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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
America's Best Idea Brought to Light, October 9, 1997
By A Customer
The concept of national parks, setting aside unbroken tracts of land and sea for the enjoyment of people, has been called America's best idea. In Preserving Nature in the National Parks, Richard West Sellars meticulously traces the evolution of the national park concept and America's national park system from 1870 to the present. From beginning to end, he confronts readers with evidence that disputes tradition. Among other beliefs, he authoritatively challenges the romantic campfire myth of an altruistic birth of Yellowstone National Park and the national park concept. He offers in its place a pragmatic rationale more consistent with the times. This book is a scholarly presentation of carefully researched and documented facts, woven into an unbroken story.
The tale unfolds from the perspective of the National Park Service, the primary governmental agency responsible for conserving parks. It starts with the campfire myth and renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. crafting and shaping the National Park Service's mission "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life [in parks]...unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." It ends with the 1993 creation of the National Biological Survey and the sweeping reorganization of the National Park Service in 1995. Throughout, readers get an insider's view of America's favorite government agency. As the story approaches the present, it necessarily shallows to encompass ever more territory, losing its rich historical texture, but gaining a journalistic perspective that serves readers well.
Great new ideas always create tension and elicit vigorous debate. Sellars skillfully draws our attention to a series of tensions created by the national park idea that shaped the concept and its manifestations in the 20th century. Creation of national parks was an attempt to resolve conflict over how to wrest the greatest good and profit from the land: consumption through private exploitation or through public tourism. Sellars also examines the tension between development in parks to facilitate access, lodging, and consumptive recreation versus wilderness preservation. Landscape architects, engineers, and biologists expressed conflicting interpretations of "unimpaired" during the 1920s and 1930s. This tension has evolved into a continuing discussion of scenery or façade versus ecosystem management.
Clearly, early promoters of national parks had no qualms about developing facilities in parks and consuming park resources. In promoting creation of the National Park Service in 1916, Robert Sterling Yard wrote in The Nation's Business "We want our national parks developed....We want good fishing. We want our wild animal life conserved and developed." The first two directors of the National Park Service, businessman Stephen Mather and lawyer Horace Albright, both believed the public needed to be enticed into parks with roads, lodges, and enhanced fishing, in addition to the parks' scenery and other natural assets. They set about building facilities, including fish hatcheries, and planting alien fish in parks as their first order of business for the new agency. They also believed they should `enhance' the parks by suppressing fires, eradicating predators, and controlling forest pests and diseases, which they did vigorously.
At its inception, national park management was a new human endeavor. No one before had tried to preserve intact large tracts of wild land and seascapes for public enjoyment and to pass them on to future generations. Unlike forest and fisheries managers who had centuries of practice, park managers had no precedents. They were truly exploring the unknown and relied on extant professions for guidance. Foresters, landscape architects and engineers who used land to produce commodities and who molded landscapes to fit human perceptions of idyllic and pastoral settings came the closest to fitting the new paradigm so they got the job: directed by businessmen and lawyers. However, national park management is more than a simple combination of these early professions, it also requires applied sciences, particularly ecology. Adding ecologists to this mix, was like combining oil and water. We're still looking for an emulsification agent.
Sellars makes it clear that the tension between scientists and non-scientists regarding national park management was the same in the 1930s as it is today. In part, the differences arise from non-scientists' reliance on untestable, belief-based consensus versus scientists' adherence to a testable knowledge-based system of learning from experience. If one believes that fire destroys forests, or that wolves threaten elk populations, there is no reason to waste time and money testing the concepts. One simply acts on their beliefs and suppresses fire and kills wolves. Testing such beliefs threatens the belief and the believers, and thus creates a perception that science would make park management more costly, difficult, and time consuming. This may be at the root of the issue that creates the tension between so-called traditional and ecological approaches to park stewardship.
Science as a way of knowing should make attainment of the National Park Service mission more certain and cost effective. The true costs of ecological restoration and of losing America's heritage to unfounded beliefs is vastly greater than the costs associated with learning first how ecosystems work and doing the job right the first time. We paid dearly for early misguided forest fire suppression. First we paid the unnecessary costs of suppression. Now we are paying the costs of restoring fire, and if we delay any longer, risk losing the very assets we sought to protect. We paid to eradicate wolves and other predators, then paid to reduce elk and deer, lost soil and vegetation, and now we must pay to restore wolf populations. This kind of cost dwarfs the minimal costs of using science to learn what is in parks, how to restore impaired assets, how to maintain restored parks, and how to protect parks from pollution, unsustainable uses, fragmentation, and alien species. In short, using science to learn from our experience reduces both uncertainty and costs.
In the last century, the parks could afford the boosterism, `enhancements,' and facilities of Mather and Albright and still recover, because parks were not the islands in a fragmented and diminished landscape they are today. Few refugia exist today, outside legislated wilderness, from which to find replacement genomes and species to repair the damage wrought by misguided policies. Time is short. Options to conserve and pass unimpaired parks on to future generations become more limited every year.
Change is inevitable. Will we use science to learn from experience, or continue to blindly accept and act on unsubstantiated beliefs? The National Park Service will not accept a change from its primary goal of recreational tourism to science-guided resources protection until its leaders personally experience success with science. As a result, people such as Richard Sellars run great risk of being attacked by opponents vested in the old system and only moderately supported by skeptics of the new, science-based system. Since the national park concept is new, unique, few have the necessary personal experience, yet. Perhaps the introspection in this book will lead to trying new ways to conserve parks.
Until we learn our history, we risk endlessly repeating the same mistakes. This account illuminates our path. Read it. You will like it. You may not agree with everything in it, but you will learn from it. We and our national parks will all be better for it.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thoroughly detailed -- almost too much!, November 5, 2004
This review is from: Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (Paperback)
The Organic Act, which in 1916 created the National Park Service, implied that preservation of nature was part of the new agency's mandate to leave parks unimpaired for future generations. The legislation did not specifically authorize scientific investigation as a part of park management. Just as the Founding Fathers did not directly address slavery in the U.S. Constitution, the authors of the act in effect placed a "to be dealt with later" stamp on the issue of how the fledgling bureaucracy would manage nature preservation. Richard Sellars, in Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History, details how the NPS, for most of its existence, has paraded as a bastion of environmental management while strongly advocating recreational tourism development and placing little importance on scientific investigation. Throughout its history, the NPS has been ignorant of its natural resources and unaware of the ecological consequences of park development. The NPS is steeped in the tradition of visitor accommodation as the most important measure of success set by Stephen Mather and Horace Albright, its first directors. In the agency's first 25 years, no public organizations demanded scientifically based management of park resources (147). Not until the 1960s, according to Sellars, was park management judged far more on ecological criteria (203). Scientific management received sporadic support in the NPS. At times the notion was shunned. The NPS wanted to do little more than meet the regulatory standards of the Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which gave science power it had never enjoyed before. George B. Hartzog, NPS director from 1964-1972, created the Division of Natural Science Studies within the bureau, but the NPS underfunded the new division and its first two directors complained that the park service hierarchy only paid lip service to scientific investigation. Five years after its inception, the division lost its high organizational status and was buried lower into the park service bureaucracy. Sellars reveals that the NPS, even as late as 1991, was short on self-criticism, overlooking its failure to adopt a truly ecological perspective on park management (277). The book's biggest strength is its abundance of self-criticism, due to the fact that Sellars served as a historian with the NPS for over 20 years. Preserving Nature in the National Parks explains a story most in the park service hierarchy would be afraid to tell. He thoroughly covers the subject of the lack of scientific management within the NPS, sometimes redundantly and with too much detail, but more critically than previous volumes on national park history. If the NPS were to respond positively to Sellars' admonition, it could be what it portends - a leader in nature preservation. If the bureau discounts such chastisement, it will continue to be a leader in only one field, recreational tourism.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Valuable history of national parks from the standpoint of nature, June 7, 2006
This book lies halfway between (1) a history of the national parks as a whole and (2) a history and critique of National Park Service policy toward wildlife, ecosystems, and science. The first several chapters discuss the history of park system, which is characterized mostly by an absence of policy toward "nature" other than scenery. This half of the book is pretty conventional, and follows material available elsewhere. It is best seen as an update of other histories such as Runte's _National Parks: The American Experience_. The second half of the book focuses more narrowly on (for lack of a better term) "nature policy." This half provides a valuable history from a critical standpoint, and it marks the book's central contribution. Several themes reappear throughout the book. The first is the park service's disregard for scientific research. Sellars doesn't quite distinguish the two, but the NPS has little use for either the scientific method or scientific evidence. Briefly put, the NPS does not want to learn facts that conflict with current management policy. It also does not want to use a method that might give it answers that differ from the answers that it wants. Other themes can be grouped together: wildlife, forests, and fire. The NPS seems to lack any understanding of how predators and prey interact, and how top-level processes (wolves and elk) can affect other processes (aspens and beavers). It also has a purely scenic view of forests, which leads to policies that spray insecticide on native beetles in the Rockies and Sierras. Fire policy has evolved toward a greater appreciation of how fire affects ecosystems, but here politics stands in the way of better management practices. Sellars provides an excellent discussion of these and similar issues throughout the book. To understand the politics here, it would be helpful if Sellars spent more time looking outside the NPS to American society as a whole. What does the public want, and why? How has the growth of the environmental movement affected the park? How has Congress changed its management of the NPS? For example, the growth of earmarking in budget legislation has strengthened the pork-barrel elements of national park policy, ultimately leading to the embarrassment of Steamtown USA. Like most histories of national parks, Sellars takes an elitist, wilderness-oriented perspective that is critical of tourism and economic development. I'm sympathetic to that perspective, but we should recognize it for what it is. Sellars doesn't reflect on his own values here - - if an overwhelming majority of the public in a democracy want national parks developed for recreational tourism, what right does a pro-wilderness minority have to disagree? Those criticisms address more what Sellars doesn't do than what he does. I'll give it 5 stars for what he does, but it's really more of a 4.5.
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