Jon Kohl

PUP Global Heritage Consortium · Coordination

El tema interpretativo es la frase más importante que un intérprete puede plasmar en papel. Pese a su centralidad para la interpretación temática, no existe ningún escrito que se ha dedicado completamente al arte y la ciencia de la elaboración de temas — hasta ahora. La Guía de campo para escribir temas interpretativos se construye sobre el legado...

Este año se cumplen 200 años de relaciones diplomáticas entre Estados Unidos y Argentina, que han implicado la cooperación en una amplia gama de campos, incluido el turismo. En procura de identificar nuevos enfoques para mejorar la capacidad de los parques nacionales para la planificación y gestión del uso público que sean de mutuo beneficio y desa...

This year marks 200 years of diplomatic relations between the United States and Argentina, which has involved cooperation across a wide range of fields, including tourism. In the interest of finding new approaches to improve the capacity of national parks for public use planning and management and develop mutually beneficial ways to deliver higher-...

Puede ser contraproducente para el desarrollo de soluciones eficaces al cambio climático que los comunicadores sobre el clima en general y los intérpretes en particular den por sentado que todos los miembros de su audiencia parten de los mismos supuestos y valores sobre cómo cambia el clima y, de hecho, el mundo. Por otra parte, el concepto de cosm...

Explica el surgimiento del marco interpretativo, un instrumento basado en la comunidad para caracterizar el patrimonio de un sitio al construir un consenso entre miembros de la comunidad. Además perfila su uso y evolución en los parques nacionales de Colombia.

La capacidad de carga ha generado una gran polémica en Costa Rica por los problemas de turismo en el Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, el más visitado del país. Mientras que diferentes partes del gobierno pelean por el correcto uso de capacidad de carga, no paran a considerar que la capacidad de carga tanto como concepto como instrumento no funciona...

La zonificación de áreas protegidas para uso humano asigna diferentes usos de los recursos terrestres y marinos a distintas zonas de gestión, en teoría, para evitar o restringir actividades incompatibles con los objetivos de gestión. Sin embargo, a pesar de su popularidad mundial, la zonificación basada en el uso humano suscita problemas como la se...

Fifty years ago Donella and Dennis Meadows and their colleagues at MIT repeatedly ran their computer model, World3, to see how Earth would behave under various environmental and economic policies. Across many scenarios, World3 spit out the same answer: Civilization could collapse in a century as the costs of coping with pollution and resource scarc...

A set of articles in a previous issue of Parks Stewardship Forum (volume 37, number 1, 2021) focused on how to implement the 2019 Chitwan Declaration of the 9th World Ranger Congress covering issues such as rangers’ role in conservation, relationships with communities, and challenges to professionalize the career. Here I build on those articles by...

Esta guía práctica presenta la metodología para aplicar la zonificación basada en condiciones en áreas protegidas. Perfila el caso de la Reserva Biológica Bosque Nuboso Monteverde. Fue un esfuerzo conjunto entre el Centro Científico Tropical en Costa Rica y el Consorcio PUP para el Patrimonio Global. La teoría y antecedentes académicos están fundam...

Mientras la rodilla del oficial Dereck Chauvin sofocaba el cuello de George Floyd, exprimió su espíritu, pero no lo silenció. Saltó inmediatamente al movimiento de derechos civiles en los Estados Unidos, y sucedió algo más. Mientras su espíritu se elevaba, marcaba permanentemente el lugar donde ocurrió su muerte. Así, tan rápido como su vida empode...

Subhead: People holding different worldviews don’t just see different parts of climate change, they live in entirely different worlds. Can climate communicators address that reality? This article discusses how doctoral researcher Gail Hochachka collaborated with psychologist Terri O´Fallon to apply the STAGES Matrix of psychological ego developme...

Human use protected area zoning assigns different uses of land and marine resources to different management zones, in theory, to avoid or curtail activities incompatible with management objectives. Despite its global popularity, however, human use zoning generates problems such as the separation of compatible uses and consequent user conflict (e.g....

El presente texto universitario es el primero de su clase escrito para audiencias de América Latina. Se basa en una visión holística de la interpretación y cómo se vincula e integra con el turismo y con la conservación del patrimonio natural y cultural a lo largo de toda la región. Sus autores partieron de la literatura de diversas fuentes discipli...

Understand how park professionals can deploy thematic interpretation techniques to achieve their health and wellness, equity, and conservation park goals. https://www.nrpa.org/parks-recreation-magazine/2020/december/heritage-interpretation-enriches-the-park-experience/

Freeman Tilden argues in his Fifth Principle of Interpretation the importance of interpreting wholes for whole people. Yet his examples reveal that in demonstrating wholeness in the form of an interpretive theme, he uses but one perspective for each of his interpreted objects (i.e., birds and places). Based on the premise that every object is enact...

This video shows US National Park Service Ranger in Yosemite National Park and acclaimed author Shelton Johnson reading the foreword that he wrote to this book. His reading is accompanied by his high quality photos that he took of the Merced River in Yosemite as well as musical accompaniment. The video can also be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/...

The field of heritage interpretation seeks to connect dots of awareness in the minds of its audiences between formerly unseen or unconnected aspects of reality that cross natural and cultural history. It cannot successfully accomplish this goal if it omits entire dimensions of reality. This article then briefly presents four principal domains of ev...

In recent decades we have experienced the world evermore dynamic, impossible to completely understand, complex, and ever-changing (DICE), and that conventional tools and approaches based on a predictable, linear, understandable, and stable (PLUS) world (Kohl & McCool 2016) cannot guide recreation planners into the future. The uncertainty of this DI...

This article expresses why the interpretation field has strong moral implications especially in its obligation to do good for a troubled civilization. It then offers 10 steps in how to do this including defining objectives, interpretive themes, conservation messages, and calls to action.

Este Cuadro 10.1 aparece en el capítulo 10 "Beneficios del pensamiento complejo". El texto completo: Desde la escuela primaria, la mayoría de los administradores de parques han aprendido supuestos sobre el mundo mucho antes de que se dieran cuenta de que había otras maneras de entender el cambio. Por lo tanto, la visión convencional todavía contro...

Simplistic thinking in terms of problem definition and solution development has so far plagued overtourism, and therefore a holistic approach is proposed. Some factors that influence overtourism and some strategies to confront overtourism are identified along two interior and two exterior dimensions across individual and collective realms. https:/...

Boletín de Interpretación: La creación de significados genera emoción, por eso, una facilitación intencional para la creación de significados relacionados con el patrimonio donde uno visita aumenta la experiencia. Sin embargo, muchos en la industria turística aunque persiguen la mejor experiencia posible aún dejan omiso este componente de la expe...

Theme writing remains central to all professional communication, especially thematic interpretation. Despite that, no document in the interpretive library dedicates itself entirely to theme writing. Most interpretation books offer only scant theme examples. Considering this need, NAI just published The Interpretive Theme Writer's Field Guide: A Poc...

The interpretive theme is the most important sentence an interpreter inks on paper. Despite its centrality to thematic interpretation, no single work has dedicated itself entirely to the exploration, art, and craft of strong theme writing — until now. The Interpretive Theme Writer’s Field Guide builds on Ham’s 30-year thematic interpretation resear...

This article analyzes an ambitious interpretive planning project in Pennsylvania's Lumber Heritage Region that resulted in plan non-implementation. It applies years later a Holistic Planning perspective that identifies numerous ways why that planning process likely failed and how it could have been done better with the current holistic focus based...

So many people use depersonalized formulas and heartless formats to frame themselves for prospective employers. They should in fact apply interpretation to their résumé design, in particular, Sam Ham’s TORE approach. Ham developed TORE based on research. Strong interpretation, he argues, is always TORE: thematic, organized, relevant, and entertaini...

Parks & Recreation, Official Publication of the National Recreation and Park Association Participation is all the discourse in park planning yet participation first must be defined and often it alone is not enough. This article discusses considerations that can make participation and community engagement more effective in park planning.

Jon Kohl and Kathy Krause, Chief of Interpretation for the National Park Service's Fire Island National Seashore on Long Island, New York, talk about our project that promoted collaborative interpreting planning.

The Overflight is a narrative interpretively written birdseye-view description of a heritage site. It integrates all the major elements required for its interpretation including themes, issues, heritage elements, resources, audiences, activities, and others. It can be used to guide interpretive planning in the same way that interpretive themes do,...

Textbook about heritage interpretation

Traditionally, interpretive standards have focused on only skills and aptitudes of individual interpreters. Nevertheless the interpretation field cites objectives not just on the individual level, but also team and community levels. Therefore standards should include all three levels to properly assess if interpretation meets professional standards...

Primer párafo: La tendencia en la planificación interpretativa –y también en otras disciplinas de planificación– es concentrar esfuerzos en la elaboración de documentos de alta calidad técnica: temas potentes, audiencias bien definidas, objetivos relevantes y medios interpretativos seleccionados estratégicamente. Pero incluso los mejores planes téc...

Many plans fail to be implemented, but not due to a lack of technical tools or approaches, rather because of their assumptions about planning and the world. Successful plans mobilize people to implement them, so the planning process must address this reality much beyond just answering technical questions. A holistic approach, then, can transcend ma...

This article is the cover story for themed issue, Immersive Experiences in Interpretation. It refutes the traditional view of interpretation whereby most of the advice and attention centers on the interpreter, her words and actions. Rather the article propose a holistic view to understanding all the many stimuli in the multi-dimensional environment...

There has been only one universe and one process of evolution, yet many human specialties divide it up. Interpret Europe needs clarity in its understanding of heritage to avoid erroneous assumptions. This articles the artificiality and arbitrariness of dividing up heritage into natural and cultural categories. http://www.interpret-europe.net/de/to...

Crisis has enveloped the more than 200,000 nationally and regionally protected natural and cultural heritage sites around the world. Heritage managers – those who manage natural sites such as national parks, wilderness areas, and biosphere reserves, as well as those who manage cultural sites including historic monuments, battlefields, heritage citi...

Neither the Municipality of Évora nor the city operators in general have a plan to manage the city’s public use attractions. Even more, over a dozen institutions manage attractions, making an integrated coordination exceptionally difficult to achieve. Given these dispersed responsibilities, the Municipality realized that only a participatory, conse...

Tour guiding research: insights, issues and implications, by Betty Weiler and Rosemary Black, Bristol, Channel View Publications, 2014, 224 pp., £29.95, $49.95, €34.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781845414672

It's 12:00 am on Playa Grande in Costa Rica. A sea turtle emerges slowly through waves breaking just yards from our observation point. It catches us by surprise. After various silent hours of waiting, our minds, once alert and on the lookout, have lapsed into contemplation of the world around us. In that moment, José, a young man from the community...

Tradicionalmente, los estándares profesionales se centran en las competencias técnicas. Se asume que para mejorar la calidad de una profesión, hay que mejorar la calidad de sus practicantes. Pero cuando una profesión tiene un objetivo urgente en la sociedad, enfocar solo a sus practicantes resulta demasiado reduccionista. En tiempos recientes, ha h...

This Box 10.1 appears within Chapter 10. The editors above are chapter's principal authors. The book editors are Worboys, Graeme; Lockwood, Michael; Kothari, Ashish; Feary, Sue; Pulsford, Ian. First paragraph: Since primary school, most park managers have learned assumptions about the world long before they realised that there were other ways to un...

There are many different types of visitors to protected areas. They may be official guests to a national park; researchers working in a strict nature reserve; volunteers assisting with a national park work program; educational groups learning about special natural or cultural heritage; or people who conduct their business within a protected area in...

For some, interpretation is a career; for others, a passion; for others still, a mere job obligation. How can interpreters, local guides, site managers, and academics work together to offer interpretive opportunities? In some sites, interpretation might demand more of managers and guides than their education will allow. Because of differences in ba...

Many people think that authenticity is an absolute either-or quality: That diamond is real or fake. That gun was really Pancho Villa's or not. That's a real Mayan site or a theme park. But in fact, visitors perceive how authentic something or some place is based on their own personal background, expectations of what they think they will encounter,...

Jon analiza cómo los marcos interpretativos participativos pueden reforzar la identidad comunitaria. Artículo aparecido originalmente en: Interpretation Journal (AHÍ). Spring 2014. Volume 19. Number 1. Traducido por Francisco J. (Nutri) Guerra Rosado y Jon Kohl "En la UNESCO, creemos que no es posible elegir entre salvar vidas y salvar el patrimoni...

Interpretive planners with development experience and facilitation skills can guide communities through the creation of meanings held and displayed in interpretive frameworks, which contribute to community self-identity and self-worth. These frameworks not only allow them to design more authentic heritage products, but also to more fully participat...

Interpretive planners with development experience and facilitation skills can guide communities through the creation of meanings held and displayed in interpretive frameworks, which contribute to community self-identity and self-worth. But first interpreters must leave behind the conventional consultant-driven approach. These participatory interpre...

La autenticidad es una percepción, especialmente importante para el turismo alternativo. Mucha gente piensa que la autenticidad es una cualidad absoluta de todo o nada sobre un lugar o un objeto: ese diamante es real o falso; esa pistola era realmente de Pancho Villa o no; ese es un verdadero sitio maya o un parque temático... Pero en realidad los...

The PUP Global Heritage Consortium's Public Use Planning effort worked with three UNESCO sites in Central Vietnam. It was the first time perhaps in Vietnam that heritage sites engaged in participatory planning. The project was sponsored by UNESCO.

Available to read online at http://es.calameo.com/read/003329972811ce07b9d09. This is the spanish version of UNESCO´s quarterly magazine World Heritage

Dentro de nuestro campo de trabajo, es tentador guardar la idea de que la interpretación evoluciona y cambia de acuerdo a las acciones de nuestros pensadores y programas propios, independientes de las trayectorias en las que otros campos como la educación ambiental, la silvicultura, la sociología, o incluso el estilo de cabello podrían seguir. Pero...

From within our field, we might entertain the thought that interpretation changes and evolves according to actions of our own thinkers and programs, independent of the trajectories by which other fields such as environmental education, forestry, sociology, or even hair design might travel. But a momentary step outside our box might reveal that all...

Intro: When disaster strikes, you can’t power your refrigerator with alternative energy mutual funds; you can’t fix your broken water filter with U.S. savings bonds; and you can’t eat your cash reserves.

Though Copenhagen negotiators wrangled and wrestled over cap-and-trade, technology transfer, mitigation funds, and other large-scale, multi-billion-dollar proposals to tackle climate change and move toward (energy) sustainability , they did not pay much heed to community transformation. Despite the lapse, many communities have transcended concern f...

Antes de que el joven Tim Merriman se convirtiera en director ejecutivo de la Asociación Nacional de Interpretación (NAI), hace 30 años fue intérprete en los parques de Illinois y uno de cuatro supervivientes. Ocurrió un recorte presupuestario y 18 de los 22 intérpretes a tiempo completo y 55 trabajadores temporales perdieron sus trabajos. El direc...

Intro: Like most Peace Corps Volunteers, when I arrived at my assigned country of Costa Rica, I inherited a local community. Tibás, like all urban towns here, expanded not through a communal compact of intentional values and goals, but rather through an ad hoc convergence of individual interests: for-profit developers, office-bound city planners, g...

Home Is Not Just a Place I had always considered Foxboro, Massachusetts my home. After all, Foxboro brought me up. I attended elementary school there, edited The Fox at Foxboro High, received my college acceptance letter, watched the New England Patriots practice behind the old mental health hospital, and fell asleep every night to the factory hum...

A principal function of heritage interpretation should be to link people and places in order to conserve those places. The motive to conserve does not arise only from within the interpretation field. Due to increasing urgency of biological and cultural heritage loss, the wider resource management field requires participation of all conservation-rel...

Even high-performance guides can be low-performance site management tools if managers do not support them, understand their work philosophy, create systems such as donation collection, involve interpreters in public use decisions, establish interpretive frameworks, or recognize quality interpretation. In short one-off trainings that extract guides...

El modelo de la Planificación Racional Comprensiva (PRC), es probablemente el paradigma dominante de la planificación en el mundo, por lo menos para entidades relacionadas con planificación de AP. Algunas palabras que muchas veces caracterizan esta forma de planificación son: metódica, apolítica, objetiva, exacta, controlada y técnica. Algunos crít...

The rapid loss of biological diversity continues despite the hundreds of conservation projects being carried out today. Cultural diversity is also diminishing, owing to globalization and encroachment. Languages are one indicator of cultural integrity, and 90% of the 6000 living languages and dialects are on the decline (Waas, 1998). The urgency for...

Stories of the Reef (Report from the Field #2) was produced by Mr. Jon Kohl for the Mesoamerican Reef Program of The Summit Foundation. Final review and editing were done by the Foundation. The Report’s purpose is to offer insight into Summit’s approaches to conservation as well as a glimpse of the various strategies and achievements of our partne...

Comparison of Global Volunteers and US Peace Corps Volunteers in the magazine of the US Peace Corps

This book explores solutions to the problems of inconsistency and even exploitation of the term ecotourism through examples, case studies, and a discussion of quality control and certification. The first part of the book (chapters 2-8) moves the reader through the spectrum of quality assurance tools, from what are perceived to be the least rigorous...

Thirty years ago, before young Tim Merriman became executive director of the National Association for Interpretation (NAI), he was an interpreter for Illinois State Parks and one of four survivors of a budget cut. Eighteen of 22 full-time interpreters and 55 seasonal employees lost their jobs. The associate director of the park wanted to cut interp...

Ecotourism strives to improve the environmental, cultural and social conditions of a place. Thus those who work as ecotour guides, ultimately, should serve that goal. Advocates of ecotour quality, however, often focus on measuring only a guide's personal qualities rather than on the guide's achievement of ecotourism's goal. With the increasing comp...

Taking a lesson from his work with ecological systems, SoL member Jon Kohl makes a case for training that honors both human nature and the tenets of the natural world. Learning works best when it takes place within the context in which it will be put to use. And training programs that recognize and build on the “holism” – as opposed to reductionism...

The wave of biodiversity destruction rises. If park managers cannot direct interpretation to mitigate the wave, it will pass, leaving little for future generations. To achieve quantifiable conservation results, interpretation must manage a different wave: new standards in effective conservation practice. Fermata, Inc., a sustainable development and...

Bookshelves around the world are laden with written plans. having spent a brief time in the limelight, each now rests unimplemented and often forgotten. Despite the celebrations of strategic plans in boardrooms, at press conferences, and throughout grant reports, such plans often end up dead on arrival – even before planners complete the planning p...

As with expectant mothers, a guide really carries for two. Professional guides should always assume their visitors are ill-equipped, ill-prepared, misinformed, and didn't read the pre-trip materials. So all the obvious safety and comfort equipment the guide would carry for himself, he needs to carry for his visitors as well. If visitors are uncomfo...

It is one thing when elk roam into the tiny Pennsylvania township of Benezette (population 230) and eat the heads off corn crops; it is entirely different when thousands of tourists follow those elk, clogging roads, cutting through driveways to photograph them, and rapping on peoples’ doors asking to use the bathroom. In the late 1990s both the cor...

Book by Lisa Brochu and Tim Merriman in 2002. Then directors of the National Association for Interpretation, first book in the InterPress series.

Environmental interpretation has its roots in conservation. Today most interpreters recognize its importance in conserving natural and cultural resources. Nonetheless the field has invested little in contemplating how interpretation can be a mechanism for conservation. Meanwhile in the biological conservation field, the Conservation Measures Partne...

Unexpected barriers often emerge to frustrate implementation of strategic park plans. Park managers, donors and planning consultants unwittingly create many of these barriers during the planning process. Barriers grow out of the assumptions that these players hold about the park planning process, the nature of park plans, the format of plans and th...

“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” In the Hollywood movie blockbuster The Matrix, computers imprison humans in a fictional virtual reality designed to keep them placated while machines o...

When I worked as a Peace Corps educator (1993-1995) at the National Zoo in Costa Rica, this was my problem: how to educate 300,000 Costa Ricans per year most of which were children, in a facility that had 75 years' experience in using its animals to entertain not teach on one small green island floating in a sea of cement? What's more, the Zoo had...

Intro: The histories of zoos and wilderness in America have been intertwined for 150 years. According to the World Zoo Conservation Strategy (WZCS) (World Zoo Organization 1993), their evolution is unfolding in three stages. Menageries marked the 19th century, when simple taxonomic animal collections were exhibited to the public. In the 20th centur...

Message, thesis, theme, topic sentence, hypothesis, main idea, theorem, slogan—different fields dress it in different colors, but that one sentence by whatever costume it wears, can be the toughest of any show. Our field in particular, heritage interpretation, has a small literature dedicated to the writing of that one sentence. Interpretive writer...

Frequently, practitioners try to link interpretation to conservation through behavior change. Interpretation, nevertheless, is often confused with other behavior change approaches such as environmental education and social marketing. Using concept modeling, we examine assumptions of common interpretation strategies to promote conservation. Evidentl...

This third and last part describes the new paradigm of interpreters as strategic communicators who use a global human story to strategically promote resource conservation. It further explains this as a new paradigm and must overcome the existing paradigm to take hold.

What do you do when the government comes knocking at your rainforest door and warns, “Sorry, we’ve just declared this area a national park and you can’t hunt or cultivate here anymore.” You could turn and fight like many indigenous tribes do when handed such an eviction notice, or simply cease life as a tribe. Or, you could do as one Emberá tribe i...

In the first installment of this series, “The Most Important Story in History: And Interpreters Positioned to Tell It” (May/June 2003), I argue that our field should take on an explicit conservationist angle since conservation runs deeply through our veins and because the biggest stories—those of our worldview— threaten the very resources we interp...

The first of a three part series. This first part introduces the big story of human civilization according to Daniel Quinn's Ishmael book series and then argues that interpreters should be equipped to tell this story to make their work more consequential by focusing on conservation. It further argues that the National Association for Interpretation...

Tourism people often don't credit interpretation with more than helping tourists understand or appreciate. But if they knew how much credit Lindblad Expeditions gets from interpretation, they would be reading Freeman Tilden in a snap. This naturalist cruise ship operator uses interpretation to generate more than $2,000 per week for the Galapagos Co...

When interviewing job or approaching a hopeful date, popular wisdom advises, " Just be yourself. " But what is just myself? I should know, I've been living with me all my life. But despite that simple advice, humans have been trying to understand themselves ever since we became self-aware. Today, we look to psychologists, palmists, astrologists, My...

“Komodo could be a little like Jurassic Park,” muses Rili Djauhari, Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Bali office in Indonesia, which supports Komodo National Park. She knows that live dinosaurs are hard to come by these days, but dragons are another matter. Komodo Island and its dragons, nevertheless, bear little resemblance to Jurassic Park Is...

La infraestructura interpretativa en países en vías de desarrollo, en general, sigue más la mitología que la lógica de la estrategia de negocios, estudios de visitación, o planificación interpretativa. Mientras los visitantes pueden encontrar ejemplos de estos mitos en los Estados Unidos, una mayor distribución de los mismos en los países en desarr...

Biologists call it K, that is, " carrying capacity. " Carrying capacity refers to the amount of living biomass a particular system can support before it collapses. But I'm going to call it " KAC " so I can tell the tale of " KAC versus LAC. " Most Latin-American parks are still run by natural-science professionals such as biologists, foresters, and...

THE CONSTRUCTION OF interpretive infrastructure in the developing world often follows blueprints of myth more than logic of business strategies , visitor studies, or interpretive plans. While travelers can spy edifications of the following myths in the United States, the myths' superior distribution in developing countries make them commonplace. Pe...

Si centros tan grandes como éstos, con presupuestos significativos y, se supone, acceso a especialistas sucumben a la mediocridad, imagínese las decenas de centros más pequeños, con pocos recursos

This article tells of the founding of the Public Use Planning Program, later to become the PUP Global Heritage Consortium, at Pico Bonito National Park in Honduras. The author and colleagues realized that parks across Latin America had great difficulty in implementing their plans and this attempt to create a public use plan was a large break from c...