Elizabeth Ginn

City of New York Parks and Recreation and Natural Resource Group, New York, New York

This past summer I completed an internship with the City of New York Department of Parks and Recreation, specifically with the Natural Resources Group (NRG). NRG is a division of Parks that was added in 1984, which is responsible for parks restoration and monitoring, natural area preservation, natural resource management, and natural area acquisition within the five boroughs of New York City. Over the past 20 years, NRG has restored thousands of acres of misused and degraded wetlands, forests and meadows in the city, into thriving ecosystems that support a variety of wildlife and keep New York City clean and healthy.
I spent the majority of my internship working on the Forever Wild Initiative, a New York State funded grant program designed to preserve natural areas within New York City. There are currently 48 Forever Wild sites in all five boroughs, totaling about 8,200 acres of natural woodlands, wetlands, and meadows. Some parks, like the Shooters Island Preserve in Staten Island, have only a few Forever Wild acres, 26, while others like the Pelham Bay Park Preserves in the Bronx, have over 1,400 acres of natural area. Natural areas is very important for New York City. They support wildlife, particularly nesting birds like egrets and herons. They also prevent erosion, filter groundwater, (especially the wetlands around Jamaica Bay in Queens and Brooklyn), and provide open space for passive recreation like birding and hiking.
The Forever Wild initiative was first funded in 2001 and it has provided signs for the sites and has paid for guard rails to be put around natural areas that were mistreated by ATV use and other inappropriate actions. Unfortunately the program lacked public awareness and attention. Very few residents knew about it and signs within the sites were not informative, resulting in an ineffective initiative that was doing little to help preserve natural areas. Therefore, the focus of this summer and the upcoming year is a revamping and revitalization of Forever Wild. There are many parts to this renewal, including designing and implementing new and more informative signs; redoing the website and making it more accessible to users; and designing and putting up ads on city buses and bus shelters. The goal is to encourage increased passive use of sites and to inform the city of the program and its importance. My responsibilities were almost exclusively within this publicity campaign. I wrote descriptions, found photos and trail maps for almost all sites for the website, added input to the new signs and bus ads, and negotiated all contracts for the ads with printers and agencies to post and maintain the ads. From doing these jobs, I was able to learn more about the parks and their importance to the city, make important contacts within the department, and develop business and negotiating skills.
When I first started the internship, I was unsure of what I was going to do, which let me be very open about it and what was to come. Because of the small size of NRG, I was given a lot of responsibility quickly and was able to be independent with my work. This was frustrating at times, but helped me strengthen my ability to initiate work and complete projects on my own.
In addition to my work on Forever Wild, I was able to observe the workings of a government agency and help out in other areas. Because all of NRG’s projects are grant-funded, I helped proof many restoration grants, which enabled me to see important components of good grant-writing skills and its value in this field. I was also able to see that working in a government agency can be, on the down side, bureaucratic, complicated, and long-winded. However, it has many strengths with a strong network and many never-ending resources.
One goal that I set before starting my internship was to learn about the importance of the environment in a city, which was obvious from day one. The daily use of New York City Parks is enormous, and the size of the system over 29,000 acres, ads to the importance to New Yorkers and the wildlife within. New Yorkers need parks not only for a retreat from the city, but also as a filter for water, and a way to keep the city cooler in the summer. I was also able to see the city’s reaction to environmental problems. NRG is able to restore degraded areas, and Forever Wild is able to preserve those areas and emphasize their importance in order to prevent future misuse.
This year, I will be writing an environmental studies honors thesis with Professor Pam Hine. I will be examining environmental education in urban and low-income areas, and its importance and effects on residents. There is a growing problem today of excessive pollution in poor areas, making them harmful to live in. Residents have few if any resources to clean up the neighborhoods, and often don’t even know that there is a problem. I will research how environmental education changes perspectives of residents in low-income neighborhoods, and try to determine if there is an affect on urban action. I will look at different forms of environmental education, both traditional and non-traditional, such as education in schools and camps, urban and environmental restoration, outings to natural areas outside of the neighborhood, and environmental advertising such as that by Forever Wild, and will try to figure out which make the most impact on low-income, urban neighborhoods. I will focus my study on urban gardening, such as the Green Corps and the Cleveland Learning Garden in Cleveland, Ohio, and GreenThumb in New York City.
My internship has helped me prepare for this thesis by observing first hand the importance of parks in all parts of the city. I didn’t expect the summer to help me tremendously on my research, as my internship one year ago with urban gardening in Cleveland gave me a lot of background. This internship, however, provided important resources and contacts within the parks system, which will help me achieve my thesis goals.