Park, Forest, and Wilderness

TAKING STOCK: CHANGING IDEAS AND VISIONS FOR PARKS Ethan Carr Park, Forest, and Wilderness ver the last 150 years, various levels of government in the USA have set aside and managed public lands according to various landscape ideals, including “park,” “forest,” and “wilderness.” Although of- O ten confused, each of these intellectual models implied different land management policies, usually backed by different constituencies. Above all, each ideal accurately reflected values specific to the time and circumstances that brought it about. Shifts in national attitudes towards public land management revealed changing perceptions of society’s desired relationship to the natural world. Landscape ideals were in this sense civic ideals, serving to define the essential character of American society through its relationship to a “nature” which was to be managed, exploited, enjoyed, glorified, or left alone, depending on the ideals espoused. This history may of particular interest today, during an era in which various new ideals of landscape management are struggling to be born. The American “park” arose in the the direct effects of this geographic 19th century as an agent of environ- modernization. Preservation as a mental reform, and in the process it public park, however, has always became public art in the most pro- implied a transformation; preserving found sense. The 1830s and 1840s landscapes has never been a passive were a period of city-building, not act. In New York’s Central Park, for unlike our own of the last several dec- example, lakes were excavated and ades, that defied precedent in the pace greenswards were graded in order to and scale of urbanization. By mid- transform mere land into landscape, century, vast grids of new streets were and a place into a park. Such built up around New York, Bal- “improvements,” though, were only timore, Chicago, and dozens of other part of the project. Just as signifi- cities. Within a space of a generation, cantly, other portions of the park site entire populations were separated for were left unaltered except for the ad- the first time from any direct access to ditions of carriage drives and paths. In expanses of open space. The park was the northern, less-disturbed portion, advocated, under these circum- the existing landscape character of the stances, as an instrument of “preser- park site was to be “interfered with” as vation,” in the sense that municipal little as possible, according to the governments were urged to acquire park’s designers (Beveridge and certain places and preserve them from Schuyler 1983, 119). Dense woods, 16 The George Wright FORUM TAKING STOCK: CHANGING IDEAS AND VISIONS FOR PARKS rock outcrops, and scenic views made lishing a human presence that once the landscape picturesque, and re- again “harmonized” with its land- quired little alteration or improve- scape setting. ment. These areas today remain The ideology of the 19th-century among the few places in which the landscape park was not limited to the pre-industrial character of Manhattan urban scale or the context of munici- Island can still be experienced. pal government. In 1864, Congress Central Park successfully con- granted the Yosemite Valley to Cali- flated the ideas of “improvement” and fornia, provided that the state gov- “preservation,” and in the process ernment maintain public ownership became an embodiment of 19th- in perpetuity for the purposes of century civic ideals: a living repre- “public use, resort, and recreation.” sentation of the physical health and The state was also charged with the mental well-being many felt the in- “preservation and improvement” of dustrial city had removed from eve- the valley, a mandate at the heart of ryday life. Park-making was thereafter the park idea. If later characterized as established in the USA as an integral a contradiction, the mandate to both and mitigating aspect of moderniza- preserve Yosemite Valley and make it tion. The large landscape park se- accessible to the public made perfect cured more healthful and feasible sense to 19th-century park advocates. civic forms for an evermore industri- The great theorist of both Central alized, urbanized republic. As a work Park and Yosemite Valley was Fre- of public art, the park landscape derick Law Olmsted, who advanced could be emotionally appreciated the park idea in both cases. Olmsted according to the conventions of pic- considered access to scenic areas a turesque aesthetics; iconographically requirement for human happiness. In it expressed a conviction that the 1865 he therefore described “im- modernization of the nation could proving” Yosemite Valley as a park as continue without losing values and “a political duty of grave impor- experiences deemed essential to hu- tance,” because unless government man happiness. It was in parks that acted to make places like Yosemite Americans demonstrated the ability Valley available to the many, the (or inability) to come together as a benefits of experiencing scenic beauty diverse community, unified by certain would inevitably be monopolized by shared values. It was in parks that we the few (Tolson 1993, 64; Ranney constructed civic models (in the form 1992, 488-516). The republic that of roads, buildings, or other facilities) had recently been preserved at such that attempted to recapture an bitter cost would therefore have failed imagined, pre-modern relationship in its most basic obligation to its between society and nature, by estab- citizens: to maintain opportunities for Volume 17 • Number 2 2000 17 TAKING STOCK: CHANGING IDEAS AND VISIONS FOR PARKS all members of society to pursue and lands in western states. Park and achieve happiness. forest advocates were at first natural For Olmsted, public enjoyment allies and pursued many of the same provided the ultimate purpose and goals. In 1883, for example, the New rationale for landscape preservation, York State legislature created the whether at Central Park or Yosemite Adirondack Forest Preserve in order Valley. Preservation of a place, and to both preserve scenery and protect the public’s use of the place, were part watersheds and water flows vital to of the same landscape ideal. commercial shipping. Charles “Preservation and improvement” Sprague Sargent, who was both a were therefore a single undertaking, silviculturist and a landscape as the Yosemite legislation suggests. designer, helped draft the 1885 For Olmsted, the landscape park al- legislation that dictated the preserve lowed individuals a “sense of en- should “be forever kept as wild forest larged freedom,” while allowing lands” (Donaldson 1963 [1921]). In groups to come together on common California, Sequoia and Yosemite ground, “unembarrassed” by their national parks were created by different economic conditions or Congress in 1890, again in large part ethnic origins (Olmsted and Vaux out of a desire to protect watersheds 1967 [1866], 98-102). Olmsted’s from rapacious logging and grazing. park (ideally) was a populated and Irrigationists in the San Joaquin tolerant landscape, in which a rapidly Valley depended on seasonal water diversifying society assembled and flows from the Sierra Nevada, and affirmed commonly held values, other economic interests, in turn, above all the value of preserving and depended on the farmers. The result appreciating “natural” scenery. Land- was the creation of vast parks in the scape preservation was justified, mountains (Sequoia and Yosemite ultimately, as a means to preserve so- national parks) and an end to most ciety itself. logging and grazing within their The theory described by Olmsted boundaries (Dilsaver and Tweed shaped a generation of intensive park- 1990, 62-73). making in the USA by municipal, But after 1891 park legislation was state, and federal governments. But no longer the only means to limit the park was not the only landscape logging and protect watersheds, at ideal to come out of the decades least on federal lands. That year following the Civil War. The public Congress passed the Forest Reserve “forest” was also advocated as an Act, which allowed the president to alternative to the park for the simply declare “public reservations” management of larger state on any forested land in the public reservations and, above all, for federal domain. Within 20 years, four 18 The George Wright FORUM TAKING STOCK: CHANGING IDEAS AND VISIONS FOR PARKS presidents had declared 150 million national forests, scientists working for acres of federal forest reserves (later the federal government (including renamed national forests). If at first it foresters, reclamation engineers, and was unclear how national forests biologists) could control the exploi- would differ from national parks, in tation of timber, water, and grass. It 1897 Congress officially opened the was felt that scientific forestry, hy- forests to timber sales, grazing, and draulic engineering, and “game man- other commercial development. In agement” could define sustainable 1898, Gifford Pinchot arrived at the practices and assure perpetual yields Division of Forestry (a bureau of the of products. Objective science was to Department of Agriculture), and his replace the venality and graft that had influence grew steadily, especially been the basis of federal land man- once Theodore Roosevelt became agement for too long. Science also president. In the first decade of the took precedence over the aesthetic new century, Roosevelt and Pinchot concerns of scenic preservationists. enlisted the political support of For Pinchot, locking up resources in western stockmen and irrigationists, vast parks made as little sense as who favored policies that defined leaving them to be destroyed by rob- national forests in terms of multiple ber barons. Pinchot felt that the park economic use (even if such use idea was obsolete, or at least it should involved fees and permits), rather be limited to “city parks,” which he than as vast parks. The policy of felt had nothing to do with western multiple use relied on the fact that, if land management.

Load more