Monument, VA; Minidoka National Historic Site, ID; Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, VA; Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, CO; and Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, AL. Three good examples of doing so are Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in the Los Angeles area, which partners with n California state parks; the 1,200-mile Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail that connects history, culture, and outdoor recreation from Nogales, Arizona, to the San Francisco Bay Area in California; and the Chumash Satwiwa Native American Indian Culture Center and Natural Area, also in California, which is a partnership between the National Park Service and the Friends of Satwiwa. A barbed wire fence serves as a reminder of the purpose of the Manzanar incarceration camp, which held 10,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. Besides Manzanar, the National Park System commemorates this period at Minidoka National Historic Site in Idaho, Honouliuli National Historic Site in Hawaii, Amache National Historic Site in Colorado, Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial in Washington (administratively part of Minidoka), and Tule Lake National Monument in California. Private enterprises and public, non-profit organizations joined a consortium of state and federal agencies to demonstrate the efficacy of place-based conservation in the ocean by monitoring a series of n fully protected marine reserves created to restore and sustain ocean productivity and the ecological integrity of giant kelp forests, submarine canyons, and seagrass beds surrounding the five park islands.