In July, before heading off to Canada for some trail work and hiking, I stopped by the library quickly to pick up some Great Britain travel books (yes, books!) and slipped a few books-on-CD into the car to listen to on my way north. One of the sets I chose was a book called The National Parks: America’s Best Idea and I have to say I am in LOVE with it. I even went back to the library to get the hardbound copy because it is loaded with pictures and quotes I wanted to remember and so I could share it with you on the 102 year anniversary of the National Park System.
The book is based on a video documentary by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan that aired on PBS in 2009 and offers a beautifully illustrated history of our national parks system. Filled with archived photographs, personal interviews and artistic renderings all related to the history of our national parks, it is fascinating to say the least. We celebrate the fact that the National Park Service was created on August 25, 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Act but there is SO much that led up to that single event and continues after that many people today aren’t aware of and is worth honoring.
Here are just a few of the quotes and ideas that struck me…
“But they are more than a collection of rocks and trees and inspirational scenes from nature. They embody something less tangible yet equally enduring-an idea, born in the United States nearly a century after its creation, as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical. National Parks, the writer and historian Wallace Stegner once said, are ‘the best idea we’ve ever had.'” -The National Parks: America’s Best Idea
“America as Eden rediscovered; America as Eden despoiled. Nature as undiluted connection to God; nature as a commodity to be used and tossed aside.” -The National Parks: America’s Best Idea
“They are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet. Their eyes are fixed upon another sight…they march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature. They will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful be useful.” -Alexis de Tocqueville
“It is the will of the Nation as embodied in the act of Congress that this scenery shall never be private property, but that like certain defensive points upon our coast be held solely for public purposes.” -Frederick Law Olmsted
“Every citizen shares with all the others the ownership in the wonders of our National pleasure ground, and when its natural features are defaced, its forests destroyed, and its game butchered, each one is injured by being robbed of so much that belongs to him.” –George Bird Grinnell, 1887
“Everywhere Muir turned, he believed he was witnessing the work and presence of God-not the stern and wrathful God of his father, who placed man above nature, but a God who revealed himself through nature and for whom mankind was merely a part of a great, joyously interconnected web of being.” -The National Parks: America’s Best Idea
“When the weekend comes around I get restless. At night I bring maps of Mount Rainier [into bed with me] and fall asleep looking at them. Even when it’s time to depart for a trip, I cannot stay in bed any longer and get up before anyone else… I can’t wait to go hiking again.” -Iwao Matsushita
“Most of all, the story of the national parks is the story of people. People from every conceivable background-rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists, and entrepreneurs. People who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved-and in doing so, reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy.” -The National Parks: America’s Best Idea
“What emerges from these stories-and from so many others in the history of almost any national park-is that while the federal goverment ultimately has to create a park, it’s usually only after a single person or a small group of people crusaded for it.” -Juanita Greene
“On a visit to Yellowstone and seeing Old Faithful go off: “All the young ladies-not more than twenty- in the tourist band remarked that it was ‘elegant,’ and betook themselves to writing their names in the bottom of the shallow pools. Nature fixes the insult indelibly, and the after-years will learn that ‘Hattie,’ ‘Sadie,’ ‘Mamie,’ ‘Sophie,’ and so forth, have taken out their hairpins and scrawled in the face of OldFaithful.” -Rudyard Kipling
“For every devoted individual who donates money to save a redwood grove, there are fifty who would..cut it down for profit. Special lands may be set aside, as in the past, as national parks, wildlife refuges, seashores, lakeshores. But we are running out of the raw materials for such reservations and there is no more where it came from.” -Wallace Stegner
“Our idea as to the park has been to develop it for…people who would be responsive to the beauty and inspiration of its scenery, and can get away for a brief or longer holiday… What we want to provide for specially is the need of people of moderate or narrow means who would appreciate what it has to give.” -George Door
“But most of all, none of this will mean anything unless we have a safe haven for these wilderness places. We must have a National park Service. Everyone of us must pull our oar! …Remember that God has given us these beautiful lands. Try to save them for, and share them with, future generations. Go out and spread the gospel!” -Stephen Mather
“I am impressed by the immensely greater greatness that lies in the future, and I ask that your marvelous natural resources be handed on unimpaired to your posterity. We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.” -Virginia Donaghue McClurg
“Much is said on questions of this kind about, ‘the greatest good for the greatest number,’ but the greatest number is too often found to be the number one. It is never the greatest number in the common meaning of the term that make the greatest noise and stir on questions mixed with money…Complaints are made in the name of poor settlers or miners, while the wealthy corporations are kept carefully hidden in the background. Let right, commendable industry be fostered but as to these Goths and Vandals of the wilderness, who are spreading black death in the fairest woods God ever made, let the government up and at’em.” -John Muir
“The national parks themselves…are old as we count in America. But until Stephen T. Mather conceived them all combined as a system…they had existed unnoticed. Once pointed out, however, the imagination of the nation seized the conception with immense zest… From ocean to ocean the plain people hailed this new proof of our national idealism, and massed themselves behind the system’s splendid development… Suddenly our national parks became our most wonderful possession…the shining badge of the nation’s glory, sharing, somewhat even of the sacredness of the flag.” -Robert Sterling Yard
After Stephen Mather suffered a stroke: “[He] had been trying to say something but could not make himself understood. The only word they had been able to get was ‘cascades’.” ‘Cascades in Yosemite?’ I asked…but that was not it. ‘Cascade corner in Yellowstone?’…but that was not it either. ‘Cascade Mountains in Washington?’ His eyes crinkled in a smile.” -Horace Albright
“From the very beginning, as they struggled over who should control their national parks, what should be allowed within their boundaries, even why they should exist at all, Americans have looked upon these wonders of nature and seen in them the reflection of their own dreams.” -The National Parks: America’s Best Idea
“It is the main duty of government, if not the sole duty of government, to provide means for the protection for all its citizens in the pursuit of happiness against the obstacles, otherwise insurmountable, which the selfishness of individuals or combination of individuals is liable to interpose to that pursuit.” -Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
“There is nothing so American as our national parks. The scenery and wild life are native and the fundamental idea behind the parks is native. It is, in brief, that the country belongs to the people; that what it is and what it is in the process of making is for the enrichment of the lives of all of us. Thus the parks stand for the outward symbol of this great human principle… A great recreational and educational project-one which no other country in the world has ever undertaken in such a broad way for protection of its natural and historic treasures and for the enjoyment of them by vast number of people.” -Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“Yellowstone was my first experience of a national park. It basically transformed my universe. I got off a bus in Gardiner, Montana, right outside the north entrance where there’s that wonderful stone arch that says, ‘For the Benefit and Enjoyment of The People.” And it doesn’t say, ‘For The Benefit and Enjoyment For Some of the People’ or ‘a Few of The People.’ It means ‘All of the People.’ For me, that meant democracy; and for me, that meant I was welcome.” -Shelton Johnson
“It has often occurred to me as a curious and anomalous fact, that American artists are prone to seek the subjects for their art in foreign lands, to the almost entire exclusion of their own… That there is a nationalism in art needs no proof. It is bred from a knowledge of and sympathy with [one’s own] surroundings and no foreigner can imbue himself with a spirit of a country not his own. Therefore he should paint his own land.” -Thomas Moran
“It seemed impossible that every new national park appeared more spectacular than the last-or at least more unusual. As I stood gaping at the awesome beauty, Mather joined me. Neither of us spoke for some time. Then I heard him say, “Horace, what God-given opportunity has come our way to preserve wonders like these before us? We must never forget or abandon this gift.” -Horace Albright
“If you go into a national park, you have stories-about the trees and about the grasses, for example, and about the animals and about the water and about all that. You also have a human story. And the human story did not start when the national parks came in. We need to make sure that people who visit those parks understand that there was somebody here before them. That there was somebody here before the national park and this is how they used the land.
When you walk into any natural, national park you’re walking into someone’s homeland. You’re walking into somebody’s house. You’re walking into somebody’s church. You’re walking into somebody’s place where they’ve lived since the Creator made it for them. And so you’re not walking into a wilderness area, you’re walking into someplace that has been utilized for generations upon generations in every form you could imagine.” -Gerard Baker
A few of my takeaways from listening to and reading the book:
- I loved hearing about the personal stories and struggles that took place within my local national parks like Mount Rainier and Olympic National Park. Sometimes I take for granted what I have so close to me. Especially a story about how John Muir literally came to Rainier to be healed!
- The parks were about pride in America, not just preservation. What do we want to be proud of? What we preserved or what we exploited?
- I found this book particularly interesting, especially with all of the political battles our national parks have been waging lately. Or at least seem to be lately. Our national parks have always represented a struggle against outside interests, especially in their conception. The politics have been there from the very beginning and there will never be a time when the public does not have a role in that struggle. Also, our parks have dealt with being underfunded, crowding, vandalism and traffic issues since their birth.
- The US Forest Service was created to manage our national forests “as a crop, not to preserve them as a temple”.
- There was a great deal lost in the act of saving. The book is not perfect and although it attempts to provide a more holistic look at the history of the parks as far as diversity is concerned, I believe it could have done a bit more to bring to light stories from those who were not proponents of what happened in the history of the parks. I’m sure their intent was to show that minorities and First Nations people had found a home in the NPS, but it doesn’t mean they all did or do. They are still not well represented in our national parks despite the assertion that they are for “everyone”. What is often considered “America’s story” is not a story universally accepted by all Americans. And yet, the history of the National Parks System truly is a small example of the less than perfect history of our country all should be aware of.
- What the National Park Service means to me could be entirely different than what it means to someone else. We each have our own relationship with it based on personal experience and culture. Just because I have a strong connection, does not mean everyone does in the same way or if at all. For example, someone whose family member was interned in Yosemite National Park in WWII would have a completely different perspective than someone who has simply camped there on a family vacation.
- It would seem, as well, that people have been taking pictures of themselves in front of popular national park sites in much the same say people do today on Instagram from the beginning of national parks.
So, whether or not you would like to learn the story behind the names of many of the wilderness areas you walk through named after influential players in the creation of both the National Park Service and US Forest Service, peruse photographs of its complicated past or gain perspective for today’s controversy, there is something for everyone in this wonderfully illustrated plume.
If you haven’t seen the documentary or read the book, I highly suggest you do so. If you think you know our national parks, this book will help you get to know them on a whole different level. There may even be ideas that make you stop and wonder about the stories that weren’t told and what we can do now to truly make our national parks for everyone.
Do you think our national parks are America’s best idea? Have you had some of your best days in a national park? Share below!
Most of the photos shown here come from the PBS website for the series and book where you can find 100’s more and make your own scrapbook! You can, also, purchase the book HERE or find it at your local library like I did.
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