ON EARTH DAY 2026, as the Grand Canyon Railway steam train hissed to a halt at the South Rim, I was transported not just across the Colorado Plateau, but across the arc of my four-decade career. Gazing over the chasm, I didn't just see geologic strata, I saw a canvas where the National Park Service and Xanterra’s Green Team were painting a new vision of stewardship.
Near the rim artist Alicia Wilson invited visitors to help paint a landscape of California condors soaring against a sunset sky. Nearby, Gwynne Trivelpiece shared tribal stories over warm Navajo fry bread, welcoming visitors into the world-famous Hopi House. At the El Tovar, Xanterra Director of Sustainability Susan Manganiello shared their environmental-outreach story, while a costumed Brighty the Burro entertained kids engaged in crafts.
Seeing the Green Team partnering with artists despite funding cuts shows that the spirit of the land is not managed by spreadsheets. Yet the Canyon faces a gauntlet of existential ‘breaks’ — from the collapse of its aging 1960s water line to the looming shadows of uranium mining and invasive species. Severe administrative funding gaps and personnel cuts threaten even the human infrastructure required to protect this fragile sanctuary, compounding these environmental pressures.
Art and story
That Earth Day experience was a heartwarming validation of a movement I helped foster: the Artists in the Parks program. At the time the idea that a musician or storyteller was as vital to land management as a hydrologist or forester was radical. My interpretive-messaging goal was to demonstrate the visceral force of the arts in awakening passion and stewardship for land and culture.
I once journaled, “We need the mix of scientific data and artistic expression to instill a balanced connection with the land . . . just as we need the balance of objective perspective and intuition, even reverence, to guide our personal lives.”
In the 1990s this mission was furthered through Interpretive Arts Unlimited, a nationwide group I developed for the Forest Service. We used performing arts to facilitate contentious meetings, designed urban tree houses, and offered conference weaving. Through Prescott National Forest, for nearly a decade we offered the Every Summer Monday series on the Courthouse Plaza and at Watson Lake, drawing up to 700 people per event to experience our mountain home through music, story and dance. These programs integrated logic and intuition, science and art, land management and community-building at a local level.
Legendary conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote, “Possibly in our intuitive perception, which may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth, its soils, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants and animals, and respect it collectively, not only as a useful servant, but as a living being.”
Local resources
In our own back yard two cornerstone organizations are keeping that intuitive perception is kept alive: the Highlands Center for Natural History and the Natural History Institute (NHI).
The Highlands Center is a regional hub for environmental education. Through signature programs it promotes the awareness that nature is profoundly healing, and that the arts help us “soften, settle, and restore” both biology and emotions.
NHI provides a unique bridge between the sciences and humanities in its mission to integrates disciplines to promote the health of the natural world. Attentiveness to beauty, which requires both a scientist’s eye and an artist’s heart, nourishes this reciprocal relationship. If you’re looking to deepen your relationship with the land this summer, these local organizations offer a vibrant calendar:
• The Rights of Nature Exhibition: Through July 19 the NHI Art Gallery hosts Expressions of Animacy, Interconnection, and Wholeness by Edie Dillon. This mixed-media sculpture exhibit engages dramatically with contemporary challenges in human and environmental diversity.
• Highlands Center Offerings: The Center offers an ongoing book club, guided nature walks, special hikes and the Community Nature Study series through the summer.
• Peace in the Pines: The Highlands Center offers programs focused on the healing power of nature May 28–July 16, allowing the wind and wildlife to become active participants in personal restoration.
• Art and Soles Summer Camp: For the younger generation, NHI partners with local educators for a creative mix of movement, games and art for third- through seventh-graders. It teaches children that nature is something we belong to, not just visit.
The integration of the arts into the ways we communicate essential aspects of our natural world has come a long way. From the South Rim to the Granite Dells, this synergy transforms resources into relationships. It ensures that we don't just study the earth as a useful servant, but respect it as the living, indivisible being it truly is.
By participating in these local programs we each play a part in this ongoing alchemy, protecting the land by learning to love it through every lens, whether scientific, somatic, intuitive or emotional. We don't just study the natural world, we fall in love with it over and over again, ultimately recognizing that it and we are inseparable.
