Seattle’s Innovation and Leadership in Climate Equity Panelist Q&A: Mickey Fearn
By Yordanos Tesfazion
Mickey Fearn has dedicated his career to making the outdoors accessible, safe, and enjoyable for over 50 years. His passion for nature and service to youth and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) has made him a valuable asset to the parks and recreation space. Mickey’s cultural competence has led him to work with local, state, and national government agencies to implement programs that center the needs of those who need it the most. Mickey was the Deputy Director of the National Park Service (NPS) from 2008-2013.
Before working in Washington, D.C., he held a variety of positions working for the City of Seattle, including Director of Innovation, Executive Director of the Neighborhood Leadership Program, and Seattle Parks and Recreation’s Director of Communication and Citizen Engagement. Mickey was instrumental in launching Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative and developed programs to end youth violence in the city. Until his recent retirement, Mickey served as a Professor of Practice at North Carolina State University’s School of Natural Resources, teaching students about diversity and equity in the field of parks and recreation. Today, he shares his knowledge with public parks, recreation, conservation agencies and non-profit organizations.
Mickey is on the panel for our upcoming Earth Day event at Town Hall Seattle! Learn more about his work ahead of the April 22nd event:
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
As a Black person, there aren’t many folks who look like you in the parks and recreation space. In a conversation with ActivEnviro (formerly known as GP RED), you mentioned that those working in parks and recreation – whether at the local or national level – are best equipped to meet the needs of communities that look and live like them. How have your personal experiences shaped the way you implement diversity and equity initiatives in your work?
It’s been quite a journey! I had my first equity job at Cal State Sacramento when they first implemented Affirmative Action in the 1970s. I was the first Affirmative Action director at the school, they actually gave me the job as a student at 21 years old. I’ve done some kind of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) work in all the jobs I’ve had since then. I’ve seen a lot of stuff change, from Affirmative Action to folks understanding that diversity is an asset that’s full of possibilities for enrichment and growth. I and many others don’t do this work because we have a moral responsibility to do it. We do this because we’re better off as a result of it.
As it relates to the Parks and Recreation profession, there are a good number of people of color on the “recreation” side of Parks and Recreation, but not a lot on the “park” side of it. When addressing the issue of equity, whether we’re talking about the people we serve or employees, there needs to be a co-creation of experiences between people who have the organizational power to make change and people who intimately know how different things are.
One of the questions that I’m consistently trying to answer now is “what is unique and what is universal?” In other words, there are some things that are true about all of us, and then there are some unique things based on gender, ethnicity, culture, etc. So, what I’ve been trying to figure out lately, is what is universal?
When I started the Race and Social Justice Initiative for the City of Seattle, it was the first municipal equity initiative. I created a chart called the Green People Chart to understand what was going on with racism in Seattle. The Green People Chart has government bureaucracy, it’s a box and some lines that indicate function and hierarchy. Well, we know that white adult homeowners are the demographic that is most likely to participate in public processes on a more consistent basis. As a result, the whole public engagement process is ascertaining the issues that white adult homeowners are concerned with. They’re the “green people” that green organizations collect information about and end up creating programs and services for.
So, then the question becomes “how do we find out what the real recreation interests and needs are of those who are not “green people?”” Nike has a large share of the African American market. Why can’t Parks and Recreation find out what Nike did? Nike understands African American culture. They understand their consumer habits, they understand their need for style, etc. In the Parks and Recreation space, we must understand what’s keeping African Americans out of the “parks” part of Parks and Recreation. We have to determine what’s keeping them out and develop programs and services that not only get them engaged but keep them engaged.
There are endless studies that highlight the health and social benefits of spending time outside, especially for youth. Over 15 years ago, you came to the Seattle Board of Park Commissioners to propose that recreational activities can prevent youth violence in the city. What nature-based violence prevention programs did you create during your time with the City?
In the first three months of 2009, nine African American kids were killed. In response, the mayor asked me if I would facilitate a group of people to understand how we go about solving the problem of youth violence in the city.
Historically, people have been guilty of treating referral pain. Referral pain is when something presents itself as an issue but is not at the place that the issue manifests from. We’ve been treating youth violence like referral pain. Sometimes we treat it where the symptom stems from but it’s not necessarily the root cause. The group I facilitated with the City was made up of social workers, police officers, and healthcare workers. They all seemed to think that their professions were the solution to the youth violence problem and suggested that they get more funding. Working in Parks and Recreation, my perspective was that self-actualized people don’t hurt themselves or each other. Young people who are self-actualized and feel good about themselves don’t hurt themselves or each other. In my opinion, the solution was to determine how we can get as many young people self-actualized as possible.
Complex interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary problems like youth violence can’t be solved with a single disciplinary solution. Marshall McLuhan, who was a great futurist in the 1960s, held the belief that you can’t solve complex problems with individual disciplines, that problems are solved in the spaces between the disciplines. For us, that meant working in the spaces between Parks and Recreation and social work, safety, and health. We could find the answer to the issue at hand in those spaces, but there was some pushback. So I went to my brother, who’s been in Seattle for a long time, and asked “why do you think they won’t listen to me?” And he said it was because nobody could make money off my solution. Self-actualization creates a situation where things (in this case, youth violence) don’t happen, and instead things become positive. You can’t make money off that.
What we know about not just young people, but about all of us, is that we have a need for the following five things: 1) the ability to operate independently, 2) a sense of kinship, 3) to have mastery over something, 4) individuation, and 5) a sense of power. If you can’t find positive ways to satisfy those five things, they don’t just go unsatisfied. Those five things can be satisfied in a dance or art group just as much as they can be satisfied in a gang. For youth who don’t have opportunities to be independent, have mastery over something, or feel a sense of kinship, gangs can satisfy those needs in similar ways that recreation experiences aim to do. We needed to determine how we could offer Parks and Recreation experiences that allow people to have a sense of those five things.
Eventually we made the decision to leave two community centers open all night. These fatal incidents were taking place past midnight, so we wanted youth to have a place they could make connections and build community at if they didn’t have anywhere else to go. There were two community centers, one in West Seattle and the other in central Seattle. If Parks and Recreation doesn’t get involved in experiences that can lead to transformation, then it’s not really doing what it’s supposed to do.
Transcript: What we begin to do is to get other community centers to be intentional. Part of the problem with recreation is people sometimes see it as self-directed play. It’s just where people go out and they have a good time, and they play basketball, and they do that kind of stuff. But they don’t see it as transformational.
In the work I am trying to do and the work I did for the City of Seattle, we decided that our young people needed to be safe, healthy, unafraid, prosperous, literate, and to be able to live powerfully in sustainable, culturally complex communities. That’s what we want for kids, and recreation can satisfy that, but not without intentionality.
You’re known for linking the generational trauma of African Americans to biophobia, the fear of living things that leads to an aversion to nature. In what ways does that aversion show up on a day-to-day basis, and what do non-Black individuals need to understand about that dynamic?
When I had my interview to be Deputy Director of the National Park Service they asked me “what are you going to do to get more Black people camping and hiking?” I responded saying, “with all due respect, I don’t care nothing about camping and hiking. What I want to know is how a group of people who had a profound ancestral relationship with nature somehow had that relationship destroyed?” And of course, I really do care about camping and hiking, I just said that for effect!
Black people were brought here to do hard labor, and many of them were also brought here because of their understanding of nature, how to get pine tar out of trees, how to grow rice in brackish water, and so on and so forth. That’s why I didn’t care about camping and hiking, I wanted to know how people who had a profound ancestral relationship with nature had that relationship destroyed.
Take a look at the Middle Passage, all of these Black people were put on a boat with no idea of where they’re going and what’s happening to them, and sometimes they were being thrown overboard. The journey itself was traumatic. Then all of a sudden, they arrive at Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina—over 40% of the enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage were dropped off there. And the interesting thing about Sullivan’s Island is that it looks like Africa. So just imagine, these people didn’t know where they were, experiencing the brutalities of slavery and then also getting separated from their families and those they shared languages with.
When slaves were being abused, they would go further into the woods to find safety because they were used to the environment. So, when they were being threatened, they would go deeper into the woods. And when slavery was outlawed, there was rural racial violence, Jim Crow, and the Great (Northern) Migration. All these traumatic events led to a generational response that has left a group of people who once had a profound relationship with nature thinking there’s nothing good out in nature for them. So, the question I had when I started at the NPS was “what happened with the biophilia and what can we do to eliminate biophobia?”
The interesting thing about this is that I have biophilia—and when I went out into Redwood Park, I was still kind of terrified. Another interesting thing was that all my white friends were jealous of where I was going while all my Black friends were saying “they’re going to lynch you from one of them trees!” But of course, when I got to the park and I saw the trees, there wasn’t a branch close enough to the ground that you could be lynched from, so I knew my Black friends didn’t have any idea of what they were talking about. All of that to say, biophobia is absolutely rigid, it’s strong. But at the same time, it’s very fragile.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, we created a program called the Neighborhood Ecology Corp (NEC). Through this program, we introduced [BIPOC] youth to nature in a place that was familiar to them, their neighborhoods. We wanted them to understand that nature isn’t just some place out there that we go to just to “get better” but that nature is all around them. We found about 25 middle schoolers to participate in a year-long experience of getting more familiar with nature. When they started, they were terrified. The first day they were out there, they were sure that an alligator was going to come out of the woods and eat them—I’m serious!
The guy who co-founded this program, Randy Senzig, is the most remarkable, unremarkable white man I’ve ever seen. Within a week, he had these young people doing bug sweeps and all this other work out in nature because he was able to eliminate the biophobia through showing them the importance of nature in their everyday lives.
We took NEC youth to Grandfather Mountain for a weekend and their parents didn’t want them to go. They thought their kids would get hurt by an animal or another person while out in the wild. During that trip, we went on an amazing night hike where the only illumination was from fireflies, it was a beautiful experience.
With this work, we don’t want to just take people out for day adventures. When I first started at the NPS, they had me take a group of kids from Oakland to Yosemite with the hopes that they’d love it enough to come back. Well, they thought it was pretty, but they talked about the trip like they survived it and were not inclined to go back. You can’t address biophobia by just taking people out on a 2-day retreat to Yosemite and telling them “here, enjoy.”
The NEC familiarizes and introduces these youth to nature in a variety of ways so they don’t view nature-based activities as solely recreational. They begin to view nature as a part of their everyday life.
Another one of the great things about NEC is that all our participants have gone on to college. It changed the entire trajectory of some youth who would’ve never gone to college, let alone major in environmental-related subjects.
Thank you for sharing more about yourself and your work, Mickey! Learn more from Mickey and other local leaders in climate and equity at our Earth Day panel at Town Hall Seattle on April 22.