National Park Idea Research Articles

Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea by Rolf Diamant and Ethan Carr

Reviewed by: Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea by Rolf Diamant and Ethan Carr Adam Wesley Dean Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea. By Rolf Diamant and Ethan Carr. (Amherst, Mass.: Library of American Landscape History, 2022. Pp. [vi], 186. $28.00, ISBN 978-1-952620-34-8.) The recent release of Megan Kate Nelson’s excellent Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (New York, 2022) and Rolf Diamant and Ethan Carr’s Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, [End Page 155] Abolition, and the National Park Idea signals a resurgence of scholarly interest in one of the oldest topics in environmental history—the origins of national parks. Olmsted and Yosemite is a truly wonderful book that deserves to be read widely by scholars, undergraduates, and the general public. Diamant and Carr explain the intellectual origins and lasting impact of Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1865 “Preliminary Report upon the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove,” known as the “Yosemite Report” for short (p. 7). They find the report so significant to U.S. history writ large that they include the entire document in an appendix at the end of the book. This source amplifies their main argument that the convergence of campaigns for urban parks, especially Central Park in Manhattan, and the radical social changes wrought by the Civil War guided the passage of the Yosemite Act in 1864. In the words of Diamant and Carr, “the Yosemite Grant was a direct consequence of the war and related to the political and social revolution that the conflict fueled” (pp. 54–55). Chapter 1 covers Frederick Law Olmsted’s involvement with the design of Central Park and with antislavery politics in the 1850s. Olmsted believed that investing in public parks, “built by free—not slave—labor, affirmed republican values at a time when they were most threatened” by a slave South dedicated to expansion (p. 23). This chapter also covers Yosemite’s early history, including the long-standing Indigenous presence in the region and the roles of figures including Thomas Starr King, Jessie Benton Frémont, and Frederick Billings in promoting wider knowledge of the area’s beauty. The second chapter details the creation of Yosemite as a public park, Olmsted’s role as its first commissioner, and his famous Yosemite Report. Much of this story is well known, but Diamant and Carr break new ground by contrasting Olmsted’s vision for Yosemite with that of John Muir. They explain that Olmsted “did not see Yosemite Valley as John Muir did, as an imagined and sanctified wilderness,” but “understood it in aesthetic terms and found a unique and powerful composition of landscape effects” (p. 57). Lost on Olmsted and, indeed, later visitors was the fact that the parklike atmosphere of the Yosemite Valley in the 1860s was the product of regular controlled burns by Native Americans. Olmsted’s design ideas (which went largely unimplemented) emphasized landscape protection, unobtrusive pedestrian paths to the park’s best views, and improving the road between the steamboat landing at Stockton, California, and the Yosemite Valley. Olmsted believed a better road would make visiting Yosemite more affordable and prevent development in the valley by enabling the transportation of food and supplies from elsewhere. Chapter 3 begins by correcting long-standing assumptions that Olmsted’s Yosemite Report had no impact on later national park development. Olmsted presented the report in 1865 before an assembly of eastern dignitaries and reporters visiting Yosemite and published part of it in 1868 amid a national debate about private land claims in Yosemite. Diamant and Carr argue that Olmsted’s work on Yosemite also influenced his later work on Niagara Falls. The chapter then explores the origins of Yellowstone National Park, emphasizing that the “designation of a national park, in the era of Reconstruction, was concomitant with rising public expectations for the national government,” and [End Page 156] positing that the “framers of the Yellowstone legislation were also well aware of California’s shortcomings in managing Yosemite” (p. 88). The chapter concludes with a review of key developments in national park history, exploring the role of the Yosemite Report in the Hetch...

Three landscapes: An excerpt from Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea

Author(s): Diamant, Rolf; Carr, Ethan | Abstract: The authors situate the intellectual foundations of the US national park system in the thinking of Frederick Law Olmsted, and analyze how Olmsted himself was shaped by the Civil War.

Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century by Alan D. Roe

Reviewed by: Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century by Alan D. Roe David Ostergren Roe, Alan D. Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2020. xiv + 344 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £25.99. Into Russian Nature is a comprehensive, excellent and engaging history of the Russian national park system from the early twentieth century to their creation in the 1980s. The author's background research and personal experience provide a unique and comprehensive perspective. Roe reveals the complicated relationship between citizen advocates for nature protection, the divided academic-scientific community and the ponderous Soviet bureaucracy. The bureaucracy opposed national parks in part because it was a 'Western idea'. The Soviet response was to support 'their' idea; that is strict nature preserves called zapovedniki. In the end, this is a history of bold aspirations, partial successes and unrealized expectations over 100 years. This is an excellent resource for scholars and students interested in the development of national parks in Russia and more broadly, how culture, government structure and society influence the protection of large natural areas. While the national park idea is near universal, each park in each of 100 countries has its own story. Into Russian Nature investigates histories from four regions: Lake Baikal — the Sacred Sea, the tiaga of Karelia and Arkhangelsk, the Pechoran Alps of the Ural Mountain range and the Komi peninsula and, finally, the Samara Bend of the Volga River including the Zhiguli Mountains. Several commonalities emerge in the case studies. Each had a few leaders who promoted the fantastic natural features through print, word of mouth, recruitment, and later with video. Each area typically had a group of nature advocates or 'friends of the park'. These groups were often comprised of young people seeking the solace and challenge of open natural spaces. The youth never grew quite powerful enough to generate sufficient political support. Each area had scientists who either supported the national park concept or opposed the park idea to protect biodiversity for science or management. Each area had at least a trickle of tourists that was promoted as a potential economic driver as mass tourism. But mass tourism requires infrastructure. The reality was that most Soviet citizens (and then Russians) were not mobile enough to access remote natural areas, lacked sufficient disposable income, or preferred known destinations. In general Russians do enjoy the outdoors but still do not visit national parks in the same numbers as other nations. Historically this has been a political liability. Ironically, even where there is mass tourism the natural areas may suffer two fates. For instance, Pribaikal´skii and Zabaikal´skii National Parks on the 'sacred sea' were established because people were willing and able to access the area. However, soon the Lake Baikal national parks suffered because [End Page 192] funding did not keep up with notoriety. The Kamchatka Peninsula has long been a natural area that attracts visitors willing to travel. But whereas Lake Baikal received national parks status, Kamchatka did not, and advocates settled for several regional nature parks — famous areas of spectacular natural phenomenon that depend upon regional political and financial support. Both results are less than ideal. Additional opposition was from industry such as mining, forestry or, in the western and southern steppe, agriculture. Other forces working against parks included that land was, and is, largely owned by the government. In a sense, why set up areas for recreation when people can access the areas at will and without regulation? And finally, in the 1990s zapovedniki started to have more tourism in part to justify their existence. Each factor worked against national parks. Too often the roots for creating national parks grew and then failed either through active opposition or debilitating neglect. Although park advocates thought that emerging environmentalism and the collapse of the USSR would mean more Western and internal political support, the emerging policies and practices rarely matched expectations. The author's conclusion is that the 2000s have been a dark chapter. Protected areas were shuffled from one department to another and at one point threatened to...

Selling Mount Buffalo National Park: Victorian Railways, Harold Clapp and the Blueprint for National Park Promotion in Australia

ABSTRACT This article explains how a modern advertising campaign for Mount Buffalo in the 1920s influenced subsequent nature tourism campaigns made by Victorian Railways and the Australian National Travel Association, which was established in 1929 and collapsed in 2001. The Buffalo campaign and those that followed are significant for their lasting impact on the social construction of Australian nature, narratives of Indigenous dispossession, settler possession and a consumer dimension that rests at the core of the Australian national park idea.

References to Iconic Landscapes in the Debate Surrounding the Founding of Finland’s National Parks, circa 1880–1910

This article reviews the formation of the idea of national parks in Finland between the 1880s and 1910s. It argues that both the term and the concept of national park evolved in a long-lasting deliberative process between competing definitions. The main actors in this process were geographers, forestry scientists and NGOs devoted to popular education and the promotion of tourism. As a result of the debates, iconic landscapes and species were located in Finnish nature inside the wholly artificial boundaries of the national parks. Eventually, both the science and tourism poles of the decades-long debate were incorporated into the plans and visions for Finland’s national parks in the early twentieth century. The national park debate between the 1880s and 1910s focused mainly on landscapes, land formations and vegetation zones, and not so much on the wildlife or indeed the people who lived inside these areas.

Landscapes and national imagination: The role of national parks in the formation of national belonging in Turkey

When the concept of a national park idea was first established in the USA, it was promoted as the ownership of the landscape for the use of the people while emphasizing national identity through nature. As a latecomer to this movement, this paper describes part of the journey of the establishment of national parks in Turkey, with a focus on the period between 1950 and 1975. In this paper I argue that the national parks were a means of constructing a national identity through the transformative power of modernism on the countryside. Focusing on different national parks from Turkey, I interrogated the role of these so-called pristine and primitive lands in the construction of national identity through different forms. Under the threat of neoliberal economic policies and new approaches to understanding of nature these protected and reserved pieces of “nature” deserve more attention.

Profile of Daniel H. Janzen

When Daniel Janzen gave his acceptance speech for the 1997 Kyoto Prize, he disappointed many people who had come to hear a preeminent biologist discuss iconic studies, from ant–acacia mutualism to seed predation (1, 2). “They expected a talk about science, but I’d switched to conservation,” explains Janzen, DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Janzen, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992, and his wife, tropical ecologist Winnie Hallwachs, have spent 35 years reframing the idea of national parks into that of collaboration between forests and societies. “The biology is easy, but we have to study society,” explains Janzen. “For me, it’s all human ecology.” Together with thousands of partners, they have developed and expanded Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) in Costa Rica into 168,000 ha of land and sea that, Janzen notes, protect 2.6% of the world’s biodiversity, and are now using DNA barcoding technology to create a library of species (3). Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs. Image courtesy of Maureen A. Donnelly (Florida International University, Miami, FL). Growing up in Minnesota in the 1940s, Janzen quickly became comfortable in nature. “I shot my first pheasant off the back steps, but I could get the bus off the front steps to the Minneapolis public library,” he recalls. “I had the best of both worlds.” The son of a wildlife management administrator, Janzen’s fascination with the tropics began at the age of 14 on a butterfly-collecting trip to Mexico. In 1962, with a BS degree from the University of Minnesota and having entered the entomology PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, Janzen returned to Mexico, looking for a thesis project. “In those days, rule number one for ecology graduate students was that you did all your own research,” …

国立公園法成立をめぐる政治過程とその背景

The purpose of this research was to discuss the political situation associated with Tsuyoshi Tamura during the selection process of notational parks. The research subject was the political process to establish the National Parks Law. In particular, this paper focused the discussion of the National Parks Law at the Imperial Diet; then the characteristics of Japan's national parks have been examined. In this paper, establishment of national parks was considered as one of the policies and has been analyzed from the following three perspectives: 1) National parks had a function to expand local interests 2) The 59th Imperial Diet was not only an opportunity for the two major parties, Constitutional Democratic Party (hereinafter “CDP”) and Constitutional Association of Political Friendship (hereinafter “CAPF”), to discuss the policy regarding national parks, but also the opportunity which CAPF criticized CDP's Interior Minister, Kenzo Adachi. 3) As national parks could influence local interests, conflicting local interests surrounding national parks existed within each political party. Thus, these conflicting interests were reflected during a discussion at the Imperial Diet. As a result of this analysis, it was uncovered that the idea of national parks was never clarified even between the two major parties based on the discussion at the national parks bill committee. The actual discussion point of the national parks bill committee was for CAPF to strike CDP and Adachi and also to prevent CDP from exploiting the national park idea for the election. The councilors who belong to CAPF actually had a hidden agenda to establish national parks in their supporting regions, while criticizing CDP's utilization of national parks for their political purposes. However, as they all try to develop the fundamentals of national parks based on their own interest to promote them within each of their constituency, even within CAPF, the vision of national parks was not consistent in the following points: the objective of national parks, locations, the scale of the area, conservation policies, utilization, and strictness of regulations. It has been revealed that the Imperial Diet thus did not function as a place to discuss national park ideas further. Due to the conflict between the two major political parties, Tsuyoshi Tamura was appointed to provide scholarly objectivity to the selection results of national parks. According to the analysis of the reasons for submission of the National Parks Law bill, urgent issues were raised such as the legal protection of industrial development like hydroelectric power, and the protection and control by National Park Plans against unsystematic tourism development. On the other hand, utilization development and visitor promotion were not specified as an imminent goal, and these were positioned as an overall large-scale purpose driven by national parks. Policy menus regarding international tourism did not exist; therefore, cooperation with the Ministry of Railways also did not exist. In addition, cooperation with the Ministry of Education did not exist. Taking all of the above into consideration, this bill was submitted only for the imminent purpose of protection and control of natural landscape.

Meditations on conservation The Hour of Land A Personal Topography of America's National Parks Terry Tempest Williams Sarah Crichton Books, 2016. 416 pp.

An environmental activist urges a renewal of the American national park idea

To Conserve Unimpaired: The Evolution of the National Park Idea. By Robert B. Keiter. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2013. 343 pp. Notes and index. Paper $35.00.

<i>To Conserve Unimpaired: The Evolution of the National Park Idea</i>. By Robert B. Keiter. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2013. 343 pp. Notes and index. Paper $35.00.

To conserve unimpaired: the evolution of the national park idea

To conserve unimpaired: the evolution of the national park idea

Parkscapes: Green Spaces in Modern Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Parkscapes: Green Spaces in Modern Japan Timothy S. George (bio) Parkscapes: Green Spaces in Modern Japan. By Thomas R. H. Havens. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2011. xiii, 272 pages. $47.00. “We would like to cut down the trees with nature in mind.”1 This 2008 request from a local tourism association chair, regarding trees that were blocking a famous view of Shōsenkyō Gorge in Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park and thereby threatening the incomes of members of his association, is a reminder of the contradictions and unintended consequences of modern Japan’s systems of urban and “natural” parks. For a single book, modern Japan’s parks are a big topic. Parks occupy one-seventh of the nation’s land, and their modern history dates to 1873, when the Grand Council of State issued Directive No. 16 ordering prefectures to establish public parks with the approval of the Ministry of Finance. Thomas Havens has chosen to focus more on the production than the consumption of these public spaces, and mostly on Tokyo. This is a story of Japan’s parks and those who have planned them (or wished to influence that planning) as state building, capitalism, earthquakes, war, and globalization have transformed concepts of public spaces, much more than it is a view of parks through the eyes of their users. Parkscapes is comprised of five chapters bookended by an introduction and an afterword. The introduction characterizes the creation of parks as “sociospatial engineering” by the government but notes that parks could and did become spaces of resistance, as at Hibiya Park with the 1905 riots, and that in recent times some parks have “transcended a power/resistance binary to become space shared by citizens and their rulers, . . . a middle ground of collaboration, acquiescence, refusal, and renegotiation all at once” (p. 5). The emphasis in the book thus reflects the central purposes of [End Page 245] Japan’s parks, both urban and national: state, society, and human beings are the focus; “nature” is not. Chapter 1 traces the early development of city parks beginning in 1873. Parks were advocated, often for different reasons, by bureaucrats such as Mori Ōgai and Gotō Shinpei and reformers including Katayama Sen and Abe Isoo. The Meiji emperor opened Ueno Park in 1876 and granted the nation its constitution there in 1889. Its museums and zoo were marks of civilization, and the rallies held there during the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars linked it to Japan’s imperial ambitions. Hibiya Park was a showpiece resulting from frequent pronouncements from the 1890s of the modern city’s need for parks to improve subjects’ health and morals, to serve as fireb opened in 1903 and joined Ueno Park in hosting rallies in support of state goals, but since the Hibiya riot, it has often been the site of popular contestation. Asakusa Park, a thriving entertainment center, covered the bulk of the operating costs for Tokyo’s parks until it was eliminated by the Allied Occupation after World War II because of its association with Sensōji Temple. The second chapter describes the halting early development of national parks up to the outbreak of full-scale war with China in 1937. Here Havens has fascinating, if brief, discussions of the writings of ecologists and geographers whose ideas helped build support for a national park system: Uchimura Kanzō, Makiguchi Tsunesaburō (both better known as religious leaders), Minakata Kumagusu, and Shiga Shigetaka. Although the national park idea was imported, Havens notes that for many advocates (Anesaki Masaharu was an extreme example) parks had a nationalistic purpose: “to affirm the distinctiveness of the land and its people” (p. 54). Others stressed the need to create parks to attract foreign tourists and their foreign exchange. One obstacle was the fact that much of the land proposed for national parks was privately owned; another was bureaucratic jurisdictional infighting. The National Parks Law was finally passed in 1931, and despite the economic depression and increasing militarization, a dozen national parks were created by 1936, including Fuji-Hakone, Chūbu Sangaku in the Japan Alps, and Daisetsuzan in Hokkaido. A pattern was established that has persisted ever since: “recreational...

National parks in the service of nation building: the pioneering work of Lipa Yahalom and Dan Zur in Israel

… From the slopes of the Lebanon to the Dead Sea,we will worship you with plowsWe will plant thee and build thee,we will make thee very beautiful.(Morning Song by Natan Alterman) In 1998, on the ce...

Science and the National Parks: A Transatlantic Perspective on the Interwar Years

The years between the two World Wars were a vital period in the global diffusion and the transnational modification and multiplication of the national park idea. It was during these decades that the American national park system took its distinct shape and the first national parks in Europe were established. At the same time, the science of ecology and ecological attitudes achieved prominence and offered a challenge as well as a new scientific underpinning of the national park idea on both sides of the Atlantic. The implementation of ecological ideas in national park policies, however, varied considerably from place to place. While ecological thinking failed to exert a lasting influence on the development of American national parks before World War II, it was of higher significance in Europe. The Swiss National Park stood out as a nature reserve extensively shaped by scientific theories and practices. The investigation of the intersection of science and national parks in a transatlantic perspective reveals that these variations essentially stemmed from a different role of science and scientists both in the establishment and administration of national parks and in their public justification.

The Timbisha Shoshone and the National Park Idea: Building toward Accommodation and Acknowledgment at Death Valley National Park, 1933–2000

The Timbisha Shoshone and the National Park Idea: Building toward Accommodation and Acknowledgment at Death Valley National Park, 1933–2000 Mark Miller In the early 1970s, tourists flocked to the lavish Furnace Creek Inn in the heart of Death Valley National Monument. With its swimming pools, palm-shaded gardens, and fine dining, the hotel seemed every bit the American version of an Arabian oasis. At the resort, visitors could enjoy the austere desert beauty of Death Valley without experiencing true discomfort or unpleasant encounters with the unforgiving landscape. Patrons of the inn, located near the monument headquarters at Furnace Creek, California, commanded a sweeping view of the snowcapped Panamint Range and white salt flats of the valley floor, a scene framing gray and beige uplands to the west. If visitors strained their eyes, they also could see a small collection of adobe casitas and ramshackle trailers on the southwest edge of the park complex. Although not marked on tourist maps, the hamlet was “Indian Village,” home to the Timbisha Shoshone, the original inhabitants of Death Valley. At the time, the Shoshone enclave was an anomaly in the National Park System; federal officials had removed other native groups from western parks. As such, the village was at the center of a brewing conflict between the National Park Service (NPS) and the Shoshone over the very existence of the enclave, with each party holding decidedly different views of native presence on federal parklands. As the 1970s progressed, Indian Village was important to debates over the proper place of native groups in national parks, what constituted wilderness and “natural” land uses, and conceptions of stewardship, resource management, and preservation. In 2000, the Death Valley conflict ended in an unprecedented way—with the NPS recognizing the Shoshone’s traditional land uses, and more importantly, Mark Miller is assistant professor in the Department of History at Southern Utah University, in Cedar City. Journal of the Southwest 50, 4 (Winter 2008) : 415–446 416 ✜ Journal of the Southwest acknowledging their right to live within the park itself. For the first time in its long history, the NPS agreed to create an Indian reservation within the boundaries of a national park. The Shoshone conflict with the NPS represents a significant chapter in the evolution of public policy toward Native American land uses within national parks. Standard works on the nation’s parks by Alfred Runte and Roderick Nash detail how the nineteenth-century “national park idea” coalesced around the goal of preserving uninhabited, seemingly pristine wilderness. Important recent studies by Mark David Spence, Philip Burnham, Robert H. Keller, and Michael F. Turek, show that the Park Service’s secret history was that these seemingly untouched environments were predicated upon Indian removal beforehand and exclusion afterward. As historian Spence concludes, when officials evicted the last Miwok tribesman from Yosemite Valley in 1969, it brought the park in line with the “standards of the national park idea.”1 Although path-breaking works on Indians and parks contain brief discussions of the Timbisha Shoshone, the following pages provide a fuller picture of the anomalous state of affairs at Death Valley National Park, a NPS unit that, unlike nearby Yosemite, never conformed to the national park idea. Whereas existing scholarship on Indian communities and the NPS largely focuses upon reservation tribes, their removal, and their generally fruitless battles to regain lands held by the NPS, the Shoshone case reveals a non-reservation, unrecognized tribe that remained on its aboriginal lands and, through decades of struggle, ultimately regained portions of its homeland. Beyond the specifics of local history, this article expands existing scholarship by revealing a growing trend in Native American–Park Service relations. As this story demonstrates, federal officials more and more are acknowledging that indigenous land-use practices are not inherently detrimental to park landscapes and may actually provide benefits to ecosystems that have been affected by human management for thousands of years. Ethnobotanists M. Kat Anderson and David E. Ruppert argue that traditional Native American management techniques should be utilized in restoring and sustainably managing environments once perceived as pristine.2 In this vein the Timbisha example seems to confirm that the NPS is moving toward a model envisioned...

“Of outstanding universal value”: The challenge of scale in applying the World Heritage Convention at national parks in the US

This paper explores the operation of the international World Heritage Convention in the national context of the United States. Although an early advocate of the national park idea and among the earliest proponents of the Convention, the US has shown increasing ambivalence towards the World Heritage Program since the mid-1990s. Through in-depth interviews with expert informants and a questionnaire survey of 406 visitors at four US World Heritage Sites, this study considers whether combining national and international conservation designations provides valuable reinforcement of conservation goals, or leads to unnecessary overlap and even challenges to sovereignty. The majority of my expert informants were supportive of the Convention, related to philosophical and practical benefits that they believed to be associated with the World Heritage label, although most identified few tangible influences of the World Heritage Program itself. Several noted hostility to the Program from a nationalist fringe, which fears international involvement in land use decisions. Such concerns were reflected in questionnaire responses, which revealed some distrust of the Convention and misunderstandings of its operation. I conclude that the scalar mismatch of implementing an international convention at the national scale inevitably involves challenges, but that country-specific factors are important in explaining why the Convention has been particularly controversial in the US. Education is integral to addressing these challenges, as well as reengagement with the Program by both the National Park Service and the federal administration. Intangible values associated with World Heritage mean that the Convention still enjoys considerable support in the US, providing a solid foundation for such a reengagement.

Black poachers, white hunters: a social history of hunting in colonial Kenya

Introduction: Hunting in Kenya I THE AFRICAN HUNTERS - Kenya's people of the bow - Hunters & farmers in Kwale & Meru - Hunting transformations in Kitui, 1860-1939 II THE WHITE HUNTERS - Class & tradition in the making of the hunt - The settler hunters, 1903-39 III BLACK & WHITE TOGETHER - Safari hunting, 1909-39 - New Technologies, changing values GAMEKEEPERS & POACHERS - The Kenya gamekeepers & conservation, 1895-1925 - International preservationists & the national park idea, 1925-45 - National parks & the poaching crisis, 1946-63 - Conclusions & epilogue - Bibliography

The Contested Landscape of Early Yellowstone

The damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley and the epic battle between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot over their competing visions for the future of Yosemite has often been represented as a benchmark in the history of the American conservation movement. However, more than two decades before Hetch Hetchy's fate was decided, another nearly forgotten battle helped define the role of wildlands preservation, this time in the contested landscape of Yellowstone. In 1883 the politically powerful Northern Pacific Railroad attempted to monopolize commercial interests within Yellowstone and breach the park's boundary with a spur line to a neighboring gold mine. Opponents, including federal scientists and outspoken members of the emerging conservation movement, feared this initial violation of park space was the precursor to additional locomotives carrying tourists deep into the heart of Yellowstone, ruining its sense of wildness forever. This article reconstructs those competing visions for the Yellowstone landscape and illustrates how Americans' perceptions of wildlands preservation and the national park idea changed during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Romanticism and American National Parks

The national park idea was conceived at a time when nature romanticism dominated Americans' sense of landscape aesthetics. Among the basic tenets of romantic philosophy discussed are the specific definitions of the picturesque and the sublime, importance of historical and romantic associations, role of emotional response to natural scenery, perception of God in nature, restorative powers of nature, and perceptions of aesthetically pleasing landscapes as pleasure resorts to be enjoyed in an escapist mode. During the last decades of the 19th century American national parks functioned primarily as romantic-pleasure resorts. While public perception of the parks has diversified greatly throughout the 20th century, subsequent changes in philosophy have tended to expand upon rather than replace perceptions that are fundamentally romantic in origin.

The California National Parks Centennial: Introduction to the Special Issue

Research Article| July 01 1990 The California National Parks Centennial: Introduction to the Special Issue Alfred Runte Alfred Runte Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (1990) 69 (2): 86–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/25462416 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Alfred Runte; The California National Parks Centennial: Introduction to the Special Issue. California History 1 July 1990; 69 (2): 86–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25462416 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1990 CHS Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.