Chapter 1
Quiet Genesis
In the last decades of the nineteenth century the
federal government began to set asideout of the vast public domain
it was giving away to settlers, railroad companies, and the
stateslarge areas of remote and scenic land to be held permanently
in public ownership and known as national parks. [1] What exactly was meant to be accomplished by
these unprecedented reservations is a mystery that will never be fully
solved. There was at the time no tradition of rural nature parks
anywhere in the world. [2] Neither was there
a popular movement calling for the establishment of such places, [3] and the first parkthe Yosemite Valley
and the nearby Mariposa Grove of big trees in Californiawas
created during the Civil War without fanfare, with hardly any
congressional debate, and with a minimum of public notice. [4]
The quiet genesis of the national park system is
hardly surprising, for the western mountain lands were then virtually
unknown. To reach Yosemite Valley in the 1860s, it was necessary to take
a boat from San Francisco to Stockton, followed by a sixteen-hour
stagecoach ride to Coulterville, and finally a fifty-seven-mile,
thirty-seven-hour trek by horse and pack mule into the valley. [5] Yellowstone, established in 1872, was even
less accessible. Except to a handful of pioneers, it was unexplored
territory, and reports of its spectacular thermal features were widely
disbelieved as the inventions of mountain tale spinners. [6] Nor were those who urged the Congress to
reserve these places celebrated figures in American life. The Yosemite
bill was introduced on the basis of a letter to a California senator
from a man named Israel Ward Raymond, described only as a gentleman "of
fortune, of taste and of refinement," and of whom all that is known is
that he was the California representative of the Central American
Steamship Transit Company. [7] The popular
account of Yellowstone's founding holds that the idea for a park was
conceived by one of the early exploratory parties in the area at an
after-dinner campfire in 1870 which decided that so wonderful a region
ought never to be allowed to fall into private ownership. Scholarly
research has turned up a more plausible, if less romantic, story. [8] One A. B. Nettleton, an agent for the
Northern Pacific Railroad Company, passed on to Washington a suggestion
which struck him "as being an excellent one . . . Let Congress pass a
bill reserving the Great Geyser Basin as a public park forever. . . ."
[8] Subsequently the Northern Pacific became
the principal means of access to Yellowstone and its first concessioner
providing services for tourists.
The statutes setting aside the first national parks
were as cryptic as their histories. Yosemite was turned over to the
state of California, to be withdrawn from settlement and held "for
public use, resort and recreation." [9] Years
later, it was returned to the United States and added to the much larger
surrounding lands that comprise most of the present national park. Eight
years after the Yosemite grant, Congress similarly withdrew Yellowstone
from settlement and dedicated it "as a public park or pleasuring ground
for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." [10] In the decades that followed, using a
similar verbal formula, Congress set aside Sequoia and Kings Canyon
(originally known as General Grant Park) in the high mountains of
California, Crater Lake in Oregon, Washington's glacier-capped Mount
Rainier, the Indian ruins at Mesa Verde in Colorado, and a number of
other remarkable places. [11] It even made
Michigan"s Mackinac Island a national park in 1875, only to repent and
relinquish it three years later. In the first years of the twentieth
century it added obscurity to magnificence by adding Wind Cave and
Sully's Hill national parks in the Dakotas and Platt National Park in
Oklahoma.
If the government had a plan for the parks it was
establishing, it was certainly casual about it. No bureau existed to
manage these places until 1916, forty-four years after the Yellowstone
reservation. [12] Yellowstone, in fact, was
run by the United States Cavalry, and the others were pretty much left
to themselves and to a few hardy innkeepers and adventurous tourists.
[13] The modern desire to view the parks as
the product of a prophetic public ecological conscience has little
history to support it. The early parks were reserved for their scenery
and their curiosities, and they reflect a fascination with monumentalism
as well as biological ignorance or indifference. [14]
The ability of a national park system to come into
being and to persist most likely grew out of the happy convergence of a
number of very diverse, but compatible, forces. Proposals to preserve
scenic places followed a period of romantic idealism that had swept the
countrythe religious naturalism of Thoreau and Emerson,
romanticism in the arts, and early nostalgia for what was obviously the
end of the untamed wilderness, already in submission to the ax, the
railroads, and the last campaigns against the Indians.
The rapidity and relentlessness of settlement also
gave weight to efforts to reserve these remarkable sites. When the first
Yosemite bill was put before Congress in 1864, the principal claim made
was that reservation was necessary to prevent occupation of the valley
by homesteaders and to preserve its trees from destruction. [15] Not many years later, John Muir worked for
an enlargement of the park to protect the high valleys from the
destructive grazing of sheep which he called "hoofed locusts." [16]
Spectacular scenery brought out curiosity seekers
eager to turn wonders into profits. As early as 1853 some promoters
denuded a number of large sequoia trees of portions of their bark, which
were shipped to London to be exhibited for a fee. Ironically, the size
of the trees from which the bark came was, to Europeans, so large as to
be beyond belief, and the exhibition, thought to be a fraud, was a
financial failure. [17] Souvenir hunters
were also on the scene, and even early reports from Yellowstone remarked
that "visitors prowled around with shovel and ax, chopping and hacking
and prying up great pieces of the most ornamental work they could find;
women and men alike joining in the barbarous pastime." [18]
Ruthless exploitation of natural marvels stimulated
an uneasiness that was felt more generally about the burgeoning spirit
of enterprise in the country. Houses were going up, and trees coming
down, with such unbridled energy that it was easy to wonder whether
Americans valued anything but the prospect of increased wealth.
Thoreau's metaphor of lumbermen murdering trees was invoked repeatedly.
[19] Andrew Hill, who led the effort to
establish the Big Basin Redwood Park in California, is said to have
formed his resolve when the private owner boasted that he planned to
fell ancient redwoods on his land for railroad ties and firewood. An
article in the Overland Monthly magazine, urging establishment of
a Big Basin park, described the principal enemy of the redwoods not as
fire, but as "the greed, the rapacity, the vandalism that would hack and
cut and mutilate the grandest, the most magnificent forest that can be
found on the face of the earth." [20]
The idea of publicly held parks was not only a
predictable response to despoliation and avarice, it also harmonized
with a principle that was then at the very crest of its influence in
American land policy. The Yellowstone-Yosemite era was also the time of
Homestead and Desert Land acts, when every American family was to have
its share of the public domain free of monopolization by the rich. [21] The application of that principle to the
great scenic wonders could not be realized by granting a sequoia grove
or Grand Canyon to each citizen. But it was possible to preserve
spectacular sites for the average citizen by holding them as public
places to be used and enjoyed by everyone. The fear of private
appropriation was far from hypothetical. In 1872, the same year that
Yellowstone was established, an English nobleman named Windham Thomas
Wyndam-Quin, the fourth earl of Dunraven, came to Colorado on a hunting
trip, visiting the area where Rocky Mountain National Park is now
located. He casually announced that he wanted to acquire the whole
region as a private hunting preserve, and by enlisting a cadre of
drifters to file homestead claims for him he was able to gain control of
more than fifteen thousand acres. Fortunately, as it happened, the
Wild-West style was still in force, and local people, under the
leadership of a colorful character known as Rocky Mountain Jim, made
things more than a little uncomfortable for Dunraven, who thought he
could transpose the style of the European aristocrat to the Colorado
mountains. By 1907, Lord Dunraven wrote in his memoirs, he had "sold
what [I] could get and cleared out, and I have never been there since."
[22]
The park concept also fitted neatly with the
nationalistic needs of the time. It appealed to a tenacious American
desire to measure up to European civilization. What little discussion
one finds in early congressional debates is full of suggestions that our
scenery compares favorably to the Swiss Alps and that we can provide
even more dazzling attractions for world travelers. [23] In the awe some scenery of the mountain
West, America had at last a way to compete on an equal plane with the
Old World. This prospect was not lost on the railroads, then the most
important element in the growing tourist industry, and their support for
national parks was never far beneath the surface. [24]
The remoteness of the parks also assured, by and
large, that they had little economic value, which dissipated industrial
resistance to their establishment. Indeed, Congress regularly sought and
received assurances that proposed parklands were "worthless," [25] and some places that did have important
commercial valuesuch as the coastal redwoods of
Californiawere kept out of the system for more than half a
century. [26] Only rarely did conflict
become bitter in the old days. as when San Francisco and the Sierra Club
battled over the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite Park for
municipal water supply. [27] In 1913 the
city won and the Sierra Club still bears scars from that fight, but
Hetch Hetchy was an exceptional case. By the time major battles began to
be fought over industrialization versus preservation, as in the struggle
to keep dams out of Yellowstone in the 1920s, [28] the national parks were already a solidly
entrenched feature of American life. [29]
The happy convergence of many disparate interests
permitted Congress and the public to sustain the contradictory, but
compatible, beliefs that permitted a park system to flourish: on one
side a repugnance at the seemingly boundless materialism that infused
American life, a spiritual attachment to untrammeled nature, and a
self-congratulatory attitude toward preservation of nature's bounty; and
on the other a commitment to economic progress wherever it could be
exacted, nationalistic pride, and the practical use of nature as a
commodity supportive of tourism and commercial recreation.
For a good many years, this fragile ideological
coalition held together with only modest conflict. The preservationists
(as they are now called), who always comprised the most active and
interested constituency in favor of national parks, had little to
complain about. The parks were there, but they were so little used and
so little developedCongress was always grudging with
appropriations: "Not one cent for scenery" was its long-standing motto
[30] that those who wanted to maintain
the parks as they were, both for their own use and as a symbol of man's
appropriate relationship to nature, had what they wanted.
The professional park managers, organized as the
National Park Service in 1916, also found circumstances generally to
their liking. Like all bureaucrats they had certain imperial ambitions.
But the park system was steadily growing, and that was satisfying. Some
of their gains were made at the expense of the national forests, housed
in another federal department, and while inter-bureau infighting was at
times intense, the general public was indifferent to such matters. [31] Moreover, in its early years, and
particularly before the full blossoming of the automobile era, the Park
Service was able to take an actively promotional posture, encouraging
increasing tourism, road building, and hotel development without losing
the support of its preservationist constituency. [32] It was then in everyone's interest to
create greater public support for the parks. If more people came to the
national parks, more people would approve the establishment of new parks
and would approve funding for management needed to protect and preserve
them. Even the most ardent wilderness advocate complained little about
the Park Service as a promotional agency. The adverse effects tourism
might have were long viewed as trivial.
The tourists who came to the parks in the early days
were in general not much different from those who come today. [33] They arrived in carriages, slept in hotels,
and spent a good deal of their time sitting on verandas. But of course
they came in much smaller numbers, their impact on the resources was
much less, and, despite the comforts they provided themselves, the
setting in which they lived in the parks was fairly primitive and marked
a sharp contrast with life at home. A visit to a national park was still
an adventure, quite unlike any ordinary vacation. The alliance of
preservationists (whose interest in parks was essentially symbolic and
spiritual) and vacationers (to whom the parks were a commodity for
recreational use) was not threatened by the low intensity use the parks
received for many decades. The contradiction Congress had enacted into
law in the 1916 general management act, ordering the National Park
Service at once to promote use and to conserve the resources so as to
leave them unimpaired, was actually a workable mandate. [34]
The recreation explosion of recent years has
unraveled that alliance and brought to the fore questions we have not
previously had to answer: For whom and for what are the parks most
important? Which of the faithful national park constituencies will have
to be disappointed so that the parks can serve their "true" purpose? The
adverse impact on natural resources generated by increased numbers is
only the most visible sign of a cleavage that goes much deeper. The
preservationist constituency is disturbed not onlyand not even
most importantly by the physical deterioration of the parks, but by a
sense that the style of modern tourism is depriving the parks of their
central symbolism, their message about the relationship between man and
nature, and man and industrial society.
When the tourist of an earlier time came to the parks
he inevitably left the city far behind him. He may not have been a
backpacker or a mountain climber, but he was genuinely immersed in a
natural setting. He may only have strolled around the area near his
hotel, but he was in a place where the sound of birds ruled rather than
the sound of motors, where the urban crowds gave way to rural densities,
and where planned entertainments disappeared in favor of a place with
nothing to do but what the visitor discovered for himself.
Tourism in the parks today, by contrast, is often
little more than an extension of the city and its life-style transposed
onto a scenic background. At its extreme, in Yosemite Valley or at the
South Rim of Grand Canyon, for example, one finds all the artifacts of
urban life: traffic jams, long lines waiting in restaurants,
supermarkets, taverns, fashionable shops, night life, prepared
entertainments, and the unending drone of motors. [35] The recreational vehicle user comes incased
in a rolling version of his home, complete with television to amuse
himself when the scenery ceases to engage him. The snowmobiler brings
speed and power, Detroit transplanted, imposing the city's pace in the
remotest backcountry.
The modern concessioner, more and more a national
recreation conglomerate corporation, has often displaced the local
innkeeper who adapted to a limited and seasonal business. There are
modernized units identical to conventional motels, air conditioning,
packaged foods, business conventions, and efforts to bring year-round
commercial tourism to places where previously silent, languid winters
began with the first snowfall. [36]
All these changes have made the preservationist, to
whom the park is essentially a symbol of nature and its pace and
power, an adversary of the conventional tourist. The clearest evidence
that the preservationist and the tourist are not simply fighting over
the destruction of resources or the allocation of a limited resource
that each wishes to use in different, and conflicting, ways, but are
rather at odds over the symbolism of the parks, is revealed by the
battles that they fight. One such recent controversy has arisen over the
use of motors on concessioner-run boat trips down the Colorado River in
Grand Canyon. [37] In fact, motorized boats
don't measurably affect the Canyon ecosystem, nor do they significantly
intrude upon those who want to go down the river in oar-powered boats.
Reduced to essentials, the preservationist claim is simply that motors
don"t belong in this remote and wild place; that they betray the idea of
man immersed in nature and bring industrialization to a place whose
meaning inheres in its isolation from, and contrast to, life in
society.
Much the same observation may be made about the
intense controversy over highly developed places like Yosemite Valley.
Many of those who are most opposed to the claimed over-development of
the valley do not themselves use it much. Wilderness lovers go into the
wilderness, and Yosemite, like most national parks, has an abundance of
undeveloped wilderness. What offends is not the unavailability of the
valley as wild country, but the meaning national parks come to have when
they are represented by places like Yosemite City, as the valley has
been unkindly called.
What's wrong with the parks, says Edward
Abbeyone of the most prominent contemporary spokesmen for the
preservationist positionis that they have been too much given over
to the clientele of "industrial tourism," people who visit from their
cars and whose three standard questions are: "Where"s the john? How
long's it take to see this place? and Where's the Coke machine?" [38] Perhaps serving vacationers who have
questions like these on their minds would require the construction of
some additional roads and the installation of a few more Coke machines,
but those intrusions need hardly interfere with Abbey's own recreational
preferences, particularly in the vast Utah parks he most admires. His
complaint is of quite a different kind. Industrial tourism debases the
significance that national parks have for him, and he is troubled to see
people using the parks as they use Disneyland, simply as places to be
entertained while they are on vacation.
Traditional approaches to conflicting uses in the
parks are not responsive to the issue that really divides the
preservationist and the tourist. It will not do simply to separate
incompatible uses, or to mitigate the damage done by the most
resource-consuming visitors. For the preservationist is at least as much
interested in changing the attitudes of other park users as in changing
their activities. And he is as much concerned about what others do in
places remote from him as when they are vying for the same space he
wants to occupy. The preservationist is like the patriot who objects
when someone tramples on the American flag. It is not the physical act
that offends, but the symbolic act. Nor is the offense mitigated if the
trampler points out that the flag belongs to him, or that flag trampling
is simply a matter of taste, no different from flag waving.
The preservationist is not an elitist who wants to
exclude others, notwithstanding popular opinion to the contrary; he is a
moralist who wants to convert them. He is concerned about what other
people do in the parks not because he is unaware of the diversity of
taste in the society, but because he views certain kinds of activity as
calculated to undermine the attitudes he believes the parks can, and
should, encourage. He sees mountain climbing as promoting self-reliance,
for example, whereas "climbing" in an electrified tramway is perceived
as a passive and dependent activity. He finds a park full of planned
entertainments and standardized activities a deterrent to independence,
whereas an undeveloped park leaves the visitor to set his own agenda and
learn how to amuse himself. He associates the motorcyclist roaring
across the desert with aspirations to power and domination, while the
fly-fisherman is engaged in reducing his technological advantage in
order to immerse himself in the natural system and reach out for what
lessons it has to offer him. The validity of these distinctions is not
self-evident, and I shall have a good deal more to say about them in the
following chapters. They are, however, what lies at the heart of the
preservationist position.
The preservationist does not condemn the activities
he would like to exclude from the park. He considers them perfectly
legitimate and appropriateif not admirableand believes that
opportunities for conventional tourism are amply provided elsewhere: at
resorts and amusement parks, on private lands, and on a very
considerable portion of the public domain too. He only urges a
recognition that the parks have a distinctive function to perform that
is separate from the service of conventional tourism, and that they
should be managed explicitly to present that function to the public as
their principal goal, separate from whatever conventional tourist
services they may also have to provide.
In urging that the national parks be devoted to
affirming the symbolic meaning he attaches to them, the preservationist
makes a very important assumption, routinely indulged but hardly ever
explicit. The assumption is that the values he imputes to the parks
(independence, self-reliance, self-restraint) are extremely widely
shared by the American public. Though he knows that he is a member of a
minority, he believes he speaks for values that are majoritarian. He is,
in fact, a prophet for a kind of secular religion. You would like to
emulate the pioneer explorers, he says to the public; you would like
independently to raft down the wild Colorado as John Wesley Powell did a
century ago. [39] You would like to go it
alone in the mountain wilderness as John Muir did. Indeed that is why
you are stirred by the images of the great national parks and why you
support the establishment of public wilderness. But you are vulnerable;
you allow entrepreneurs to coddle you and manage you. And you are
fearful; you are afraid to get out of your recreational vehicle or your
car and plunge into the woods on your own. Moreover you want to deceive
yourself; you would like to believe that you are striking out into the
wilderness, but you insist that the wilderness be tamed before you enter
it. So, says the secular prophet, follow me and I will show you how to
become the sort of person you really want to be. Put aside for a while
the plastic alligators of the amusement park, and I will show you that
nature, taken on its own terms, has something to say that you will be
glad to hear. This is the essence of the preservationist message.
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