National Capital Parks-East

John Gross Barnard

Meet the six winner of the 2011 Hartzog Awards, which celebrates the amazing contributions of volunteers to our national parks.

In 2018, six talented National Park Service employees were awarded the Freeman Tilden Award for their amazing and innovative interpretive programs.

On behalf of the Interpretation, Education, and Volunteers Directorate, we are pleased to congratulate the national recipients of the 2021 George and Helen Hartzog Awards for Outstanding Volunteer Service. Through their extraordinary work and dedication, these volunteers have made an exceptional contribution to their parks and communities.

The National Park Service congratulates the regional recipients of the 2025 Excellence in Volunteerism Awards. These nominees embody the values of service, engagement, and stewardship fundamental to our national parks.

A National Park Service (NPS) uniform weaves together the unique story of the person who wore it and the NPS mission. Sometimes the uniforms and their stories also reflect a larger history for the NPS and American society. That’s the case for the uniforms worn by Robert G. Stanton who began his career during the civil rights era and went on to become the first African American director of the NPS.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s … Environman? While it may sound like a Saturday morning superhero, Environman was a National Park Service (NPS) symbol for its environmental education activities in the 1970s. Beginning in 1967 the NPS became a leader in environmental conservation education, which then-Director George B. Hartzog, Jr saw as crucial to the survival of the parks and the planet. Many of those key ideas echo in today’s NPS climate change education.

Historically National Park Service (NPS) landscape architects were the artists of the NPS. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s the NPS began hiring some of the best graphic design and advertising firms in the country to create or update logos and symbols. How is it, then, that Robert C. Osborn—a cartoonist, caricaturist, and satiric commentator known for his “images of bloated power, violence, and death”—came to draw one of the National Park Service’s most feel-good symbols?

What if your office were the woods? Your break room a mossy log? This is the reality for members of the Inventory & Monitoring forest vegetation crew. The team has collected data on forest health in NCR parks every year since 2006 and recently completed the fourth cycle of forest vegetation monitoring (2018-2022). Learn what staff biologists and technicians have to say about their experiences in the field these past five years.