- [Narrator] Funding for Roots, Race and Culture is provided in part by the Norman C and Barbara L. Tanner Charitable Support Trust, and by donations to PBS Utah from viewers like you, thank you.

(funky music) - Hello my friends, and welcome to Roots, Race and Culture, where we bring you into candid conversations about shared cultural experiences.

I'm Danor Gerald.

- And I'm Lonzo Liggins.

Many people ask me from out of state, Lonzo, what's there to do in Utah?

My answer is inevitably the same.

Utah is an outdoor state.

Although we do have some fun options for a nightlife, people primarily come here for the outdoors.

- And I can say it's definitely been a part of my experience living here, but the great outdoors hasn't always been so inclusive.

As a matter of fact, according to wilderness.org, only 11% of Hispanics and 9% of blacks engage in outdoor recreation compared to 72% of their white counterparts.

So why is this, why does it seem that BIPOC communities just avoid the outdoors?

Do they not feel safe?

Today, we have the perfect guests to unravel these mysteries.

- Hey, Ashley, why don't you introduce yourself?

- Sure, thanks for having me.

My name is Ashley Cleveland.

I am an environmental scientist at heart and a city planner by day.

I go by Outdoor Auntie, and I am your local outdoor advocate.

- Awesome, so explain, what's Outdoor Auntie?

Tell us about that.

- Well, of course the outdoors.

I advocate for the outdoors, but I went with the auntie plug because all my family's from Georgia and the aunties in my community are really, really important.

They're the biggest cheerleaders.

So I wanted to make sure I was everyone's biggest cheerleader as we're a family in the outdoors.

- Oh, how about you, Esteban?

- So, my name is Esteban Benites-Moreno.

I'm an immigrant from Mexico, and I built my career around community health education and community engagement.

I became involved with Latino Outdoors after a colleague decided to bring the chapter here to Utah.

And our main mission is to engage and connect our community with the outdoors, both the Latino/Latina community, as well as embracing our culture and our history and family values within the work that we do.

- That's awesome.

- Well, I'd like to jump over to you, Ashley, because in discussions we've had previously, you told us about some difficult times that you had growing up in California, and I'd like to hear a little bit about that and maybe know if that influenced your love for the environment.

- Oh, for sure.

So, as I said, both sides of my family are from Atlanta.

My mom moved us out to California when I was very young, and we moved around a lot growing up.

Unfortunately, there was a bout in time in my childhood where we experienced chronic homelessness, meaning that you don't have a permanent address for more than a year at a time.

And in one of these instances, we wind up staying at a family shelter in San Francisco and they had a wonderful program where for the summer, they would send you to a few summer camps while your parents could look for work and not necessarily worry about you if you're at a certain age.

And during that time, I of course was the only black girl on the trip.

And there was one park ranger who was a woman who was the education park ranger who had to deal with all of us rambunctious kids and she let me be her shadow 'cause at that time I was actually really quiet and introverted, surprise.

But through that experience at Sequoia National Park and in the Redwood Forest, I think that really ignited my love for just ecology and the environment and 10 years later, I wind up becoming a park ranger at Chad Islands National Park and I think it's because of that experience that I was able to draw back from.

- Esteban, tell us about your journey to the outdoors.

What got you interested in being an outdoor enthusiast, so to speak?

- My family played a huge role in this.

Growing up when we immigrated to the United States, we came with nothing.

And our vacations were going outdoors, going camping, visiting national parks.

And it was a great opportunity for all of us to connect as a family, talk to each other, enjoy days of food and eating.

And it just had a lasting impression on me.

I still remember one day coming home and my parents letting us know, let's go on a spontaneous trip anywhere and they're like, let's go to Yellowstone National Park, which was one of my first national parks that I visited.

And since then, I've just had this passion to explore all the wonderful things that our community has to offer.

- That's really fantastic.

And you bring up this desire in your family and community to connect outdoors, which has kind of been a traditional thing for a lot of ethnic communities.

Now, what I find fascinating is we've been doing some research on these national parks, and according to Professor Khang J. Lee, who's here at the University of Utah, when the pilgrims first came here way back in like Plymouth Rock, they considered like the wilderness area to be this wild thing that needed to be tamed and cultivated.

And then somewhere around the 18th century, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau started romanticizing the outdoors, right?

And so then all of a sudden for these white Americans, these Anglo-Americans, it became this thing that, oh, well we need to go out and do this and then Civil War comes along, and then Yellowstone Park becomes our first national park.

And this is the amazing thing about you being a park ranger there, those were segregated at the time, all the way up to as late as the 50s.

- Yeah, we even have a photo of one of the segregation signs that were up there during the time, if you could put that up for us.

So this is the Lewis Mountain where they had just specific spots for blacks that they could go, which surprised me because I thought that that wouldn't be a place and here's some picnic areas, white only, and Negro only.

- [Danor] And Shenandoah National Park.

- I just thought was segregation.

It was just like, restaurants, movie theaters, bathrooms.

- Water fountains.

- Oh yeah and that was it.

But then all of a sudden to find out that y'all can't go to the park with us.

We over here where it's like we're outdoors.

What's the big deal?

- You segregate the outdoors.

- And it makes a lot of sense.

What do you two think about that?

What do you think about, Ashley?

- Well, I'm a city planner by trade, so that isn't new to me 'cause at the end of the day, this is public land.

America has a really great way of creating laws to manage things and this is just one more way of taming the wild, if you will.

So when we talk about public lands and parks and public pools and national parks, they aren't exclusive from that.

I know our history has a showing those white only signs in restaurants and buildings and libraries and schools, but it also includes recreation spaces.

- And we'll talk a little bit about swimming later as well, but you also volunteer at an organization.

Can you tell us just a little bit about that?

- Yeah, so I've been a Salt Lake City resident for 10 years, and I've been an Outdoor Afro network leader for the past six years.

Outdoor Afro, much like Latino Outdoors, has been around for 10 years.

And we have over 180 volunteer leaders like myself across the US and our whole task is where black people in nature meet.

So any event once a month, you can find anywhere from seven to 30 black people outside with me doing a myriad of activities here in Utah.

- Oh, that's really awesome.

So I'm kinda curious, what sort of activities do you do when you take people out and you do your activities with the community?

- Yeah, Latino Outdoors wants to offer a range of activities that all people can do, either by themselves, with family members in a variety of settings.

we've done anything from nature journaling, that skill that can help guide people out to the outdoors, to outings where people are learning how to snowshoe, bike, hiking, you name it.

And within our work as Latino Outdoors, we've been able to collaborate with many community partners to bring about these events either through collaborating and donating their time or donating physical things like materials or equipments that our community members can use after they have learned an activity.

- That's huge.

- So, about this friction, do you guys feel that there's maybe a little bit of a negative stigma about being outside in nature among these communities of color?

Do you feel like-- - Well, in my opinion at least I can only speak for the black community of course.

I feel like we have a lost history.

One thing that I have a tendency to talk to our Salt Lakers and our black Utahans about is that as African people, we have a history with nature.

I mean, all humans do.

And when we came over here to the US, we brought that with us.

And even in the early histories of the US, we were agriculturalists.

So we've always been close to nature and knowing how to navigate through the northern stars and things of that nature with like Harriet Tubman.

So that's one reminder that I always have.

Here, I think that you have to get used to just the mountain ranges in the physical space of Utah 'cause it can be really intimidating to get started.

And so it's more so of an educational component that we need to share in our own vernacular to make people more comfortable in giving it a try.

And then I don't want to also negate the fact that there are plenty of black people in Utah who are avid outdoorsmen, avid, like very experienced fishermen, wild land ranger guides.

Like, we're out here, we're out here.

- There's a lot of it.

No, I totally agree with what you're talking about.

And Esteban, I mean, we see those statistics, we see those numbers, we see 9% in the black community, 11% in the Hispanic community.

Why do you think that's the case in the Hispanic community that those numbers are so low?

- There's a wide range of reasons that are affecting those numbers.

Everything from historical access barriers that we've talked about from segregation, native people being relocated from their land and other political issues that are happening both in the United States, in our country and globally.

So I think there historically have been a lot of barriers.

And we also have to take into account socioeconomic status of individuals.

Here in Utah, we have the privilege of having many national parks and the mountains right by us.

And at the same time, there's a cost associated with it.

From passes, equipment, and when many families are living paycheck to paycheck or having multiple jobs, it makes it difficult.

- You have time and money, you need both of those.

- And I think it's one of those things where we wanna change the narrative of what it means to be outdoorsy.

Outdoorsy doesn't mean having to go to our mountains every day, go on a hike, visiting all these national parks.

Our communities have historically been connected to the land for medicine, through traditions.

And we can connect to nature and be outdoorsy from our neighborhoods, our homes.

It can be something as simple as going outside for a walk, tending to a garden in your backyard, or learning about the herbs and plants that are just in your community.

- We have been the invisible outdoor enthusiast for so many years in so many playing fields.

We talk about hidden colors and all these other movies popping up when there's been plenty of us participating.

We just haven't been on the REI ads or anything like that.

- That's very true.

Who is it being marketed to has a big impact on the people's perception of who it's for.

Another story that my dad told me was about growing up down in south segregated Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, they had to drive 30 miles away to go to a swimming pool that they were allowed to go into.

And he remembers standing there and looking and seeing all these black people swimming and just his jaw on the floor.

And they had a great time and he learned how to swim and he also had ice cream and all these great things.

I, on the other hand, ended up being an All-American diver in college.

I was on the swim team, high school and college.

And to this day though, most of my family does not know how to swim because they grew up in that era.

And that's a critical life skill, you know what I mean?

So we have some photos of this time in history when the swimming pools were segregated, and we'd like to bring those up and just kind of show the impact it had.

- [Lonzo] Yeah, that was a segregation in a public swimming pool.

Danor, tell us about that.

- [Danor] So yeah, this is in Cairo, Illinois.

And originally this was a public pool, and it should have been integrated because the laws were passed at this time, but what they decided to do was just turn all the swimming pools into private clubs.

So when these black youth came to go swimming, they still were denied admission because they just found a way to skirt around the law.

- Yeah, and see here's the hotel manager at the St. Augustine Florida swimming pool.

This hotel, he was actually pouring acid on some kid, some people who were trying to integrate the swimming pool so he could see the white guy that's there and then there's the black girls, and he was pouring it in the pool to discourage them from integrating these pools, which is insane to me.

It's crazy thinking that that actually happened over swimming.

We think of something as simple as swimming as just a simple leisure activity that I do three or four times a week.

But yet there were people that have fought to just be in a swimming pool.

And it really makes you think about some of these fears in our community when it comes to the outdoors and where it's rooted.

So the question is, other than the organizations that you guys are volunteering for, are there other ways that we can encourage people of color, Hispanics and blacks to be out in the outdoors if we're not a part of an organization?

- I'd say starting your neighborhood, start simple, start small.

Typically, if you have children in your life, that makes it a little bit easier to go to a park.

That's a good way to be outdoorsy, maybe ride a bike.

That's a good way to also take another step and visit maybe a nature trail.

Maybe find other affinity groups.

- What do you think, Esteban?

- So the first thing I think of is similar to what you said, focusing primarily on those closest to us at first.

I think a lot of times, people around us have the same feelings of uncertainty of how to connect to the outdoors.

And I would also encourage people to explore what their community has to offer.

And when more of us are coming together and learning about these things, we can build a stronger collective movement to protect our environment as well as bringing in new perspectives and ideas to make sure that the policies that are being pushed in our government are equitable and are keeping our communities in mind as well.

- What kind of policies are you thinking about that don't keep our community in mind?

- I know for me, I live on the west side.

West Valley has always been my home.

And air pollution is something that hasn't always been prioritized as much as I would've liked.

I would think that environmental racism would have to play a role in that.

When you look at the history of different communities, we see that lower income communities, oftentimes which house more people of color, are the places where factories are being built and other companies that are contributing to the pollution or destruction of land.

- And I'd probably hop in there and say we really care about civic engagement.

And what that means is getting people civically involved in the way that they can give meaningful feedback.

And I think that for environmental justice to work, municipalities and laws and policies need to make sure that those people are not there at the table when decisions are being made.

And so go to your community council meetings, attend city council meetings, push for those to be more inclusive and kid-friendly and host it at times that fit your community schedule.

And also maybe become some of those people.

- When we share our stories, we're really driving this change.

At Latino Outdoors, we have this program that we call Yo Cuento, which translates to many different things.

It could translate to I count or I tell a story.

And it's this program where we're uplifting the voices of people in our community to share their experiences, connecting to nature, the activities that they enjoy, as well as the issues that are important to them and their communities.

- We have some graphics to show some of the benefits that come from being outdoors, emotional benefits, we have reduced stress, improved mood, increased positive emotions, and a decrease of anxiety.

- [Lonzo] All of which I feel.

- And they study this stuff.

So we're not just throwing this out there and you can feel it, it's pretty tangible.

And now there's an emerging field called environmental neuroscience where they're not just studying the emotional benefits, but also the cognitive benefits that come from being outdoors and they are amazed and shocked at what's happening.

So here's some examples here.

They've literally studied and found out being outdoors in nature for anywhere from as little as 40 seconds to four days or whatever, your perception, reasoning skills, memory, judgment, imagination, creativity, and problem solving, all of these things improve just from having access and being out in nature.

So they've been studying this and finding there's certain aspects to what's out in nature that really help to create this effect in your brain.

One of them is this idea of fractals.

And we have some images to help people understand what a fractal is and it's this repeating pattern that you see in nature.

That's a naturally occurring thing.

So there's an example there, looking up at some trees and sort of a snowflake kind of pattern.

- [Lonzo] Do you guys get this same type of feeling?

- [Ashley] Yes, I do, it's soothing, it's definitely soothing.

- Yeah, that's what keeps me going.

- And so these things have like major, major effects on your cognitive ability in your brain.

And then, so I go back to like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain and these people who were genius, Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain as well, but you wonder if their writing was impacted and they were so creative and so good because they spent so much time outdoors and it impacted that?

- What do you guys think, what do you think, Esteban?

- Yeah, I mean, the overall quality of life is definitely one of the main reasons why people go outdoors.

We see that physical and mental health wellbeing becoming better by spending time outdoors as well as just being able to connect with others socially.

That social health is just as crucial as physical and emotional health.

- But is it a one and done?

I mean, do you take them on this great experience and then they never do it again?

- I hope not, that's not what I consider to be successful.

So when we're talking about Henry David Thoreau and these whole new movements of relationship with nature, they call it the transcendentalist movement or the enlightenment period for a reason.

There's a reason why as a human that breaks you open.

- I went out and shot some video footage out in the mountains 'cause I got to discover hiking and even in the snow, because an activity that I've picked up has pulled me into this sort of experience.

Let me just read this here.

So I'm explaining some moments that I've had.

I've had moments of extra lucidity, when everything around me felt like it was crystal clear.

My senses of smell, touch, hearing, sight were all hyper tuned and I was taking in everything all together in a complete, perfect clarity.

It just happens gradually.

Then a switch flips and suddenly you experience everything around you in an overwhelming, peaceful, but razor sharp way.

It lasts for a while until you start thinking again, but mostly you stop thinking and just sense this profound sublime state of being where you are.

It's hard to hold onto for a long time.

It's kind of like sand in your hand.

But the only other time that in my life that I've ever experienced these hyper sensational moments were while I was playing outside as a child.

And so I went and shot some footage to sort of exemplify that.

But in the process of doing that, just walking around, all of a sudden, this description that I had would just sort of come over me.

And you know what, it was this sort of scary feeling where I thought, okay, I am totally, like my Spidey Senses are seriously tingling.

Is there a cougar following me or something?

Like, what's going on?

- So my question for both of you is, there's a lot of myths in our communities about the fears.

Like, I hear a lot of black folks that say, man, I ain't going out in the woods.

I don't wanna be dealing with bears and mountain lions.

How can we dispel those myths and let people know that yeah, there are those things out there, but what is the chances of that actually happening?

- I think it's sharing stories.

Like when you're not on the trail, when you're at like first Fridays at Black Chamber or something, having a beer with everyone else, that's when you have your time to say I had an adventure for the first time and I got to see...

I went to Death Valley National Park and I got to see these amazing group of wild boroughs like running across the plains under blue moonlight.

You can romanticize some of that by like storytelling.

I think our culture is really good at that.

We probably just need to do more of it.

There's so many instances where you can seek out beautiful experiences in nature, have any to do with wild animals while also respecting their boundaries 'cause I think we're really good at that as a community.

We're not gonna roll up on a bison that close, but we're really good at enjoying them from a distance I think.

- That's the difference between white folks and black folks.

White folks get closer to the animal, black folks get further away.

- I can love you from over here.

- What about you, Esteban?

- Yeah, I would say that really taking the time to learn about the place or activity that you are wanting to do and I would also encourage people to seek out events or opportunities that people can do with groups like outdoor Afro-Latino outdoors, so that you can learn together as a group and have some people that can comfort you and decide for yourself whether that activity is something you wanna continue doing, or one time was enough.

I know you mentioned the cost of activities, I think that's a great opportunity to figure out whether it's something that you want to commit all that time and money 'cause I think that's a big deterrent for a lot of people.

Like, what if I try this?

I spend all this money and then realize, oh, I actually don't like this or I don't want to do it.

So seeking out these communities and groups can be a way to dispel some of these myths that you hear and learn along the way together.

- Do you have any parting words for our audience that you would love them to know about the outdoors and encouraging them to go?

- Oh goodness, I'll talk Utah specific.

There are so many affinity groups and all of us are on Instagram.

I'm 35, so I guess my words could be for those millennials out there.

Get on Instagram, come find the Latino Outdoors, come find Color the Wasatch, come find Color Outside.

There's so many affinity groups here in Utah, you're bound to find a mix of a group that fits with you.

And then second would be just be safe and be gentle with yourself.

Your outdoor relationship is something that's gonna grow.

It's a lifelong journey.

It's about the journey, it's not about the destination.

- Yes, very good, Esteban, some good parting words for us.

- Explore what works for you when trying to connect with nature.

I think there's this narrative like you have to act or behave or do certain activities to be outdoorsy.

And a lot of times it's exploration, trying to figure out what you do enjoy and what you don't.

And along the way, you're going to learn a lot of skills, build a lot of great memories, and strengthen your sense of community.

- Well, thank you guys.

That's it for this week's show.

If you guys have any thoughts about this episode, we would love to hear from you.

Feel free to drop us a line on social media anytime.

- Yep, or visit our website where you can catch other episodes.

Just go to PBSutah.org/roots.

Until next time, from Roots, Race and Culture, y'all, we are out.

- [Narrator] Funding for Roots, Race and Culture is provided in part by the Norman C. and Barbara L. Tanner Charitable Support Trust, and by donations to PBS Utah from viewers like you, thank you.

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