Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2010 1:13 am Post subject: Parks and People, take 2
I did the wrong reading over the weekend, as did many people in the class. This thread is for us to talk about that reading now, since we talked about tonights reading then.
The reading we are discussing is;
Edward Abbey, "Polemic: Industrialism Tourism and the National Parks," from Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (pp. 273-278)
"In Maine, a Public Park in Search of Public Support," New York Times (pp. 260-263)
I have visited many national parks, and they all feel different. My favorite was Denali national park, which makes up 2/3rds of the national park system, and has 66 miles of poorly maintained dirt road.
The location of the park is extremely remote (center of Alaska) and there is almost no good way to get there. I spent 3 weeks in the park with my family, hiking in small groups with local guides interested in and studying the natural world in some way.
The park felt wild, it felt like I was lucky to be there, and that it was only luck that kept me safe.
This felt like a reservation, a national park. The other parks I went to felt more like amusement parks. Yellowstone has some amazing things, but it is not wilderness.
As a species, we need to protect space for the creatures keeping us alive. The wolf, the sheep, the bison, the bee, all of these influence our lives in many ways. We need to protect the world which keeps us alive. For if we don't, it will buck us off.
I visited yellowstone years back. I was amazed to see so many animals that were bigger than me. A more familiar park trip i took recently was to six flags, not a national park i know. Everytime i'm at six flags i get extraordinarily depressed. I feel like cattle grazing in a fenced in, overpriced, hot, artificial land. While i absolutely hated his writing style, I think abbey had a very valid concern, he was worried national parks would turn into amusement parks. He was trying to stress that visiting a national park is a two way deal, that people need to sacrifice some of the conviniences of home in order to experience nature, that nature can't actually be experienced with these conviniences. One thing i noticed about the second reading, the times article, was that Roxanne, the lady heading the conservation, was extremely wealthy. This alligned with a trend i've been noticing, that those who advocate for the environment are typically financially sound individiduals. Is there a relationship between wealth and conservation? I think it's easy to fall into the trap of viewing the conservation debate as a stricly moral conflict, between the good environmentalists and the bad polluters. I would like to take apart this debate more objectionally because i tihnk there are a lot more forces at play, cultural forces, economic forces, certainly political forces. What do you think the key factors of the conservation debate are and why?
Abbey sarcastically used the word progress to describe what the survey crew was. "Progress had come at last to the Arches, after a million years of neglect. industrial tourism has arrived." Its interesting to see that Abbey has such a problem with 'progress.' He's one of the first authors (I think at least) that seems to really dwell in nature. By that I mean he enjoys nature more than city life or modernized land by a longshot.
Another good quote from that reading was on the same page, pg.274. "There may be some...who virtually identify quantity with quality and therefore assume that the greater the quantity of traffic, the higher the value received. There are some who frankly and boldly advocate the eradication of the last remnants of wilderness and the complete subjugation of nature to the requirements of-not man-but industry."
The first idea of quantity over quality is something we see all the time but I usually haven't applied that to human life. Abbey talks how its better to go one mile hiking than say 100 miles by car, which is actually mind-boggling. His second idea of nature succumbing to the Industry is somewhat depressing. The fact that the Industry controls the environment is just ridiculous. especially seeing how we created the Industry. its because of the Industry that water is privatized, and privatized water is really killing other people. it sort of seems like the Industry is its own government now.
Unlike Paul, I liked the author's writing style. I thought the beginning sounded beautiful with very good imagery.
I've either never been to a national park in this country, or I was very little and do not remember doing so. However, I imagine that people visit these parks because its nice to see such serene, undeveloped land which has been affected very little by humans or pollution. I'm sure a lot of national parks are seen as nature's utopias to humans who are used to the crowded, fast paced cities, the stale, clean-cut suburbs, or even an empty wilderness. National parks are revered for their beauty and serenity. Though I haven't been to one, the pictures provided by Google are quite eye-catching.
Paul's question was what do you think the key factors of the conservation debate are and why? I think you're right. I think wealth definitely is a key factor in the debate of land conservation. Interest and love of the in environment are most likely to be a factor, unless those fighting for the conservation just have nothing better to spend their money on and they're bored. But I doubt that that is actually a factor. I also think that maybe having spare time might play a roll in it. People who are really busy often 'don't have time to care about the environment.' But yeah, the major factor appears to be wealth.
I agree with Jayshil, that his sort of sense of hopelessness and how he gives in to the industrialism and tourism of the once serene, and more desolate park, is really depressing. He made the
Oh and I have a question for Rachel that I'll probably forget tomorrow, so I'll just ask you now- Are the questions and stuff you ask just a little help to get us started, like for if we're stuck or something, or are they mandatory? Also, do we have to answer the question of the person who came before us, or can we just answer whichever questions we want? :/
This reading is making me really regret never having been to a national park. The only representations of "real" nature I have seen have been zoos, nature shows, and the animals around where we live. I think Paul brought up a good point about Abbey not wanting national parks to become fake nature themed amusement parks. I think this reading more than any other has made me want to experience nature and i have even begun to drop some of the philosophical truths that this class battles with.
Yes:
Everything is the a product of nature including humans making all of our actions "natural"
Nature has no will or ultimate goal that we must worry about disturbing
Nature moves in cycles that are grander than human life that will destroy or rebuild nature
However we are still here on planet earth. If we isolate ourselves from nature and destroy it we will only be harming ourselves. I believe that there is truth and importance to these ideas but where do you draw the line? My question is:
Who are all of these philosophical truths for, what do they accomplish?
I’ve probably been to some national parks when I was younger but I don’t remember. I did, though, go to something of the like on my trip to Israel last semester. As part of the program, we did weekly acts of community service, and one week, we went down south to the Negev (desert), into the Ramon Crater (go Google Image it). It’s the size of Nantucket, and it’s beautiful. I don’t know if it counts as a national park, since it has absolutely no buildings or official tourist attractions, but there are jeep-tour services and whatnot to take advantage of. It has a paved road that goes down the steep walls of the crater and stretches from one side to the other--all roads branching off are dirt. People do drive down and look around, and the reason we were there was because people would drive their cars along the twisting, turning, and at times narrow dirt roads, and would steer off of them slightly, onto the “natural” part of the crater, meaning anything that wasn't road. This was damaging the floor of the crater, and after time and time of repeated wheel-impressed damage, the roads were growing wider and more undefined, and more of the ground was being eaten up. We lined a portion of the road with any big-ish rocks we could find to more clearly define it, and preserve this land that has been dry and beautiful for the last 2 million years. Anyway, that whole story was to agree with Abbey, that automobiles should not be allowed in national parks. The Ramon Crater is not even a major tourist attraction, but the small number of tourists that do venture there already have a big impact. I don’t even want to imagine how massive the damage is that the America public has inflicted upon its major parks.
I am disturbed by the idea that national parks “are for people.” I’ve always assumed that the base idea of a national park was to preserve the area, not just concentrate and organize human’s damage on it. That really is all it does. Instead of opening up the land as an opportune spot for a city, a fence is put up and people are allowed in, only to destroy it through different means (pollution, tire tracks, littering, etc.). It seems as though this organization has been working as a great cover-up. In my eyes, the beasts “tourists” and “vultures” only differ in title.
Maine, Public Park- I can sympathize with how stressful and irritating it would be to some people to have so much land become privately owned by someone who would not let them hunt or use the land in any way in hopes of turning it into a national park. However, considering the amount of land on the earth that humans DO have access to, I think that it is sort of ridiculous how upset they are. “Ban Roxanne,” really? I mean, I realize that by doing this she is displacing them, but somebody is going to have to be displaced sometime because as humans we simply cannot develop and use all the land everywhere. I think that she should work to help them find different land or something similar. But I think that they are overreacting. In my opinion, The U.S. needs national parks, as a way to preserve land. And honestly, the way things are going, if this land was left to just anyone, within the next hundred years I would bet that a lot of it would be purchased and developed. And I just find it sort of annoying that it’s such a controversy, I feel like it shouldn’t be. (I still need to finish the other reading)
This was another reading that got me depressed. I found it disturbing how private tourism corporations could so easily interfere with a government run service (National Park Service) and, in the bigger picture, spoil it for people for their own profit.
When I was 11, I took a tour of all the northern national parks with my dad and brother. We did it all by car, which got me to thinking that it would have been impossible for us to visit them without one. These parks are fairly spaced apart, and we most definitely could not have biked to them from Chicago, where we started out. It's necessary to build roads to a point, But I do disagree with any large ones being built straight through the center of a park.
It isn't exactly the roads that made it lame for me back then, but it was the kind of cars and people on those roads. Lots of old people that can't hike, so they drive their enormous RVs within viewing distance of the sites.
(I learned about how terrible highways are for places in Doug's Cars and Cities class, and it applied throughout this reading.)
The National Parks I remember most are Banff and Lake Louise National Parks in Alberta (I am aware that it’s U.S. Environmental History and not Canadian Environmental History, but whatever). The parks were so breathtakingly beautiful that it seemed almost unnaturally beautiful in a way. The stereotypical coniferous trees lining snowcapped mountains were far too green and the sky was too clear. It felt like Canadian preservationists wanted the environment to live up to its reputation, mainly for tourism. Naturalists or preservationists seemed to be giving the land a makeover so tourists would see exactly what they had expected to see.
I agree with Stefan about the construction of roads through parks. There were plenty of roads that drove right through the heart of the terrain, with trees, mountains and rivers on either side. The roads took away from the feeling of being one with the land. It felt like we were just being led on a systematic tour peering out at a foreign landscape all within the safe confines of our industrialized vehicle. We might as well have been in a museum.
Also, I started to think about what it means to visit these parks. When I went to these parks, many tourists didn’t always appear completely invested into viewing the natural landscape. Instead, tourists appeared as if they were there just for the novelty of saying that they had been there. I’m not sure how other National Parks do it, but there were excessive numbers of tourist shops selling t-shirts with cartoon moose saying “I visited Lake Louise.” People need the comfort of some element of our industrialized, cute t-shirt making society in order to appreciate any unfamiliar environment.
All in all, I understand Abbey’s frustration with modernizing nature and the inability to “pry the tourists out of their automobiles, out of their backbreaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs and onto their feet, onto the strange warmth and solidity of Mother Earth…” I think that if we are going to preserve nature, we can’t half-ass it and have paved through it all designed for people to come and see the reputation of beauty that is nature. I think if people really cared that much about the environment, they’d have to prevent absolutely everyone from entering the parks. Thoughts?
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