Civilizing Nature

National Parks in Global Historical Perspective

Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler, Patrick Kupper, Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler, Patrick Kupper

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857455277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

National parks are one of the most important and successful institutions in global environmentalism. Since their first designation in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s they have become a global phenomenon. The development of these ecological and political systems cannot be understood as a simple reaction to mounting environmental problems, nor can it be explained by the spread of environmental sensibilities. Shifting the focus from the usual emphasis on national parks in the United States, this volume adopts an historical and transnational perspective on the global geography of protected areas and its changes over time. It focuses especially on the actors, networks, mechanisms, arenas, and institutions responsible for the global spread of the national park and the associated utilization and mobilization of asymmetrical relationships of power and knowledge, contributing to scholarly discussions of globalization and the emergence of global environmental institutions and governance.

PART I

Parks and Empires

CHAPTER 1

Unpacking Yellowstone

The American National Park in Global Perspective

Karen Jones

On 19 September 1870, the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition struck camp on the Yellowstone Plateau. Over the campfire, the group ruminated on a three-week-long Rocky Mountain adventure that had taken in towering peaks, crashing waterfalls, spouting geysers and otherworldly mineral deposits. In keeping with the modish ethos of westward expansionism, discussion swiftly focused on territorial claims, profit and tourist potential. Judge Cornelius Hedges turned to his compatriots and instead proposed that the area be ‘set apart as a great National Park’. Fellow explorer Nathaniel Langford later remarked, ‘His suggestion met with an instantaneous and favorable response … I lay awake half of last night thinking about it.’ Two years on, following political lobbying from the likes of Langford and Hedges (among others), 3,300 square miles of monumental scenery in present-day northwest Wyoming was preserved for posterity as Yellowstone National Park.¹

The inception of the national park idea by a group of altruistic Americans around the campfire remains a compelling image to this day. From Hiram Chittenden’s The Yellowstone National Park: Historical and Descriptive (1895) through countless pamphlets and pageants, the Madison Junction campfire became associated with the crafting of an illustrious concept. Even doubts over the authenticity of the story failed to dampen its lustre. In a speech commemorating Yellowstone’s 125-year anniversary, then vice-president Al Gore paid heed to Madison Junction as the ‘holy ground’ of American wilderness. The central themes of the story – environmental philanthropy, frontier exploration, wilderness tourism and monumental landscapes – highlighted the symbolic power of conjoining nature and nation. As historian Richard West Sellars mused, ‘Surely the national park concept deserved a “virgin birth” – under a night sky in the pristine American West, on a riverbank, and around a flaming campfire, as if an evergreen cone had fallen near the fire, then heated and expanded and dropped its seeds to spread around the planet.’²

In the years since its establishment, Yellowstone has become an American icon. Writer Wallace Stegner issued an effusive celebration of the national park as ‘the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic.’ Yellowstone symbolized the special connections between Americans and their land as well as the egalitarian mores of a new republic. It attracted devotees across the social spectrum. In the late 1950s, Hanna Barbera offered an animated homage in the form of ‘Jellystone Park’ and the antics of Yogi Bear while Disneyland in California featured a runaway mine train ride (1956–79) that transported theme park visitors to a facsimile ‘nature’s wonderland’ of geysers and mud pots.³

Beyond the United States, Yellowstone achieved global resonance in the realms of environmental diplomacy and popular culture. For environmental historian Donald Worster, the national park denoted ‘one of America’s major contributions to world reform movements’. Just four years after its establishment, the British Earl of Dunraven applauded U.S. authorities for ‘having bequeathed as a free gift to man the beauties and curiosities of “wonderland”’. The preserve in northwestern Wyoming swiftly emerged as the ‘model’: an original national park template that set down critical precepts of protecting wild nature from commercialism, federal/national responsibility for natural resource management and rights of public access and recreation. This formula became a transnational staple for modern states inspired by the remit of civilizing nature, namely, managing relatively unspoiled environments for the purposes of conservation, tourism and identity politics. As historian Aubrey Haines noted, ‘[Yellowstone] has become synonymous, both here and abroad, with much that is basic to the national park ideal.’ By the end of the twentieth century, that ideal had facilitated the creation of 3,881 parks from Arthur’s Pass, New Zealand (1929) to Zakouma, Chad (1963).⁴

This chapter explores the formation, evolution and dissemination of the Yellowstone ‘model’ with a view to understanding its power as a cultural and environmental signifier and globalized conservation product. The first section looks at the birth of the national park movement, situating Yellowstone as a product of American exceptionalism and as part of a transnational park- making tradition influenced by ideas about aesthetics, spirituality and ‘the wild’; the mechanics of colonial encounter; and Western modes of territorializing nature. The second section explores early management practices in the national park, looking at how foundational (and now iconic) principles of land protection, public access and nature preservation operated on the ground. Here the idea of a Yellowstone ‘original’ is challenged to reveal the national park as an experimental landscape governed by shifting cultural values. Hence, the civilizing of nature was far from categorical, with practices determined by changing scientific ideas and envirosocial codes. Finally, the third section considers the power of Yellowstone as an export. Despite its overwhelmingly ‘American’ patina, Yellowstone was an ideal type of the national park brand and a standard for imitation worldwide, with diverse cultures reformulating its basic tenets of resource conservation to fit specific localities.⁵

The National Park Movement in the United States

The national park movement in the United States was irrevocably connected with processes of westward expansion. As Euro-Americans moved westwards across the frontier, taking the modern state, rubrics of ‘civilization’ and capitalist democracy with them, they engaged with ideas of discovery, progress and environmental transformation. It was precisely this interaction with the ‘untamed’ West that prompted artist George Catlin to consider the concept of a national park: the first recorded instance of such an idea. Travelling across the Dakotas in the early 1830s, Catlin was mesmerized first by the expanse of the prairie landscape and second, by its residents. Predicting the demise of the Sioux and the bison at the hands of what he termed ‘the deadly axe and desolating hand of civilized man’, Catlin argued that the government should create a ‘nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!’ In calling for the protection of grasslands, animals and Native American communities as integral aspects of the prairie environment, Catlin’s vision proved truly revolutionary.⁶

The establishment of America’s inaugural national parks came with the discovery of the soaring peaks and rugged vistas of the far West, a monumental landscape very different to the East. First witnessed by Euro-Americans in the 1850s, the Yosemite Valley of California prompted grandiose commentary from explorers for its redwoods and glacial features. Desires to protect Yosemite from private despoliation led to state park status in 1864, with forty square miles of the Sierra Nevada preserved ‘for public resort and recreation’. Moves to protect Yellowstone reflected similar fascination with fantasy worlds of rock and ice. Officially designated as a ‘public park’ in 1872, Yellowstone stood apart from Yosemite by virtue of its size and federal jurisdiction. Right from the start, Superintendent Nathaniel Langford favoured the appellation ‘national park’, as did the Helena Herald, who proudly referred to Yellowstone as ‘our National Park’.⁷

Governed by an emergent cult of wilderness, a reevaluation of nature underpinned the American conservation movement. According to Wallace Stegner, the national park seemed inevitable ‘as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe’. Whereas the traditional pioneer mentality cast wild nature as a place of temptation, waste and threat, a new generation of Americans (comfortably installed in more urban, and urbane, environments) ventured fresh assessments. No longer viewed as a moral maze requiring subjugation by plough and biblical zeal, untamed spaces earned value for their divine, aesthetic and intellectual qualities. The industrial state came to see wild nature as a place for its citizens to go for spiritual renewal and socioeconomic repose. Modernity demanded pristine nature as its foil. Hence, where pastor William Bradford spoke disparaging of the ‘hideous and desolate wilderness’ in 1650, Henry David Thoreau proclaimed ‘in Wildness is the preservation of the world’ by 1851. Significantly, this idolization of wilderness coalesced around the illusion of a pristine American landscape untouched by humanity, a geography without indigenous peoples and hence very different to George Catlin’s ‘nation’s park’.⁸

According to the dominant epistemology, the wilderness cult was a specifically American phenomenon, a signal of the unique connections between the residents of the New World and their soil. As historian Roderick Nash noted, ‘The special American relationship to wilderness – having it, being shaped by it and then almost eliminating it – soon provided the strongest reasons for appreciating Yellowstone and subsequent national parks.’ The appreciation of wilderness grew from a frontier condition and pivoted on the idealization of landscapes apparently unmodified by agriculture (and thus distinguished from the Old World). To Nash and others, it exemplified American exceptionalism, expressed in natural bounty and assertive nationhood. However, European as well as American factors exerted an influence. In particular, the philosophy of Romanticism, with its veneration of rugged nature as a repository of spiritual inspiration, advanced the worship of the wild. Thus, when explorer David Folsom described the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River in 1869 as ‘beautiful, picturesque, magnificent, grand, sublime, awful, terrible’, he referenced the archetypal superlatives of the European Romantic vernacular. From Gainsborough and Wordsworth to Goethe and Rousseau, a legion of Old World artists, poets and writers had betrayed a hankering for gnarled trees, precipices and waterfalls. Meanwhile, in British landscape parks such as Prior Park, Bath, (1754) and Hampton Court (1515), untended chunks of woodland, filled with winding paths and grottoes promised their own playgrounds of thrill, disorder, and transcendence. Europe too boasted a fetish for ‘wildernesses’, albeit crafted by gardening conceit rather than primordial design.⁹

Along with Romanticism, patriotism contributed a great deal to the U.S. national park project. In place of the castles and cathedrals of Europe, America boasted equally grand natural monuments in the form of ancient trees, soaring peaks and rugged chasms. The West thus emerged as a heroic geography, a territory of profound destiny in which Americans planted claims to national greatness, New World identity and moral turpitude. In 1864, Clarence King offered a litany in nature-jingoism in hailing the Sierra redwoods ‘living monuments of antiquity’ vastly superior to any ‘fragment of human work, broken pillar or sand-worn image’. Beautiful nature signalled a solid and pure basis on which to craft an equally illustrious American empire. Geographic features became figurative ammunition to hurl across the Atlantic in repose to accusations of crass materialism and cultural infancy. Nature was nationalized and nation naturalized. In 1872, the U.S. government paid artist Thomas Moran $10,000 for a seven-by-twelve-foot canvas entitled The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Resplendent in the lobby of the U.S. Senate, Moran’s homage to Rocky Mountain geo-histrionics offered clear evidence of ‘nature’s nation’ as a foundational myth of the American republic.¹⁰

Joining affections for wilderness and nation in the story of the American national park was a democratic impulse. According to Nash, the formation of reserves remained ‘inconceivable’ without a democratic mandate. The creation of national parks predicated on a desire to protect landscapes from rampant commercialism on behalf of the public good. In that sense, the modern industrial state secured its own claims to ‘civilization’ via altruistic acts of emparkment. Geologist Ferdinand Hayden conveyed such sentiments in a report to the U.S. House Committee (1871) recommending the preservation of Yellowstone from selfish interests. Hayden highlighted profiteering and materialistic practices at Niagara Falls in his argument. As historian Alfred Runte pointed out, if Niagara’s British detractors had seized the imperative, ‘England, and not the United States, would now be credited as the inventor of the national park ideal.’ Instead, the tenets of Republican virtue, access to commons and the rights of the everyman lent the park movement a New World countenance. This democratic rationale distinguished the national park from the preserves of Old Europe, whose ornamental lakes and corralled environmental resources were tied to aristocratic purse strings.¹¹

Contrary to the rhetoric of American exceptionalism, Yellowstone and Yosemite did not represent inaugural experiments in ‘people’s parks’. Setting aside land for civic purpose and public leisure dated back to the classical world. Likewise, the movement to create rus in urbe, to open up green spaces in the industrializing cities of Europe, was similarly democratic. Designed by industrial philanthropist and social reformer Joseph Strutt, Derby Arboretum opened to the public in 1840, while Halifax, Yorkshire, boasted a ‘People’s Park’ as of 1857. Stewards of the royal parks of London, Berlin, Prague and Paris tore down park gates and revised selective entrance rules by the early 1800s. In the nineteenth-century city, the public park symbolized civic uplift, urban identity, science, imperial display and healthy recreation for the working class. Frederick Law Olmsted, famous architect of New York’s Central Park (1857–61) and Commissioner of Yosemite (1865), visited Birkenhead Park, Merseyside, in 1850. Mesmerized by architect Joseph Paxton’s grand experiment in green populism, Olmsted related, ‘I was ready to admit that in democratic American there was nothing to be thought of as compa...