Wilderness in National Parks
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Wilderness in National Parks

Playground or Preserve

John C. Miles

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eBook - ePub

Wilderness in National Parks

Playground or Preserve

John C. Miles

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About This Book

Wilderness in National Parks casts light on the complicated relationship between the National Park Service and its policy goals of wilderness preservation and recreation. By examining the overlapping and sometimes contradictory responsibilities of the park service and the national wilderness preservation system, John C. Miles finds the National Park Service still struggling to deal with an idea that lies at the core of its mission and yet complicates that mission, nearly one hundred years into its existence. The National Park Service's ambivalence about wilderness is traced from its beginning to the turn of the twenty-first century. The Service is charged with managing more wilderness acreage than any government agency in the world and, in its early years, frequently favored development over preservation. The public has perceived national parks as permanently protected wilderness resources, but in reality this public confidence rests on shaky ground. Miles shows how changing conceptions of wilderness affected park management over the years, with a focus on the tension between the goals of providing recreational spaces for the American people and leaving lands pristine and undeveloped for future generations.

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Year
2011
ISBN
9780295990392

1 WILDERNESS AND THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL PARKS

Historians have identified many motives for the designation of early national parks. Yellowstone became the first truly national park in 1872 (Congress had designated a Yosemite Park in 1864 and ceded it to the state of California, but since in 1872 the Yellowstone area was in a territory rather than a state, it became a national park by default). The origins of the idea for Yellowstone National Park were for many years attributed to a September 1870 campfire discussion in the soon-to-be park in which a group of idealists pledged to protect the unusual landscape they were exploring. The story was that after visiting the Yellowstone country, members of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition speculated about how they could profit from tourism in the area but then rejected that selfish idea in favor of the land's preservation as a public park. They then took the idea to the world, and soon the world's first national park came to be. While this is an inspiring story of altruism, there is much more to the origin of the national park idea than the story suggests.1
According to Roderick Nash and other historians, there is no evidence that the initial advocates of Yellowstone National Park, whatever their motivations, were primarily interested in preserving wilderness.2 Not that the idea of wilderness preservation was absent in American society in 1870. Voices had been raised for fifty years, among them the artist George Catlin, who had written in 1833 of the Great Plains that these regions “might in future be seen (by some great protecting policy of government) preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in a magnificent park.”3 Henry David Thoreau wrote famously of the value of wildness in Walden, arguing, “We need the tonic of wildness.… At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable.… We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”4 Thoreau in 1858 asked, “Why should not we … have our national preserves … in which the bear and the panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth.’ … Or shall we, like the villains, grub them all up poaching on our own national domain?”5 Catlin and Thoreau linked wilderness and the idea of park and preserve, but protecting wilderness, of which there was much in 1872, was not prominent among the motives of Yellowstone advocates.
One public-spirited motive for protecting the unique features of the headwaters of the Yellowstone River was to prevent private exploitation of this unique area.6 Truly remarkable natural features like Niagara Falls had, some thought, been damaged and the experience of them cheapened by the exploitation of private entrepreneurs. Six years earlier Yosemite Valley had been given a measure of protection because of fear that it would fall into private hands and that its natural features would be defaced or destroyed by exploitation.7 A measure of high-minded concern for the common good was present in the establishment of Yosemite Park and in the Yellowstone movement as well.8 Other motives at work in creating Yellowstone were profit, as in the mind of Jay Cooke of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and even a search for national identity. Americans found in places like Yosemite and Yellowstone an architecture of landscape that they thought equal to European monuments and sought to promote these landscapes as cultural icons.9 Historian Robert Utley summarizes the motivations of early national park founders, observing that “altruism and materialism warred in the Yellowstone proposal, have warred in virtually every park proposal since, and war more or less regularly in most existing parks.”10
The debate among scholars about what led to the Yosemite and Yellowstone parks reveals the ideas and forces at work in the 1860s and 1870s that brought about emergence of the national park idea. Thoreau's notions about the value of wilderness were present in the discourse of the time, but in the West there was still so much wilderness that preserving it seems not to have occurred to those thinking about Yosemite and Yellowstone. Initially there was little or no linkage between the ideas of national park and wilderness preservation. Soon, however, an articulate transplanted Scot would make the connection.
JOHN MUIR LINKS WILDERNESS AND NATIONAL PARKS
John Muir arrived in the Sierra Nevada of California in 1869. After herding sheep during his first summer there, he returned in 1869 to become a year-round mountain dweller, living mostly in Yosemite Valley until 1873. As he explored, climbed, botanized, and studied the geology of the landscape around him, he reflected long on the qualities of the place and his experience of them. As he tramped the high country, traversed canyons, and climbed mountains, he was increasingly impressed by the wild grandeur he encountered and he fervently embraced the wildness of California's lofty granite mountains.
During his early years in the Sierra—what might be called his “bohemian period”—Muir searched for his personal identity and concluded that he was a mountain man and would devote himself to wilderness. He wrote to his friend Jean Carr in 1874, when he realized that his days of year-round seclusion in Yosemite were coming to an end, that “I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer … and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness.”11 He decided to interpret and advocate for wilderness, to preach a gospel of nature. After years of self-absorbed exploration of nature and mountains, he would take what he had learned to the world. He would work to protect what wilderness remained. Muir was not leaving Yosemite and wild places for good, though he would spend long periods away from them. A journal entry expresses the insight gained in this phase of his life, now ending, that he was by nature a man of the wilds: “Some plants readily take on the forms and habits of society, but generally speaking soon return to primitive simplicity, and I, too, like a weed of cultivation feel a constant tendency to return to primitive wildness.”12 He might leave the wilderness, but he knew he would return.
Muir married, managed his father-in-law's fruit ranch in California, started a family, and for seven years (1881–88) did not visit the wilderness. Restlessness grew in him, and at the end of this period of self-imposed exile he visited the Cascades of Washington and Mount Shasta in northern California. On this trip he found much wild nature, but he also found that the destruction of wildness he had observed years before in Yosemite was progressing rapidly in many places. He had written essays in the 1870s that won a national audience. At this moment of return to his beloved wilderness, Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of the prominent Century magazine, came into Muir's life. Johnson shared his concern about destruction of wild lands, knew the power of Muir's pen, and thought he would be the ideal spokesman for an effort to protect wild nature in places like the Sierra. He sought Muir out and the two made a trip to Yosemite, where they found, as they expected, the valley's “garden wilderness” still under siege. They agreed that an effort to stem the degradation of the place was necessary, and Johnson suggested they begin with a campaign to preserve the federal land around Yosemite Valley. Why not, he proposed, model a reserve here on Yellowstone National Park? They agreed on a plan. If Muir would write two essays for Century about Yosemite and the idea of reserving land around the valley, Johnson would lend editorial support and push the necessary political campaign in Washington, DC, for Yosemite National Park.13
Muir took up his pen, and in “The Treasures of the Yosemite” he made the case for what he called “the range of light.”
And after ten years in the midst of it, rejoicing and wondering, seeing the glorious floods of light that fill it … it still seems to me a range of light. But no terrestrial beauty may endure forever. The glory of wildness has already departed from the great central plain. Its bloom is shed, and so in part is the bloom of the mountains. In Yosemite, even under the protection of the Government all that is perishable is vanishing apace.14
He published “Treasures” in Century in August 1890 and followed it with “Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park” in September. The essays extolled especially the waters of Yosemite, arguing that “all the fountain regions above Yosemite … should be included in the park to make it a harmonious unit instead of a fragment, great though the fragment be.”15 He described his adventures in this wild and holy place and made it clear that part of what must be saved was wildness, the opportunity to experience raw, powerful, even dangerous nature. Muir biographer Michael Cohen writes of Muir's “Features” essay that “in showing his reader how he discovered himself as a part of the power of the wilderness, Muir presented the strongest possible argument for national parks as wild places where each man could seek, according to his ability, direct, unmediated intercourse with the elemental forces of nature.”16
In “Features” Muir wrote more descriptively of what precisely he thought the boundaries of the proposed park should include. He described a 250-square-mile reservation that was mostly wilderness, beginning this description with the Big Tuolumne Meadows in the northern drainage. This was the more “improved” and accessible part of the proposed park. The second part of the essay described Hetch Hetchy Valley, which, unlike Yosemite Valley, remained wild. Cohen and others have argued that Muir was thinking strategically here: “Thus Muir hoped to save Hetch Hetchy by making it a wild and inaccessible hinterland of a larger, improved park.”17 Yosemite Valley would not be part of the proposed national park (at least in this round of preservation politics; Muir and others would later seek recession of the valley to the federal government and would achieve their goal in 1905 when the valley became part of the national park). The tourist seeking easy access to the improved temple of nature could go to Yosemite Valley. Someone seeking to know the wild would work harder and find it in Hetch Hetchy. Cohen goes on to say that “while he [Muir] realized that there was no such thing as large-scale recreational use and wilderness in the same place, he was willing to sacrifice Yosemite Valley if he could preserve Hetch Hetchy.”18
While Muir was writing, Johnson was carrying out his end of the agreement by organizing the lobbying effort for the park in Washington, DC. He did his work well, and by the time Muir's essays appeared in Century, a bill for Yosemite National Park was well on its way to an October 1 approval. The Yosemite bill was preceded on September 25 by approval of a Sequoia National Park, which, along with a General Grant Park included in the Yosemite legislation, protected magnificent stands of giant sequoia from the axes of loggers. The concept of national park established by the Yellowstone precedent had borne abundant fruit in 1890, and part of the rationale for the new Yosemite National Park was protection of its wildness. John Muir had made wilderness protection a central national park value.
Muir's advocacy of wilderness preservation was not finished with this Yosemite work; he was only beginning. He next argued, unsuccessfully, for a Kings Canyon National Park. He founded the Sierra Club and devoted much of the twenty-four years remaining to him to park and wilderness preservation. Muir came to be called, perhaps unfairly in the eyes of his many allies like Robert Underwood Johnson, the “father” of the national park system. He did not argue only for national parks, also arguing for forest reservations in the 1890s, and he did not advocate any separate designation of wild places as would others later. As Michael Cohen has noted, in the 1890s the distinctions among national park, forest, monument, and wilderness had not been established. In Cohen's words, “These artificial distinctions would be made only as a result of the increasing power and complexity of the bureaucracies which would administer federal funds.”19 In Muir's thinking national parks, and even for a time forest reservations, were the means to protect wilderness.
Muir published Our National Parks in 1901 and in it gave his readers a tour of Yellowstone, Sequoia, General Grant, and, of course, Yosemite national parks. The opening chapter is titled “The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” and it begins:
The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.20
Later in the book Muir celebrates the wildness of Yosemite, writing that “the Yosemite Park region has escaped the millmen.… it is still in the main a pure wilderness.”21 In 1912, as he approached the end of his life (he was seventy-four that year), Muir wrote to Howard Palmer, secretary of the American Alpine Club, regarding a conference on national parks called in Yosemite by the secretary of the interior. Muir had attended and told Palmer that the principal topic of discussion had been whether automobiles (which he called “blunt-nosed mechanical beetles”) should be allowed into the park. He wrote sarcastically that “a prodigious lot of gaseous commercial eloquence was spent” on this topic. Among all such eloquence, wrote Muir, some spoke “on the highest value of wild parks and places of recreation, Nature's cathedrals, where all may gain inspiration and strength and get nearer to God.”22 The ideal park, in Muir's view, must contain wilderness, and the range of “mechanical beetles” must be strictly limited.
John Muir was a prolific writer who, in his long life, filled sixty journals with his reflections and wrote hundreds of letters, eleven books, and many articles. Sprinkled through forty-six years of writings are hundreds of allusions to the “wild” in nature and the experience of it and to “wilderness.” All Muir biographers document his dedication to wilderness preservation and his linkage of such preservation with national parks. His ideas and example inspired other park advocates. His work was widely read, and he became a national figure in the emergent “conservation” movement. A part of that movement aimed to preserve wild and beautiful places.
THE EVOLVING WILDERNESS IDEA
Roderick Frazier Nash, in his classic Wilderness and the American Mind, has traced how, as Muir traveled the Sierra finding himself and developing his ideas about wilderness, other events were contributing to the idea of national park wilderness. Noting that Congress was not thinking of wilderness preservation when it established Yellowstone National Park, he observes that “gradually later Congresses realized that Yellowstone National Park was not just a collection of natural curiosities but, in fact, a wilderness preserve.”23 A Northern Pacific Railroad proposal to build a branch line into the park in the 1880s was defeated in Congress and the decision was, in Nash's view, a milestone. “Never before had wilderness values withstood such a direct confrontation with civilization.”24
Legislators in the state of New York, convinced that preservation of forests in the Adirondacks was necessary for the long-term welfare of the growing New York community, created a “Forest Reserve” in 1885 and in 1892 made this part of a 3-million-acre state park. A state constitutional convention and public vote stipulated in 1894 that public forests in this park would be kept “forever wild,” and, as Nash notes, while watershed protection for utilitarian purposes was the most powerful motive for this action, nonutilitarian arguments were also important. “The rationale for wilderness preservation was gradually catching up with the ideology of appreciation.”25 This action in New York boosted the conceptual linkage in the minds of preservationists between “park” and “wilderness.” Ed Zahniser recently made the point that New Yorkers were the first to inject into the nature preservation movement the notion that what was needed was to preserve not just forest but “wild forest lands” and not just for a while but “forever.”26
Thus the idea of wilderness preservation was strengthened and given protective power, and the goal of protecting wilderness in perpetuity was added to park making. Not even Muir had argued for the level and nature of wilderness achieved in New York. He perhaps assumed that designation of a national park meant such protection, at least for such wild places as Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley. Even as the Adirondack campaign was unfolding, Muir was advocating that presidents use the new power granted them by Congress in the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 to proclaim forest reserves in the West, believing that this action would protect wilderness. He soon saw the error of this notion as Congress opened the reserves to commercial activity in 1897. Then, in 1914, congressional approval of a dam in Hetch Hetchy demonstrated how wrong Muir had been about the level of wilderness protection national park designation might provide. In the Adirondacks, precedent had been set for a stronger government commitment to wilderness preservation.
Part of the park wilderness story at this stage involves wilderness rhetoric. When a politician like Congressman William McAdoo, in debate over the railroad proposal for Yellowstone National Park, spoke of “sublime solitude” and “virgin regions,” or when John Muir wrote of the “wild” and “wilderness,” were they thinking of wilderness in the modern sense of an area unmodified by human activity? They were indeed thinking of landscapes that they assumed had not been changed by human activity, settings in which people could know a place as God or nature made it. McAdoo spoke of a park like Yellowstone as a place where people could achieve “closer communion with omniscience.”27 Muir used religious references throughout his arguments for wilderness. They perceived wild land, in the West at least, as entirely unmodified by human activity, generally ignoring the quite obvious fact that Native Americans had been or were present in such landscapes. At Yellowstone and Yosemite (an...

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