The League of Women Voters-Whitewater Area presents “National Parks at a Crossroads” on Thursday, April 19 at 7 PM, at the Whitewater City Council Chambers. The focus is on what climate change means for our National Parks. While much of the news on climate change focuses on how it will impact the way we live or what will happen to the polar bears, there has been little public discussion about what it will mean for our national parks. During this one-hour program, you’ll hear from Dr. Eric Compas about the obvious and subtle ways in which climate change is reshaping our nation’s first national park, Yellowstone.

The projections for the region’s vegetation and fire patterns, changing ecosystem definitions, and the policy response to date are all fundamentally challenging the way we think about nature, wilderness, and our relationship to it. While park managers have significant control over what a future Yellowstone will look like, they don’t yet have the tools to make these decisions—and that has brought us to a significant crossroads for defining what it means to be a national park in the 21st century.

Since the 1960s, the League of Women Voters has been at the forefront of efforts to protect air, land and water resources. As citizens of the world, we must protect our planet from the physical, economic and public health effects of climate change while also providing pathways to economic prosperity.

Dr. Eric Compass is an Associate Professor in the Geography, Geology, and Environmental Science Department at the UW-Whitewater. He studies public and private land conservation both in Wisconsin and the Yellowstone region, and he teaches courses in environmental policy and geographic information systems.