New Fleet Of Electric Buses For Zion National Park

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

The National Parks are in the spotlight this week as Nat Geo TV unspools the new National Geographic series National Parks: USA, featuring Indigenous stories that weave the wildlife of Zion, Yellowstone, Katmai, the Everglades and Olympic into a human framework that goes back millennia. The series was filmed months ago, so the only thing missing is the new fleet of zero-emission electric buses that rolled into Zion last week, aimed at cutting down on noise pollution while cutting the fossil energy cord, too.

The new National Geographic series premiers tonight, September 8, on National Geographic TV, followed by streaming on Hulu.

The True Stories Of The National Parks

I had a chance to speak with former the Cultural Resource Manager for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Autumn Gilliard, who is also a former National Park Service Dark Sky Ranger at Pipe Spring National Monument, located in the Kaibab Paiute Reservation in northern Arizona. She gives the new National Geographic series high marks for centering Indigenous knowledge within the dynamic beauty of each park.

More specifically, Gilliard described the series as a good beginning to showcase for the value and truth of Indigenous knowledge, though she also advocates for a change in perspective about the nature of science and knowledge.

“Traditional ecological knowledge is always considered as a secondary method below scientific views,” she explained. “Any time there is a man made imposition on a natural resource there should always be a conversation with people who are connected to that landscape.”

“The series did a good job of showing that native people are astronomers, architects, hydrologists, and more. The producers integrated the Indigenous perspective and the Indigenous voice,” she elaborated.

That is a healthy contrast with the conventional perspective on Indigenous knowledge. “Our voice is always considered folklore-ish, not considered science…traditional knowledge is always considered less than,” Gilliard said.

When our conversation touched on the rise of the anti-science movement (I was thinking of climate change denial, for example), she observed:

“From an Indigenous perspective, when you have this atmosphere of a looming behavior over the [advocacy of] Indigenous intellect and the suppression of it, it comes from a mythological format of colonization. This has been perpetuated on us for eons. The moment we speak for our view of science, it becomes oppression. If you can detach a people from their true knowledge you mold them into something else.”

National Parks: Do Your Own Research

As indicated by Gilliard, the National Parks: USA series is a good jumping-off point for learning more about the rich store of knowledge earned by the people who tended the land long before the more recent arrival of tens of millions, but there is much more to discover.

“People have lived there fore eons  before it was made into a national park,” she said of Zion,”But there is not a lot of literature out for public access. I would tell visitors to educate themselves before visiting, go to the park website and also do research on their own…look up different books, or visit the Paiute Indian tribe of Utah.”

The Internet is a good place to start. For example, if you look up some of the stories behind the Pipe Spring National Monument, you might come across an article by Gilliard posted by the Society for Applied Anthropology in which she describes how water access featured in the encounter of the Kaibab Paiutes with Mormon Pioneers headed by Brigham Young.

“Brigham Young instructed the Pioneers to build a fortified structure over the mouth of the Spring for protection against what he thought would be hostile Natives,” she relates. “This was a wrong interpretation on his behalf.”

“The Kaibab Paiutes were never hostile to the Pioneers and one might consider it to be the exact opposite. The construction of the fort ultimately cut off the use of the Spring’s water from the Kaibab Paiute people leaving them saddened and stressed to have to cut ties with the sacred and precious water resource their ancestors and they had used for ions,” Gilliard continues.

Electric Buses Bring A Lighter Footprint In The National Parks

The irony of “protecting” a natural spring with infrastructure still resonates today in the complex issue of public access to the National Parks. Millions of people come to witness the beauty, and they keep on coming, and they build roads and bridges and visitor centers and other infrastructure to bring in more people, impinging on the natural habitat and creating barriers.

Nevertheless, the National Parks Service is determined to lighten what it can, and that brings us to the new fleet of electric buses. Zion is the first National Park to fully electrify its visitor shuttle fleet. Plans are already in the works to decarbonize additional National Parks fleets as well including Grand Canyon, Acadia, Yosemite, Bryce Canyon, and Harpers Ferry.

The fleet officially launched on September 4, and it represents another step along the decarbonization pathway. Before the year 2000, cars were the main mode of transportation into the park. The shuttle service was introduced in 2000 to help cut down on congestion, deploying propane instead of diesel fuel to reduce pollution.

“More than 4 million people visited Zion National Park in 2023,” the National Parks Service observed in a press statement. “Zero-emission buses improve the visitor experience with higher total capacity on board and quieter operations as the vehicles move through the park, and modernize a fleet of propane-powered vehicles that were in service for over 20 years.”

As an illustration of the all-hands-on-deck approach to vehicle decarbonization, the new electric buses were acquired through a $33 million grant from the US Department of Transportation, and the unveiling event was attended by National Park Service Director Chuck Sams, US General Services Administration Administrator Robin Carnahan, and Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians Chairman Roland Maldonado along with local officials and representatives  from the nonprofit organization Zion National Park Forever Project, which is credited with advocating for shuttle buses to manage traffic.

“The National Park Service began providing free shuttle service in the park’s Zion Canyon and the Town of Springdale in 2000,” the National Park Service explains, adding that the system evolved in collaboration with Springdale, the Federal Highway Administration, and the Utah Department of Transportation along with input from other state, county, and municipal stakeholders.

Baby Steps To Fleet Electrification

The National Parks fleet is just one small piece of a very large federal fleet electrification puzzle. The goal is for new acquisitions to include only electric vehicles by 2035, not to take all existing gasmobiles off the streets, so the rollover will take time, considering there are about 600,000 vehicles in the federal fleet.

Speaking of fleet electrification, it’s been a while since I checked in on the US Postal Service, so stay tuned for more on that.

Follow me via LinkTree, or @tinamcasey on Threads, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Photo (cropped): Zion National Park at night, courtesy of National Geographic via email/DropBox.