“Hmm, first I'll put a colorful park map in the entrance," the park director informs himself, as he ruminates about a new interpretation program in his park. "Then I'll have a guide gather up groups as they enter and let them know what kinds of habitat and wildlife they can find here." He scratches his head. "But I think I'll shut the old trail along the river… it's polluted now. I don't want to disgust anyone - they want a natural experience."

On the surface of the director's consciousness, park brochures, cool wildlife videos, and interpretive signs illustrating indigenous uses of plants flutter around. But deeper down, below his daytime thoughts, lurk assumptions even his mind's voice cannot or dares not articulate. Lots of information leads to happy tourists. Happy tourists lead to more conservation money!

This park director drew interpretation from his ecotourism quiver, but the shot erred wide. As with other ecotourism strategies - community-based enterprises, public-private partnerships, nature guide training, business planning - interpretation can be aimed with the precision of Robin Hood or that of Elmer J. Fudd. For interpretation to lead to conservation, parks need more than just happy and informed tourists, because Homo sapiens craves deeper meaning like a bibliophile at a rummage sale. But we'll get back to meaning later on.

Whichever ecotourism arrow a manager elects to loose, ecotourism's promise usually involves park conservation. According to Katrina Brandon, a well-known thinker in conservation and ecotourism, ecotourism offers five benefits to a park:

1. A source of financing for biodiversity conservation;
2. Economic justification;
3. Economic alternatives for local people to reduce over-exploitation of park resources;
4. Constituency-building which promotes biodiversity conservation; and
5. An impetus for private conservation efforts.

Our park director attempted to use interpretation to deliver benefit #1. But while many park managers miss with interpretation, nevertheless, many other people have learned the trade. In fact they have coalesced into the field of heritage interpretation.

Open to Interpretation
The art of interpretation has been developing throughout the 20th Century continues today, but humans have been doing it ever since cavemen first began scribbling animals on stonewalls. As a result of journalist Tilden Freeman's tour of US National Parks, he carved interpretation into form with his seminal book, Interpreting Our Heritage, published in 1957. In it he wrote, "Interpretation is the larger revelation of truth behind any statement of a fact," and "Interpretation should capitalize mere curiosity for the enrichment of the human mind and spirit."

Those words set alight a new profession that, instead of translating Spanish to English, translates natural, cultural, and historical legacy or heritage, of places, people, and objects to a form people - ecotourists - can easily digest and savor. An interpreter helps them see underlying significance and appreciate the story hidden amongst the interstices of the object. Like a Coast Guard search and rescue team, an interpreter navigates a sea of information in search of meaning.

With its annual conference, research journal, and trade magazine the National Association of Interpretation embodies the field. It has 4,500 members consisting of park interpreters, museum docents, zoo educators, academics, and park managers. Closely related to NAI, moreover, is NAAEE: the North American Association for Environmental Education. While smaller, it has many of the same members. The NAAEE's conferences often showcase interpretative presentations and NAI has an environmental education section.

Because this overlap between interpretation and environmental education causes confusion even among academics, field-worthy readers can sigh relief at their own confusion. What is interpretation? What is environmental education? And which is most suited for ecotourism? Those questions need answering before a park manager can use interpretation effectively. For that, we shall interpret a bit of theory.

What Gets Remembered
According to Tilden, "The visitor's chief interest is in whatever touches his personality, his experience, or his ideals." And if nothing in a park titillates those, the visit will be short indeed. The very crux of interpretation, whether with ecotourists or kindergarteners, centers on their being a non-captive audience, free to leave or at least zone out whenever the muse demands. That rule differs immensely from education. Because interpretation is largely recreational, voluntary, and of short duration, it normally has little chance of effecting behavior change.

Environmental education on the other hand, tends to be knowledge-based, curricular, and sequential, with the express goal of developing an environmentally conscious and active citizenry. Not likely any ecotourist would sit voluntarily through a heavy dose of that one sunny afternoon in the park. Thus, for ecotourists, who are transient and in control of their travel destinies, the most appropriate approach is interpretation, rather than environmental education. Parks should change their own behavior if they want to change the long-term behavior of a tourist, although they can direct visitor actions.

This confusion about behavior change has led to a host of assumptions unsupported by learning theory. These assumptions can kill effective interpretation programs even before an interpreter can dig his program's opening hook into the audience. Some common assumptions include:

1. Short interpretive encounters can change attitudes and even behavior.
2. Attitude change leads directly to behavior change.
3. It is harder to get adults to change their behavior, so programs should focus on children, even if children are not the appropriate target audience for a particular problem.
4. Quality information, by way of satisfied tourists, leads to environmental action.

So if a park manager wants to put together an ecotourism program and benefit #1 from above (financing for biodiversity conservation) sounds good, then she can use a technique called "concept modeling" to better understand how interpretation can get more conservation return on the ecotourist dollar. The book Measures of Success by Richard Margoluis and Nick Salafsky discusses this approach to designing conservation projects.

A concept model basically explains how something works in a cause-and-effect relationship. It tries to wring personal interest and subjectivity out of a strategy, leaving only the dry logic behind.

RARE Center for Tropical Conservation, an international non-profit based in Arlington, Virginia has developed a suite of training and technical assistance programs to help protected areas more effectively used ecotourism to achieve conservation objectives. RARE Center took the concept model tool and, instead of using it to describe a site as indicated in Measures, it used it to describe how a generic conservation tool operates. One of its tools, the Public Use Planning Program, essentially helps park managers to facilitate a participatory public use plan and then implement it. Public use is the management of all non-extractive visitors (except scientific research and sport hunting) to a protected area. Ecotourism is only a little narrower than public use in that it involves only tourists and not the myriad other park visitors: students, local residents, scientists, reporters, and politicians in election heat.

The model illustrates the central role that interpretation can play in public use management. One process diagramed in the model starts with the intervention, which builds public use management capacity, which leads to better visitor experiences, which leads to greater quantity and quality ("quality" means they pay more and damage less), which, by way of support generation mechanisms results in greater support for conservation activities that reduce threats and conserve park resource diversity. RARE Center staff says that the model helps to focus on interpretation as a tool to generate support, rather than a tool to promote community awareness, community economic development, or other strategies commonly associated with ecotourism.

It's no coincidence that the visitor experience and participation in conservation is central. But the concept model also tells us that simply having happy tourists is not sufficient for them to take out their wallets and turn them upside down over the park's donation box. The model tells us we need to create opportunities (with "support generation mechanisms") and by inference, we need to size up and work with our ecotourist audience in order that they participate in our conservation solutions.

Theory Into Practice
So how might our mythical park director have spun a successful interpretive program?

As mentioned earlier, the human mind yearns meaning - meaning cast in stories. It's not simply an aesthetic yearning characterized by literary gluttony, but rather a psychological imperative. Every religion is based on a creation story. Science rests on stories such as Darwinism. Our news comes in stories. Babies create narratives to understand the world. At every turn, we spin stories for the same reason that concept models work. A story is a series of events and facts tied together by a central message or plot. The more information refers to a central idea, the more likely people will weave it into their understanding and remember it - and act on it.
We understand the role of "local appreciation" due to its relationship to the bigger message of the model. Our brain organizes knowledge through associations, physically using our neuronal web. Stories also organize information.

Without turning this point into a saga, our park director could create a story about his site. He could add emotional elements, define a protagonist, and weave a plot, just as any decent novelist would do. His goal should be that the visitor comes to appreciate, even love, the site, and understand the threats it faces.

But he avoided the conservation story, preferring instead idyllic scenery. Another underlying assumption bubbles up from the gray matter depths: Ecotourists want to see unadulterated nature and don't want to see environmental conflicts. As every writer knows, a story ain't a story without a conflict. Ecotourists are ecotourists precisely because they do care about environmental issues. And that's the lever to their participation.

Now if through interpretation they understand the conservation situation (even remedially), they will invest their emotions, because, if the interpretation proved effective, the visitor should have been immersed in and interacted with the site's resources. It is far better than their simply reading an entrance map, watching a cool video, or walking a trail, although all those should contribute to the larger story.
Then whilst the ecotourist's excitement runs high, the park offers him an opportunity to channel positive energy into conservation action. Research shows that people are more likely to take action when it is clear how to carry it out. Here, another buried assumption gets excavated: Happy tourist turns wallet upside down.

The park director, then, needs to add opportunity to happiness. To do that, we rip a page from the direct marketer's handbook. Every time we buy a Black and Decker stove, a small survey falls out. Companies use personal information to tailor their sales pitches. They find our interest and link it with a corresponding product. It's Marketing 101 but rarely applied in parks, even though no conservation NGO fund-raiser leaves home without it.

So imagine, once again, our park director's polluted river. He knows the neighborhood upriver dumps sewage. To advance his clean-up project, he knows he needs volunteers to stuff envelopes, a writer to craft press releases, and a digital camera to publish pollution pictures.

His interpreters armed with this list of needs and a respectable understanding of the conservation problem might bring tourists to the river, near the quiet marsh perhaps with herons and beavers. Then he pulls a meter out of the water farther upstream where oxygen levels drop sharply. Uh-oh, the story has just taken a turn for the dark, anoxic side. Enter conservation problem.

The interpreter allows them to smell tainted water. He illustrates symptoms of E. coli infection, and shows photos of a lake with biological oxygen demand out of hand. This agitates the tourists - psychologists call it "cognitive dissonance," a discomfort people naturally want to relieve. The interpreter says, "If you are interested in becoming involved in helping to protect the river [i.e., relieving their agitation], talk with me afterwards, I have some suggestions."

If the interpreter learned about his audience, he can suggest to local people that the park needs volunteers. He can ask a writer to write articles, or suggest that someone donate $150 to buy a digital camera. The interpreter knows that a person is more likely to give money to a specific purpose than simply dump it into a donation box and walk away. Our director dredges up another assumption - visitors give money to general and specific goals alike - and disposes of it.

Some parks and even tour operators can be this activist, others, such as non-advocacy federally protected areas, may only point to the donation box or direct visitors to a non-profit park association like NPRA or concessionaire such as in Denali National Park. Whatever your park's angle, interpretation can get ecotourists AND local residents directly involved in conservation philanthropy, going way beyond a mere entrance fee. And the ironic thing, much to our interpretive apprentice's surprise, ecotourists leave the park even more satisfied than if they had contributed nothing at all.

Nuts and Bolts and Traveler’s Philanthropy

In the Galapagos, more than one million dollars mark the path to visitor philanthropy. That is how much Linblad Expeditions has raised from its clients for its Galapagos Conservation Fund. In 1997 the tour company, which conducts expedition ship-based naturalist tours around the world, teamed up with Dr. Sam Ham of the University of Idaho to create a message-based interpretive program that promotes visitors’ contributions to the Fund, managed by the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos as well as the Galapagos National Park itself.

The interpretive program involves hooking visitors with pre-cruise materials, tours of the Galapagos during the tour, written materials on board, a solicitation on the last day, and on-going dialogue with visitors after they return, so that might contribute more than once. This program uses carefully selected primary messages to create beliefs necessary to support action, and secondary messages to break down misconceptions, destroy negative or contradicting messages that people may get, and overcome their beliefs in negative consequences of their action.

Primary Messages
1: "Galapagos is unique in the world."
2: "All eyes are on the Galapagos."
3: "In the end, it will be the passion and insistence of the visitor that will ensure the preservation of the Galapagos Islands"
4: "Lindblad Expeditions has championed the creation of the Galapagos Conservation Fund and has committed its own resources to the cause. It invites its own guests to join the cause to protect the "World's Natural Jewel."

Secondary Messages
1: "Galapagos is threatened by the introduction of aggressive and well adapted exotic species that don't belong here. These species either kill or out-compete Galapagos' native and endemic species."
2: "Illegal commercial fishing is threatening the rich marine ecosystem on which almost all Galapagos wildlife depends."
3: "Current funding falls far short of the capital required to manage and protect the Galapagos Islands."
4: "Donated funds go straight to a special Galapagos Conservation Fund administered jointly by the Charles Darwin Foundation and Galapagos National Park."
5: "All of the funds go directly to new or ongoing conservation projects."

Ham based this message package on psychological research targeting Linblad’s audience. "It would not be effective in other locations, even if ´adapted’ to local circumstances," warns Ham. He investigates each new audience every time he launches this kind of project.

In the Galapagos this strategy dependably generates an average of $200,000 a year. Funds have been used to eliminate feral pigs on an island, re-establish native vegetation, maintenance of park patrol boat, environmental education programs on the islands, fund Galapagos university students, offer small-grants for local conservation projects, and others.

Since founding the program, Ham and Lindblad’s conservation director, Tom O’Brien, have been evangelizing the idea. LEX launched a similar campaign in Alaska with the Alaska Whale Foundation. Ham and O’Brien are now preparing to work with the Conservation Corporation Africa (a tour operator and with numerous ecolodges) to launch another campaign in South Africa. The Business Enterprises for Sustainable Travel (BEST), a joint initiative of The Conference Board and the World Travel & Tourism Council, has adopted traveler philanthropy as a major theme and held a conference on the topic in the Dominican Republic last November and another in Miami this month (September 2002).

Tilden’s Six Principles of Interpretation

"I. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.

II. Information, as such, is not interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information.

III. Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.

IV. The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.

V. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part, and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase.

VI. Interpretation addressed to children (say, up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults, but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best, it will require a separate program."

Understanding Tilden’s Principles

I. Research shows that people are far more interested in topics that relate directly to them. If you like birds, you will probably be much more interested in a talk on birds than on glass-blowing.

II. Interpretation creates new meaning using information, just like a carpenter builds a house using wood. Neither the wood nor the information will get us to the objective, but we cannot get there without them.

III. Interpretation requires a creative use of information and requires an interesting medium to deliver the message. A guide does not need to be a master artist to learn to use artistic techniques like painting, writing, or designing an exhibit.

IV. Interpretation wants to create new meanings to inspire and provoke an audience. Interpretation is not trying to teach or instruct a body of knowledge or skills.

V. Interpretation looks to create meaning about an idea, not just information describing parts of an idea. Normally our themes contain the idea, not just parts of it.

VI. Children go through development phases, each of which has needs and concerns very different from those of an adult. To use a simplified adult program misses children's needs.