Roger Di Silvestro, National Parks Conservation Association

Roger Di Silvestro is the senior director of Communications for the National Parks Conservation Association. He has been a professional conservationist for more than 25 years and has written six books on wildlife conservation.

WASHINGTON, D.C. Yesterday, as Grist reported, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) released its fifth annual "America's Ten Most Endangered National Parks List," hoping to spread the word that our national parks are in trouble and need help.

Today, we started to get a better sense of how widely that word has spread. Much to my relief, Kate -- godmother of the "Ten Most" list -- reported that the list was covered in newspapers all across the nation and was picked up by network affiliates. And Marie, our web director, told me our site got 1.2 million hits the day of the release, way up from the roughly 40,000 hits we get on an average day.

The list appeared on Headline News all day. It was featured on the CNN website. We got a call from a reporter at the London Times wanting to interview someone on staff about the list. And then here we are, yakking about it in Grist. To top it off, I read a nice, two-column article about the list in the Washington Post, which included a good quote from the National Park Service. Let's hope that's a sign that the Bush administration is readying itself to do meaningful work on park problems.

Time to sit back and be amazed at how a handful of people and a little modern technology can reach well over 100 million people around the world within hours. But we can't rest on our laurels for more than a few minutes. The list is behind us, and we're on to the next thing. The fact is, even on the day we were releasing the list, we had begun to move on to the next thing, as the staff of our diversity program held a meeting to discuss the future.

The NPCA Diversity Program seeks to involve people of color in the national parks experience. Conventional wisdom suggests that people of color do not visit the parks in numbers comparable to their proportion of the general population. A book I read (It's the Little Things) that touched on this subject suggested that this was true for African Americans in part because of fears evoked by remote areas heavily visited by whites -- fears kindled by the decades of terrorism that whites wreaked on blacks in isolated parts of the nation. I can't vouch for that conclusion, but I can say that NPCA's goal is to help shape a National Park System in which all Americans can feel at home.

This goal is important because, within a few years, more than half of all U.S. citizens will be people of color. That demographic shift will affect the nation from top to bottom. Maybe we'll even get a president whose name ends in a nice, round vowel, or whose complexion is dark, or who has fully functional breasts. For all its talk of equality and freedom, the U.S. has been embarrassingly narrow in its choice of leadership. As the political influence of all cultures and colors increases, the national parks will increasingly need the support of people of color.

And people of color will need the support of the national parks. America's heritage is in the national parks. Parks preserve samples of our wild places. They preserve our history and culture. And not just Anglo-Saxon American history, but Latino history and Native American history and the history of other ethnic groups as well. Sites where Japanese-Americans were interred during World War II are now park units. More than 20 parks commemorate the role of African Americans in shaping the nation's history. All of us can find ourselves in the national parks.

NPCA is working to find ways to get more people of color into the parks. People like me, who measure a successful day in the woods by how few people they see, may cringe at the thought of getting more people into the parks. If access to parks like Yellowstone and Denali were limited to people named Di Silvestro, I'd be ecstatic, especially as most of my relatives think a park is a place called Central. But in the real world, where people continue to pride themselves on having children -- a feat that has been done successfully only about 6 billion times in the last 75 years or so -- populations are going to grow, and the parks are going to attract more and more people. And if the national parks attract people, they should attract all people, and all people should feel comfortable visiting them.

Meeting such challenges is far more difficult than merely getting out the word on troubled parks. So now it's back to working on the things that make parks endangered, from snowmobiles to polluted air, and from the shadows still cast by racism to the need to give the parks a face that matches that of our nation. To solve these problems, we need the support that projects like the "Ten Most" list are meant to generate. As our diversity program and our activist work make clear, the future of the parks begins with the people. If you want to join in, knock on our door.