The Players and the Poets:
A LOOK INTO THE EARLY HISTORY OF MANAGEMENT AND MINDFULNESS IN AMERICA'S FIRST NATIONAL PARKS.
The Players
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The PoetsJohn Muir, Henry David
Thoreau, William Worsdworth and many others helped preserve wilderness with their words. Their poetry, doctrine, and artistic contributions to the movement helped influence wilderness laws and wilderness appreciation. “The concept of wilderness as a church, as a place to find and worship God, helped launch the intellectual revolution that led to wilderness appreciation.. The logic was that if nature embodies moral law and spiritual truth, then wild nature provides the most direct link to the deity. Thoreau and Emerson absorbed this axiom from European Romantics and Asian mystics, and John Muir brought it into the American West. His trips into the Sierra Nevada became acts of worship.” -Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. |
Early Example of wilderness management in Yellowstone Park. "The feeding, touching, teasing or molesting of bears is prohibited."Preservation...At Long Last.
"The price of popularity that saved wilderness is intense management. The alternative to such control is a level of recreational use that would quickly deprive anyone of having even a semblance of a wilderness experience. Unmanaged wilderness would indeed be loved to death." (Nash, 340.) "The problem was to convince Americans that the developments of their last wilderness would entail more sacrifice than gain." (Nash,188) |
President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir ride horses along a road in Yosemite Valley. Half Dome is in the distance. The two wilderness leaders, one a poet and the other, a politician, are accompanied by early Yosemite Park Rangers Archie Leonard and Charles Leidig, followed by unidentified man on foot; left to right, Leonard, Muir, Roosevelt, Leidig. May, 1903.
Photo courtesy of National Park Service, photo archives.
Photo courtesy of National Park Service, photo archives.