Wallace Stegner, 1983:
"National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst."
Source: https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/hisnps/npsthinking/famousquo...
"National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst."
Source: https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/hisnps/npsthinking/famousquo...
https://timeline.com/national-parks-native-americans-56b0dad...
> Quickly after the park was established, Whittlesly describes white superintendents trying to make the area “safe” by removing “primitive savages” from the park, claiming they didn’t live there to begin with as they were afraid of the geysers. Those claims were completely untrue; in fact, the Yosemite Indians — as well as Sheep-eaters and Mountain Shoshone tribes — lived on and revered the land, and many others also considered the geysers to be sacred. Tribes such as the Crow, the Blackfeet, the Flatheads and the Kiowa would travel through the land as well at other points of the year, for hunting or in search of obsidian for arrowheads.
> Making the land safe wasn’t the least of the problems for the Native American tribes. In a “park” now protected and preserved from “the wanton destruction of the fish and game found within said park, and against their capture or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit,” how were the tribes to eat, sleep, hunt, gather food, light fires? They weren’t. Forced off the land now considered a natural preserve by the government, Indians were once again removed from their ancestral home.
So sure, we could say national parks are "absolutely american"..
Curiously, the provincial govt tried to introduce an access fee a few years ago, and there was a huge pushback from the citizenry.
[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-parks-ran...
It's also a great book in general.
I've been traveling to parts of Death Valley (which were former BLM land) for over two decades and know people who have been going to the same areas for four or five decades. The Park Service is not "the best of the US". Instead, at the local level, it is people with an agenda attempting to make a mark/name for themselves. One particular former BLM area has palm trees which the park service wants to remove. Yet, the park itself has more of the same around where they expect tourists to spend money. Hypocracy.
The same National Park System, PG&E and it's subcontractors are surveying and noting places where trees need trimming -- in particular around the park beetle. Said contractors and PG&E itself pointed out to NPS the vast groves of dead pines in the park itself and offered to help thin things. NPS declined due to "wanting to preserve the beauty" of which is large swaths of dead trees.
Edward Abbey was right in being suspicious of how humans would preserve and maintain our parks.
The idea of these protected areas serving the public good by, among other things, remaining accessible to the general public, is also integral to the definition of the term (and this article and new policy show this rather well). Such a policy may not have occurred to anyone establishing a nature reserve in Europe at the time, where classes would remain a fundamental category of society until the end of WW2.
There are a lot of people that live in Europe, it's not that there was so much wilderness and now it's all paved over. Australia and Canada have huge areas of wilderness because it's partially uninhabitable. Not many places have that.
Don't get me wrong, there are many beautiful places in Europe. I've had the pleasure of doing several long distance walks in the Alps, the Pyrenees and in Corsica. But it's not wilderness.
Even uninhabitable places need protection from resource extraction if they are to remain wilderness. This is how Canada lost most of its coastal rainforest. Not because there are cities there now, but because it was all cut down and sold to make shingles and 2x4s.