National Parks

The United States was the first country in the world to establish national parks. Initially, national parks were designed to protect and preserve areas considered significant for their scenic or recreational value to human beings. Recently, that notion has been replaced by more ecological views, in which the goal is to maintain stable interactions and relationships between all living things and their environment. Besides preserving nature, national parks preserve cultural and historical sites.

The first parks

The term “national park” was first applied to the Yellowstone reserve created in the territories of Wyoming and Montana in 1872. The public wanted to preserve the beauty of the huge land reserve, and because no state government existed to which park administration might be shifted, the federal government grudgingly assumed responsibility. At first, there were no federal funds to administer the new national park; in its early years, Yellowstone was managed by the U.S. Army .

Even before Yellowstone National Park was established, federal action had established two other natural reserves. In 1832, the national government set aside an Arkansas hot spring as a “reservation,” chiefly for its medicinal value. In 1864, Congress ceded the Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Grove of giant redwoods to the State of California for permanent management as a state park.

The dramatic beauty of Yosemite and Yellowstone fired the popular imagination. When debating whether to make these areas parks, supporters argued that such “natural curiosities” as the waterfalls at Yosemite and the geysers at Yellowstone were national treasures to be protected for public enjoyment.

About 1890, a new way of thinking about preservation emerged: the idea that wilderness itself was useful and therefore worth protecting. As much as anyone in his generation, California naturalist John Muir (1838–1914) encouraged Americans to think of wild nature as a complement to civilization. He believed that contact with nature invigorated people and enlightened their souls. In 1890, Muir published a series of articles in Century magazine that urged protection of the Sierra Nevada high country beyond the previously reserved Yosemite Valley. The Yosemite National Park was created in 1890 at Muir's urging.

West vs. East

In the West, much of the land was in the public domain (not under private or state ownership). Well into the twentieth century, the creation of a national park in the West required a simple transfer of land from one

federal agency to another, rather than an expensive real estate purchase. Because there were vast amounts of public land, it was possible to create some enormous nature preserves—two million acres in the case of Yellowstone.

There were not nearly as many public lands in the East. As a result, private philanthropy (charitable giving by individuals and companies) played a crucial role. The first eastern park, Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island in Maine , established in 1919, was a gift from wealthy summer residents of the Bar Harbor area. The philanthropy of Standard Oil Company founder John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874–1960) played a large role in the creation and maintenance of Acadia and early southeastern parks such as Great Smoky and Shenandoah. (He also bought and donated land for such western parks as Grand Teton and Yosemite.)

The conservation movement

In the early twentieth century, theories of maintaining nature turned from preservation to conservation—the protection and renewal of natural resources, such as clean air and rivers, a healthy wildlife population, and dense forest areas, using careful land management to assure the greatest social and economic value for the present and future. With conservation, humans could use the resources of nature as long as they took steps to ensure that the resources would be available to future generations.

Two pioneers in the conservation movement were President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919; served 1901–9) and the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946). They firmly believed in the wise management of the public domain through land management, and they took steps to conserve the United States's forests and natural resources. Conservationists created national forests; these national preserves differed from the national parks in that they permitted lumbering, mining, animal grazing, and human recreation (including hunting, which is prohibited in national parks).

During Roosevelt's administration, five new national parks, four biggame refuges, and fifty-one bird reservations were created. Under the National Monuments Act of June 8, 1906, places such as Muir Woods in California, the Grand Canyon in Arizona , and Mount Olympus National Monument in Washington were set aside for the public to enjoy.

Tourism

Since the 1920s, national parks have changed to accommodate new recreational interests such as mountaineering, camping, and hiking. In 1916, the National Park Service (NPS) was created to provide for public enjoyment of the parks while also conserving the scenery. The first NPS director, Stephen Tyng Mather (1867–1930), worked hard to promote tourism. In the 1910s and 1920s, Mather allowed cars to enter the parks because cars made the parks accessible to millions. Mather encouraged private businesses to build hotels, stores, and transportation systems for the parks, opening the national parks to the American public as never before. Although these policies brought more people and more money into the parks, they also led to what critics consider overdevelopment of many parks.

Ecological perspectives

Everglades National Park in Florida was created in 1934 mostly to protect the wildlife and vegetation of the 40-mile-wide “river of grass.” Everglades suggested a fresh approach to nature preservation—establishing national parks to protect ecological systems for their own sake, rather than for human benefit. In debates in the 1970s over the future of the public lands of Alaska , advocates of wilderness preserves argued that the proposed parks should protect their ecosystems (the complex set of relationships between all the living organisms in an area). They lobbied for scientifically meaningful boundaries that would enclose whole watersheds (areas of land where all the water drains to the same place) and entire animal migration routes.

Cultural preservation

The preservation of historic and cultural resources has been a responsibility of the national park system since the turn of the century. In the 1890s, in response to pressure from veterans’ groups, the War Department began to set aside historical lands such as American Civil War (1861–65) battlefields and military cemeteries.

Systematic federal protection of historic sites began with the passage of the Antiquities Act (1906). This law was passed because people were buying up national treasures such as the recently discovered Native American cliff dwellings and artifacts in the Southwest. The Antiquities Act prohibited destruction of historic and prehistoric objects on public lands and authorized the president to preserve these sites as national monuments.

The Historic Sites Act of 1935 made it the mission of the National Park Service to survey, acquire, research, restore, and operate historic sites and structures. The act decisively shaped the historic preservation movement in the United States and gave a leading role to the National Park Service.

In 2007, the national park system was composed of a network of nearly four hundred parks. Fifty-eight of these are “national parks”; the rest are national forests, national monuments, historic sites, urban recreation areas, national historical parks, national historical reserves, and national heritage corridors. The park system is comprised of more than 83 million acres.