Preservation, we think about something staying the same. Yet preservation changes things. So thats the focus were going to aim at today. In the context of open space lands here in the u. S. Where often theres this presumption that Public Ownership is the best way to protect a landscape. We even see the miniseries by ken burns from a ways back on National Parks. It was called americas best requested which was taken from a quote from wallace stigner. That natural spaces that have trails for hiking and sightseeing and so on are representative of pure, pristine nature thats had some boundary put around it and its been kept a same like a vase in museum. Just kind of static and never changing. That literally is part of the founding legislation for the National Park service which was written and passed by congress in 1916. The Park Service Just had their centennial last year, lots of hoopla. And so you can see that their fundamental purpose is to conserve scenery and provide for the enjoyment as well as leave it unimpaired. The impression you get from this language is that parks are unimpaired and staying the same through generations in time. So what im going to sort of, what my research has focused on for years and that unchangingness thats hiding thats occurring as places are preserved. As a little backdrop, this will be familiar to some of you from earlier in the semester. This idea that all ecosystems is from nancy langston, environmental historian and mentor of mine. She states very clearly that all eco systems are the product of history, including both their natural and cultural or social history. So one of the things i do in my work is looking at how looking how landscape change over time can really tell us something about the ideas that people have about landscape over time and how those ideas change with changing times. So a lot of this is really underlining both why understanding environmental history is important to begin with, but then also sort of seeing the current state of the ecosystem, how and why it got there from the social or cultural side as well. So were going to start with just again, review from my class. This concept of landscape. Landscapes are you sort of inherently formed by interactions, formed by people in place so theyre always about this interaction. Pierce lewis wrote there are unwitting biographies. Essentially, by shaping the land, by being influenced by whats on the land and what is possible there, come on in. Theres lots of seats in the front. We essentially write our own autobiographies in the landscape without realizing were doing it. So were leaving traces, all the ideas we have, the ways in which we interact with the land, all those things. And for those of us who are researchers and interested in studying environmental history, we can then come along, look at the landscape and read something as if it were a book or another kind of text. We can read something about whos been here and what theyve been doing from looking at the landscape and how it changes over time. We may use the term natural landscape or cultural landscape. I always make the assertion that all landscapes are both. There is no purely cultural landscape, although Downtown Manhattan has plants growing places and pigeons flying everywhere and theres a lot of nature in the middle of a city and similarly the most remote pristinelooking wilderness has a lot of cultural overlay, cultural management, et cetera, thats influencing what that place is like. Lastly, all landscapes are dynamic. Theyre always changing. Theres no way of holding them still the way we do with a vase in a museum. You can put the ming vase on a shelf and maybe have some nice climatecontrolled air and lighting for it and it will just stay pretty much the same for centuries. We cant do that with landscapes. Theres no way of holding them still. Theyre constantly shifting with climatic changes, ecological changes and with cultural and social changes. Thats really what im interested in looking at. And a prime example is National Parks. In the way that we often dont notice that landscape changes occurring because it happens so slowly. So many of us have visited the Yosemite Valley. This is a photo that i took when i was visiting there alongside the merced river. Its really striking to look at pictures of the same place over time. Again, i think the first week of this course we looked at some of these same images. This is the photograph taken from the same location near the merced river but taken in 1865 by carlton watkins. What you can see in it, a little difficult, the trees are in the way. You can see theres a big meadow in the back. Some coniferous trees, but a lot of oak trees and willows. Its a much more open landscape than what we see today. Similarly, we can look at paintings from the 1870s. This is by albert beerschtott. Hes done a little fancy footwork with the sides of the valley. They actually dont match up. If you look at a photograph today, youll realize this side is about five miles west of this side in his painting. But whats interesting about this painting is, again, its showing us the ecosystem of this landscape in the 1870s. Which again is meadows in oak woodlands with a few coniferous trees. A real contrast to the landscape we see today, which is almost all dark, coniferous forests. Not that one is better than the other or preferable but that the ecosystem here has changed enormously because this place was preserved. This is a place where native americans had lived for centuries and had been doing Landscape Management of their own, mostly through burning. Once that management was stopped and the place was protected, the ecological shifts started occurring. But those who visit today think, oh, this is what its always been like. Because we dont know the history. Thats part of what were going to be looking at today is trying to understand the ways in which parks change over time, how they change far more than we recognize, and how that helps us to understand whats going on with park protection. Other things that most of us take public parks for granted. In a way that most of us have grown up with parks in cities and National Parks to go visit. Theyre kind of part of our culture now, but thats fairly recent. Public parks are a novel intention, they evolved during the 1800 essentially out of both the admiration of wealthy estates, private estates in england where there would be sort of, oh, whats the tv show . The um downton abbey. Yes, thank you. I always forget words. Very downton abbeyesque. You have this huge estate with Rolling Hills and people strolling about, but most people couldnt visit those estates. They were privately owned by individual families. With an admiration for those kind of spaces, but here in the u. S. , this idea that we wanted that space to be more democratic, to be more open to the public rather than just private. They also evolved in some ways from using certain public spaces like cemeteries very informally for going for an afternoon walk. It seems odd to us now this you would sort of go strolling in a cemetery. They seem much more formal now. But back in the 1800s, especially in the 1830s through the 1860s or so that was a very common thing in a lot of large cities. It was pretty much the only open Space Available and so people would go out for a walk and just enjoy the view and the green grass and the stones. Sort of a combination of these very formal spaces that we didnt want to repeat here in the u. S. And these more informal uses. Similarly, preservation itself of Historic Buildings say was originally something undertaken by private wealthy individuals. George washingtons estate at mt. Vernon was protected by the mt. Vernon ladies association, a private organization. The idea that government should protect and preserve places was not part of our culture. Until the sort of late 1800. One of the people most responsible for that change was this guy, frederick law homestead. He was a Landscape Architect and park designer. He very famously designed central park in new york city. Ive got the original design here. Its a little hard to see, but from the 1860s. Essentially what he was doing at the time, this was actually not central in new york city. It was way out in the sticks. But he had the foresight to know that the city would grow up around the park and wanted to create a space of nature for sort of people to visit to just sort of stroll around and enjoy. This idea of sort of creating and designing a wilderness. This was not just a case of setting aside an already natural landscape and leaving it alone. Which is again what we tend to think of when we think of park protection. What he was doing was making nature out of what at the time was mostly old sheeps meadows. There actually is a big grassy area in central park called the sheeps meadow and thats why, because there were sheep on it. But you know, from this old image, literally moving earth around, planting trees, bringing nature in to a degree thats deeply, deeply designed. Has anyone been to central park in this room . A couple people. When youre there, it feels very natural. Ive got a picture here of new york city with central park today. Its completely forested. Theres sort of hills and dales. Theres lakes. Lots and lots of dense trees. A lot of little paths. It feels like youre in a pristine piece of new york forest thats just been left behind without any buildings, but almost every aspect of it with the exception of a couple of big granite boulders, all the hills, all the forests, all the lakes are all completely designed and, therefore, artificial. But we dont feel like theyre artificial. We interpret them as natural. As a natural space. And so thats really this idea that olmstead brought to his work was designing nature to in essence make it more natural or more natural seeming than what might have been there originally. He also was very he actually had a lot of nervous conditions himself as a young man and was ill a lot. He had this idea that nature could be sort of a therapy for people. That not literally sort of psychotherapy, but as a relief from sort of your stresses of ordinary daily life in an urban setting with all the noise and the sort of trains running by and all kinds of crowding. He thought what people need is this escape valve in a sense. To go and stroll around on sunday with your sweetheart on your arm enjoying a contem plate afternoon experience of nature. He wanted to to be a public space open to all classes, not just the wealthy. That was part of his ambition here. Yet the rules that he put in place for your behavior were much more geared toward middle class and upper class visitors than towards working people. You cant have a lot of noise. Theres no organized sports allowed. This is very much a version of nature thats contemplative and quiet and sort of strolling about. Whereas if youre a real working 9 00 to 5 00er, it twaent 9 00 to 5 00 back then. It was like 6 00 to 8 00. You have one day off to blow off steam so people want to play stick ball in the streets and drink beer and run around and none of that was allowed. So in essence this was created as a public space, but really privileged certain users over others. Were going to see these early ideas of how youre supposed to behave in a park, who the park is aimed toward, still carries through in a lot of our National Parks today. Theres a lot of presumptions that both these parks are open to everybody, but that there are particular ways youre supposed to behave and interact with nature when youre there and other ways are not appropriate. So youre not going to find socking fields in a National Park. Youre going to find hiking trails. Not everybody likes to go hiking. Too bad. So theres sort of this element to it as well. So olmstead starts off this idea of parks as designed nature. This gets combined with how do we get from these designed city parks like central park to the National Parks that we have. In some ways, the National Parks originated with a place that didnt become a National Park until much later, i think the 1940s or 50s, which is Niagara Falls in new york. Before a lot of western expansion really started bringing awareness of the big monumental western landscapes that we are familiar with, before that, the early 1800s, niagra falls was considered one of the most stunning Natural Landscapes that north america had to offer. It is pretty darn stunning. I have never been there. Ive just seen pictures, but its pretty great. After the erie canal opened up easier transportation in the new york area, it became it still doesnt seem fast to us. It would take at least two days to get from new york city to niagra falls, but that was instead of a week. So greatly easy. Greatly easier to get there and you get this big influx of tourists coming from new york and boston and sort of the urban cities wanting to go and visit niagara. Its this beautiful place, they go and have their photograph taken. I couldnt find a date for this picture, but its clearly sort of the late 1800s at some point, but one of the problems of niagara, heres the tourists alongside the beautiful falls having their photograph taken with a big view camera. One of the problems at Niagara Falls, though, was there werent any public controls the way we understand them now. Again, people just didnt have that cultural conception of government stepping in to control space in any way. And so what happened was youd get all of these little sort of tourist stands like we get in a lot of places today. Hey, were going to sell postcards. Pay me a dollar or five cents and stand here and get the best view. There would be photographers supplying their trade and so you got all this sort of messiness kind of messing up the scene. So what ends up happening is the grandeur of the falls gets messy. Theres little stands, theres people selling the equivalent of hot dogs and cotton candy today, kind of messing up the view. And a bunch of european visitors come to visit and they write criticism. They say, oh, these tacky americans, they would sell their grandmother to make a dollar. Theyre essentially ruining the view to have this sort of small scale entrepreneurial use. They just think its incredibly tacky. How dare they. This is a time when here in the u. S. , were kind of culturally sensitive. Were less than 100 years old as a nation, had recently sort of shaken off the influence of europe. Great britain specifically. Yet all cultural references are from europe. The writers we read, the painters we look at, all of the sense of high culture that we have is european. So theres this push, especially when the europeans are now criticizing us and saying, oh, theyre so tacky. Theres this push to try and say what do we have thats unique and different and shows how great the u. S. Is. And one of the things they start to focus on are the Natural Landscapes that especially the western u. S. Sort of reveals as people are moving west. And so niagra falls becomes essentially a negative example sort of what not to do. We dont want to mess things up the way we did there. So when Yosemite Valley here in california is, quote unquote, discovered by a battalion of military folks who are chasing some native americans up the merced river and sort of come out into this amazing valley and theyre stunned by this incredible scenery that they see. Yosemite valley is pretty unlike almost anywhere on earth with these huge Granite Cliffs just sort of dominating this thing. So to this young u. S. Culture at the time, these kinds of monumental, unique, stunning Natural Landscapes become symbolic of our National Pride. Of saying, hey, weve got something that those crazy europeans dont have. In fact you see a lot of descriptions of western landscapes as people are moving across the western territories and describing these places. Theyre often describing them in comparison to castles in europe or old ruins in rome and saying how much cooler, essentially, these places are. You could have some tumbled down castle or you could have this amazing rampart of stone and granite and theres all this sort of comparison going on. So nature takes on a new meaning of being symbolic of our youthful strength and vigor of our nation. It becomes very nationalistic to experience these kinds of monumental western landscapes. And its not just the landscape in this case. There was similar interest in the redwood trees, both the coast redwoods here in coastal california and the giant sequoias of the sierras. Its just symbolic of something our nation had that no one else had. Just the sheer size of these things. Theres all kinds of photographs of slicedthrough sequoia trees with people posing by them or standing on the stump and seeing how many people they can fit on as like a dance floor just saying look how gigantic this is. This is better than any tree youll find in europe. Its bigger and its taller and its what were doing thats great. The funniest thing for me about the giant trees is the botanists who are all about identifying species in sort of the early stages of biological science in the 1860s or so. They have this giant fight over what to call the sequoias with their latin name. The british botanists all wanted sequoia wellingtonia after wellington. The United States botanists wanted sequoia washingtonia. Instead, thankfully, sticked with sequoia gigantia. Which is more descriptive. Again, the descriptions of these places, this is a quote from surveyor Clarence King describing the giant sequoias in 1864. He writes no fragment of human work, broken pillar or sandworn image hath lifted over pathetic desert. None of these linked to the past as today with anything like the power of these monuments of living antiquity. So this is this idea that we have a past, we dont need europes past, we have our own and its this natural past, this natural history, thats better than anything europe has. So theres a lot of sort of nationalism being imbued in this. Why does nationalism matter . Its in part where the setting of National Parks comes from. Setting aside these landscapes to keep the symbolic scenery pretty and powerful and not sort of messed up the way niagara got messed up wi