Appendix
A Policy Statement: The Meaning of National Parks Today
I. The parks are places where recreation reflects the aspirations
of a free and independent people
They are places where no one else prepares
entertainment for the visitor, predetermines his responses, or tells him
what to do. In a national park the visitor is on his own, setting an
agenda for himself, discovering what is interesting, going at his own
pace. The parks provide a contrast to the familiar situation in which we
are bored unless someone tells us how to fill our time.
The parks are places that have not been tamed,
contemporary symbols for men and women who are themselves ready to
resist being tamed into passivity. The meaning of national parks for us
grows as much out of the modern literature of inner freedom and its
fragility as it does our of traditional nature writing. "I tell thee,"
Dostoevski says in The Brothers Karamazov, "that man is tormented
by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand
over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is
born."
II. The parks are an object lesson for a world of limited
resources
In the national parks the visitor learns that
satisfaction is not correlated to the rate at which he expends
resources, but that just the opposite is true. The parks promote
intensive experience, rather than intensive use. The more
one knows, searches, and understands, the greater the interest and
satisfaction of the park experience.
To a very casual visitor, even the stupendous quality
of a Grand Canyon is soon boring; he yearns for "something to do." The
more the visitor knows about the setting, however, the greater its
capacity to interest and engage him. He cannot exhaust its interest in a
lifetime. In the same way, the more knowledgeable and engaged the
visitor, the less he wants or needs to pass through the parks quickly or
at high speed. The quantity of resources the visitor needs to consume
shrinks as he discovers the secret of intensiveness of experience, and
his capacity for intense satisfaction depends on what is in his own
head. This of course is what Thoreau meant when in his famous essay
"Walking" he said:
My vicinity affords many good walks; and though I
have walked almost every day . . . I have not yet exhausted them. . . .
The limits of an afternoon walk . . . will never become quite familiar
to you.
The parks perform their function without being used
up at all. We do not increase our enjoyment of an alpine meadow by
picking its flowers, but by leaving them where they are. The more we
understand that they are part of a larger system the more we appreciate
them in their setting; and in their settingrather than perceived
as things to possess or to use upthey are inexhaustible.
III. The parks are great laboratories of successful natural
communities
We look at nature with awe and wonderment: Trees that
have survived for millenia; a profusion of flowers in the seeming
sterility of the desert; predator and prey living in equilibrium;
undiminished productivity and reproduction, year after year, century
upon century. These marvels intrigue us, but nature is also a model of
many things we seek in human communities. We value continuity,
stability, and sustenance. And we see in nature attainment of those
goals through adaptation, sustained productivity, diversity, and
evolutionary change.
Ideas are perhaps the scarcest of all resources, and
nature is a cornucopia of ideas in a vast laboratory setting. With a
discerning eye, one can see in any park a multitude of examples of
efficiency and adaptationin architecture, in food production and
gathering, in resistance to disease, in procreation, and energy
useall of which have counterparts in human society. Our interest
in preserving natural systems is not merely sentimental; it rests on
preservation of nothing less than an enormous knowledge base that we
have no capacity to replicate. To some these are merely practical
benefits; to some, they suggest ethical imperatives. Whatever our final
characterization, nature provides an unequaled storehouse of material
for human contemplation.
IV. The parks are living memorials of human history on the
American continent
For the most part, the national parks demonstrate the
continuity of natural history measured over millenia. The less dramatic
span of human settlements is an equally essential part of that history,
and the national park system is a richly endowed showcase of our history
as a people. Here too adaptation and succession, struggle and
continuity, diversity and change are revealed. The settlements of Native
American peoples at places like Mesa Verde and Bandelier National
Monument; the great sites associated with the American revolution, such
as Boston National Historical Park and the principal Civil War
battlefields; the communities of early settlersCade's Cove in the
Great Smoky Mountains and the mining at Death Valley; the Robert E. Lee
home and the Booker T. Washington birthplace.
These places are essential to the aspirations of a
free people, for without our history we are at large and vulnerable in
the present. In 1984, George Orwell's great novel of freedom and
its loss, one of the most poignant scenes is that where the hero Winston
searches for a perspective against which to measure the life in which an
all-powerful state had immersed him. But the past had been obliterated:
"He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him
whether London had always been quite like this . . . it was no use . . .
nothing remained . . ."
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