Introduction
I have long been fascinated by the political
influence of that small minority whofor lack of a mote exact
termare generally known as preservationists. [1] In good times and bad, for over a century,
they have regularly persuaded the Congress to establish and maintain
national parks, insulating millions of acres of public land not only
from most commercial and industrial use, but even from much of the
development that popular tourism demands. During the heyday of
utilitarian forestry eighty years ago, they were called "nature fakirs,"
a cruel joke that expresses almost perfectly the ambivalence of the
majority toward the politics of preservation.
The public greatly admires splendid scenery and
untrammeled nature, as frequent television specials, magazine articles,
and large sales of coffee table picture books attest; and it nods in
agreement at a steady flow of press reports, all more or less entitled
"Are We Loving Our National Parks to Death?" At the same time there is
widespread frustration and resentment whenat the behest of the
"nature fakirs"government refuses to build roads into the
wilderness, to accommodate more recreational vehicles in the parks, or
to approve an elegant ski resort in an alpine valley.
The preservationist is in rather the same position as
the scientist who comes to the government seeking research funds. He
speaks for something most people admire without understanding, receives
unstinting support for a while, only suddenly to be turned upon by a
wave of popular reaction against alleged elitism and arrogance.
Whatever the problems of scientific researchers, it
is at least recognized that they know something beyond the ken of most
of us, and that somehow what they are doing is important. The
preservationist is not quite so fortunate. It isn't at all obvious that
he knows anything special. Attitudes toward nature and recreational
preferences seem purely matters of private taste. The auto tourist sees
himself as every bit as virtuous as the backpacker. The preservationist
often appears as nothing more than the voice of effete affluence, trying
to save a disproportionate share of the public domain for his own
minoritarian pleasures.
Since the preservationist does not seem to speak for
the majority and its preferences, at least in much of what he advocates,
on what basis does he come to government, seeking official status for
his views? Is he, like the scientist or even the museum director or
university professor, the bearer of a great cultural or intellectual
tradition? Is he a spokesman for minority rights, or diversity, seeking
only a small share of our total natural resources? Or is he the prophet
of a secular religionthe cult of naturethat he seeks to have
Congress establish?
It may seem odd to be raising such questions more
than a century after the first national parks were established. It is my
thesis that preservationist ideologythough it has never gone
unquestionedlong found itself compatible with a number of other
popular desires that our parklands served, and therefore never received
the scrutiny or the skepticism to which it is now being subjected. The
enormous growth of recreation in recent years and the vastly increased
range and mobility of large numbers of tourists has brought
long-somnolent questions to the surface. Should the national parks [2] basically be treated as recreational
commodities, responding to the demands for development and urban
comforts that visitors conventionally bring to them; or should they be
reserved as temples of nature worship, admitting only the faithful?
Strictly speaking, these are questions that the
Congress answers, for it makes the laws that govern the public lands.
They are issues to which the National Park Service must respond on a
daily basis, for it is the bureaucracy that manages these lands. But
neither of these two public institutions operates in a vacuum. Both
respond to leadership elites that claim to speak legitimately for
important public values; and both are sensitive to the limits of public
tolerance for self-appointed leaders of opinion. For this reason I
propose to ask how the preservationist justifies his asserted
leadership, and whyif at allthe public should be inclined to
follow.
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