Every two years, The George Wright Society organizes and is the primary sponsor of the USA’s premier interdisciplinary conference on protected areas. By “protected areas,” we mean a broad array of places—both “cultural” and “natural”—managed by different entities: parks at all levels; historic and cultural sites; research areas and designated wilderness within national and state forests, grasslands, wildlife refuges, and other public lands; tribal reserves; marine, estuarine, freshwater, and other aquatic sanctuaries; private land-trust reserves; and similarly designated areas.
The GWS is unique among professional organizations because it encourages dialogue and information exchange among all the people needed for protected area conservation, from historians to biologists, managers to researchers, public agencies to private organizations, academics to field personnel. The conference reflects this cross-cutting approach. We host professionals from many fields of cultural and natural resource conservation for a stimulating week of discussion. The GWS conference brings people together to share problems and information, hear new perspectives, and contemplate critical questions about the future of protected areas.
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| Scenes from the GWS/CR2003 Conference in San Diego (Photos by Chuck Rafkind) | ||
Typically, about 60% of the attendees are from the U.S. National Park Service and the conference program reflects this; in fact, the conference serves as the top-level meeting of NPS cultural and natural resource professionals. However, as noted above, the scope of the conference goes well beyond the U.S. National Park System to include other federal agencies, state agencies, NGOs, academic concerns, and organizations outside the USA.
GWS2005 will be the 13th in this series of conferences, which date back to 1976. Since 1982, the conferences have been organized by the George Wright Society. Past conferences have been recognized as official training opportunities by various U.S. federal agencies.
For more on the conference format, see the Call for Proposals.
Questions?
Contact us — we’ll be glad to help you!
The George Wright Society
P.O. Box 65
Hancock, Michigan 49930-0065 USA
1-906-487-9722; fax 1-906-487-9405
conferences@georgewright.org
