Ralph White, manager of the James River Park

Teaching people about the value of something fosters appreciation and care for it, that’s Ralph White’s philosophy.

“People who are disconnected from their environment lose any sense of care for the environment and then the environment gets degraded and it’s a downward cycle,” said White, manager of the James River Park.

“And conversely, that people who know about their environment learn to love their environment. They use their environment and they become political supporters,” he said.

White didn’t always think this way.

He felt a tie to the Asian community while living in Thailand and the Philippines as a child. Later, he studied Mandarin and Thai and became an Asian specialist for the Peace Corps. While returning to Thailand with the Peace Corps., he realized that political and economic development was not his kind of work.

He had been doing his kind of work every time he bought an animal from a roadside stand. The animals were mostly for sale as food, but White used them to teach the local children the value of the animals.

He gave those animals to a forest officer and they built a nature center.

The children had no knowledge of local species. “The only questions they could ask were: one, can it hurt me and two, can I eat it,” he said.

The nature center was full of informative signs that explained things like the reason a squirrel’s tail is long and which pests a certain animal eats, but the center lacked in its size and the amount of animals.

White traveled to the United States to find ways to improve the center and found many people lacking the same type of knowledge so he decided to stay in the U.S. to teach the value of animals.

In Jan. 1980, White was hired as the city park naturalist. At that time, there were 13 other people on the James River Park’s staff but budget cuts eliminated everyone else by July 1, 1980.

“The only reason that I kept my job is no one wanted to be down along the river,” he said. “I was hired as a teacher. I found it was very hard to teach classes when there were piles of broken glass and graffiti.”

The graffiti made him rethink teaching altogether in 1981 when, teaching a mostly-black fourth grade class about geology, he unknowingly brought them across rocks with racial slurs painted on them. Though the children were not very upset, their teacher was livid and refused to have anything to do with White or the park again.

“I can feel for him but I said I have to rethink everything. I can’t teach at all with that condition so I began spending half or more than half of my time with litter maintenance,” he said.

He also started experimenting with ways of eliminating graffiti. Since chemicals that removed graffiti were burning his skin and harming the environment, he settled on painting over it.

Covering the graffiti was time consuming so he came up with two ways to enlist help. The first was that every class he taught would volunteer for an hour to repay him.

Second, he started an internship program. “[It] was a thin excuse for a maintenance man,” he said.

Then groups like the Audubon Society and James River Outdoor Coalition started volunteering. With the help of outdoor enthusiasts, White decided to take a hands-off approach and believe that the people would take care of the park they loved.

“My job as an administrator is really to get out of the way. I’ve come to the conclusion the worst thing is to be too involved, directing what to do, telling people what’s right and what’s wrong,” White said.

Johnny Goodwin, a field maintenance worker at the park, says White’s hands-off approach has made him a success.

“Ralph White is the most efficient park manager in the city because he surrounds himself with people who love their jobs,” he said.

“And when we have a problem he asks us how we think it can be solved. We have a general goal and we strive on our own to keep an image and respect of park visitors,” Goodwin said.

In return, White makes sure there are signs showing who constructs and maintains features of the park.

“I believe people do things, partly, to be paid in terms of honor or recognition. No one will admit to that but you’re not paying people money. You’re persuading their altruism, you’re encouraging their altruism, and the way you do that is to give them credit when they’re finished,” White said.

The signs not only give credit where it’s due but teach the value of the volunteers’ role in the park.