CLEVELAND – The national parks in the USA have some similarities with the parks in Great Britain.
Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England, and Cuyahoga Valley National Park were recently declared sister parks due to their similarities.
“This will allow the parks to share information and best practices and better connect with each other around the world,” says Lisa Petit, director of Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
She said Dartmoor approached CVNP to develop this relationship because of the commonalities they have, including the fact that there is farmland within the boundaries of both parks.
CVNP developed an agricultural program in 1999 to preserve the valley’s pastoral landscape and protect both natural and cultural resources.
“Dartmoor looks very different from Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It’s wide open land and there are archaeological finds from the Bronze Age. It looks very different to us, but we have similar concerns about protecting and restoring natural resources,” Petit said.
“Cuyahoga is restoring a landscape rather than managing it. Many of the big national parks are simply managing what they have rather than trying to restore an ecosystem and a national park,” says Peter Harper, board member of Dartmoor National Park.
Apart from the fact that both parks contain agricultural land, they are both located close to urban communities, which is one of the main reasons why Dartmoor got involved in the initiative.
“One of the things that really struck us was that there was no litter anywhere. We didn’t see any litter anywhere. People really respect their national parks and we want to try and build on that in Dartmoor so that people realise that this is something really special to them and that they need to look after it,” said Harper.
The agreement between the partner parks was signed in June and has a term of five years with the aim of exchanging ideas.
“They learn a lot from our model, but we can also learn a lot from them. They do things very differently than we do and in some cases even better,” says Petit.
