> 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"..
If you want to see something closer to "absolutely democratic", look e.g. at British Columbia, where all provincial parks are free to enter. They still have a permit system and fees, but only for overnight camping; if you just want to come and walk and enjoy the surroundings during the day, it costs nothing.
Curiously, the provincial govt tried to introduce an access fee a few years ago, and there was a huge pushback from the citizenry.
The elimination of day use or parking fees in BC parks coincided with a significant reduction of their budgets - after all, much of their money was from those user fees - and since then trails and infrastructure have been left to crumble. And that's to say nothing of the lack of resources for staff - in 2016 there were just seven park rangers in the entire province[1]. You can see more than seven rangers in one room if you walk into a Yosemite or Yellowstone visitor centre. That's not democracy - it's just neglect.
For an interesting contrast to this sentiment, read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. He is writing from a somewhat unique perspective from his position as a park ranger in Arches, way back in the 1930s when it was still mostly undeveloped.
An incredible read and an interesting view of things at the time.
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.
Yellowstone was indeed the first "national park" at least within its cultural sphere. Before that, European royalty would often protect certain areas as their hunting ground or sum-such, but those were far smaller.
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.
Mostly because by the time conservation of wilderness came into vogue, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were the only Western-style democracies with large, intact tracts of wilderness remaining.
This comment confuses me. Are you saying that Europe... destroyed all their mountains? Or what?
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.
Wilderness is not just the mountains. It is the complete ecosystem, the most productive part of which is not rock and ice (which remained largely untouched in Europe as in North America because as you note there's not anything you can really build there) but the meadows, valleys and forests most of which are indeed paved over in Europe. How many primitive (i.e. never cut and regrown) forests exist in western Europe? How many subalpine valleys in the Alps have no village or pastures in them?
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.
It’s a poetic statement not a literal one. It speaks to the aspirational idea of what America could and should be/aspire to be.( in the mind of the writer)
"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...