Nature as We See It: National Parks and the Wilderness Ideal

DECEMBER 2003 251 Ecological Restoration, Vol. 21, No. 4, 2003 ISSN 1522-4740 E-ISSN 1543-4079 ©2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Last spring I made my first trip to Walden Pond. As an environmental historian and someone who attributes a great deal of his understanding about, and appreciation of, nature in America to Henry David Thoreau, I considered this an important experience. I knew I was supposed to be disappointed. Walden Pond, after all, is nestled in the noisy suburban environment of Concord, Massachusetts; a rail line passes nearby—and a train was visible in the distance as we arrived. Moreover, the pond has also become something of a city park, where locals exercise and crowd the “beach” in the summer to escape the New England heat. But in late March, the pond was tranquil, its wooded hills shielding it, as least visually, from its surroundings. A skin of ice still covered the water, and there were no swimmers to be seen. After walking along the shore of Walden, viewing the cabin site and looking at the remnant “bean field” in the nearby woods, it was easier to imagine how Thoreau spent his time here and what he meant in his writings. While I have always valued Thoreau as an intellectual touchstone for the modern wilderness movement, I have been more impressed with his views on wildness—a condition that can exist anywhere. My trip here reaffirmed that among the many things Thoreau and the Transcendentalists have to teach us, living with nature rather than apart from it is essential. Nature, to be sure, exists outside of human control as the living world around us, but nature is also cultural. It is an idea that refers to a set of actual things that humans have not made. Yet we also believe that we can know the nature we have not made. We can see, feel, and touch it. We describe landscapes, like national parks, as “natural” because we believe that when we look at mountains, rivers, and wildlife in these settings, we are “seeing nature” (White 1995). Like Walden, national parks are natural places. Although we conceive of them as wild lands, they are also products of human design, and so is the wilderness they preserve. It has become common, however, to view the history of national parks through the lens of the Wilderness Act of 1964, and thus to interpret the meaning and purpose of parks as wild landscapes beyond human influence. But in doing so, we risk seeing parks as products of the present rather than the past. We risk losing the rich and textured history of human contact with national parks, and the significant role that nature has played in the lives of many different peoples. If we are to address the complex issues facing national parks today, we need to look beyond the notion of park landscapes as reservoirs of pristine nature removed from human history. Instead, we should also think of them as historical creations—idealized landscapes in which wild nature and modern Americans can coexist in relative harmony. National parks, perhaps more than any other public land reserves, have the Nature as We See It: National Parks and the Wilderness Ideal