The George Wright Society champions stewardship of parks, protected & conserved areas, cultural sites, and other kinds of place-based conservation by connecting people, places, knowledge, and ideas. By uniting people from many different backgrounds around a common passion for protecting Earth’s natural and cultural heritage, we create the collaboration needed to meet today’s greatest conservation challenges.
INNOVATING ACROSS BOUNDARIES FOR
Parks • Cultural Sites
Protected / Conserved Areas
Call for Contributions:
Forthcoming PSF issue spotlighting LGBTQIA+ issues & achievements
What sets us apart: Interdisciplinary conservation thinking
GWS’s unique role is to foster interdisciplinary place-based conservation. Specialist organizations and subject-matter professional societies create essential knowledge. GWS operates one level up from that endeavor: we provide opportunities for specialists to go beyond their usual mental boundaries and see how what they know connects with, and complements, what other specialists know. GWS nurtures the kind of context-aware thinking needed to tackle complex conservation problems.
What we create: Innovation
Innovation only comes from open minds. Open minds thrive in a collegial atmosphere that encourages people to think outside their silo, beyond their usual point of view. GWS is the only conservation organization that exists specifically to bring people together from a wide range of points of view in settings designed to allow open-mindedness to flourish. By doing this, GWS creates space for multidimensional learning and collaboration that leads to innovative conservation action.
How we work: Convening
The learning spaces we create are both physical and virtual. We convene opportunities for people to come together in person: face-to-face events that expand communication networks, support mentoring, and build the capacity of park and protected area stewards, cultural and natural resource managers, scientists and other scholars, and teachers and students. We also help create these goods by nurturing a virtual global community of stewardship through publications and online interactions.
Today’s top story • 27 September 2022
Pennsylvania announces 3 new SPs
For the first time since 2004, Pennsylvania has a new state park. Three of them, actually — as well as a former mining area that will be turned into a playground for motorized offroad vehicles even as it is environmentally restored.
The new parks in eastern Pennsylvania, largely made possible by revenue from natural gas fracking operations on state forestland, were announced Sept. 27 by Gov. Tom Wolf, who spoke at one of the new parks in York County.
INSPIRED BY GEORGE MELÉNDEZ WRIGHT
George Meléndez Wright was born in San Francisco, California, and in 1933 became the first chief of the wildlife division of the U.S. National Park Service. Under his vision and leadership, each park started to survey and evaluate the status of wildlife and to identify urgent problems. As one of the first and only Latino staff for the Park Service, he was a true pioneer in celebrating diversity and working together across disciplines for parks, wildlife & wild places.
The George Wright Society was founded in 1980 in his honor, to continue the legacy of forward thinking and applied solutions in an ever-changing environment.
Learn how the story of George Meléndez Wright is inspiring young people in the book Bravo! Poems About Amazing Hispanics
