Class on the evolution of a natural park system and the effort to preserve pristine wilderness. She argues that this approach obscures the ways that humans have iran tractor with the land. Her class is about one hour in ten minutes. So today were gonna be talking about landscapes and preservation and sort of preservation unexpectedly changes parks is protected areas. The intention here is really not only to sort of understand the history of these types of protected spaces but then also to make the process of preservation more visible. To make it more easier to understand, not only the history of parks and how they have changed over time the sort of more importantly why they have changed over time. Most of us when we think about preservation, we think about something staying the same and yet preservation actually changes things so thats really kind of the focus were gonna aim at today. I want to see if i can manage this. So in the context of sort of open space lands here in the u. S. , were often presented with this presumption that Public Ownership is the best way to protect the landscape. We even see the miniseries i cant burns from a ways back on National Parks, it was called americas best idea which is actually taken from a quote by wall of stigma. Natural spaces that have trails and for hiking and sightseeing insulin are representative of pure, pristine nature lets just had some boundaries put around it and its been kept the same, like a vase in a museum, just kind of static and never changing. Set aside unchanging by generations, that literally is part of the founding legislation for the National Park service which is written and passed by congress in 1916. So the Park Service Just had their centennial last year. Lots of hoopla. 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 up parks are unimpaired and staying the same for generations through time. So what im gonna sort of what my research is focused on for years and what were gonna focus on today is that how unchanging this is sort of hiding a whole bunch of landscape not skate change and these places of reserve. So just as a little backdrop, this will be familiar to some of you from earlier in the semester, this idea that all ecosystems from, matthew lagged him a mentor of mine, she states very clearly the whole ecosystems are the product of history, including both their natural and cultural social history. So one of the things that i do in my work is looking at, looking at landscape change overtime can really tell us something about the ideas the people have a landscape overtime and how those ideas changed with changing times. So a lot of this is really underlining why understanding environmental history is important to begin with but also sort of seeing the currents equal system how why it got there from a social or cultural side as well. So were gonna start with just again a review from my class, this concept of landscape. Landscapes are sort of inherently and interact form interaction of people in place. Theyre always about this interaction, pierce lewis geography geographer said that their unwitting by aga phase that we essentially buy shaping the land by being influenced by whats on the land and by what is constant there, come on and theres lots of seats in the front. We essentially right our own autobiographies in the landscape without realizing were doing it so were leaving traces of the ideas that we have, the ways that we interact with the land, all those things. And for those of us who are researchers and interested and studying environmental history, we can come along and look at the landscape and read something as if it were a book or another type of tax. We can actually read something about whos been here in 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, you know even Downtown Manhattan has little plants growing, and theres pigeons flying everywhere and theres a lot of nature even in the middle of a city. Similarly, the most remote, pristine looking wilderness has a lot of cultural overlay, cultural management etc thats influencing what that places like. And then lastly, all landscapes are dynamic. They are always changing. Theres no way of holding them still. The way that we do with a vase in a museum. You can put the ming vause on a shelf, maybe have some nice Climate Control air and lighting for, and itll probably just pretty will stay the same for centuries. We cant do that with landscape, theres no way in holding them. Still there constantly shifting with climatic changes, with a chromatic changes and with social and cultural changes. Thats really what im interested in looking at. That a prime example is National Parks in the way that we often dont notice this landscape change is occurring because it happened so slowly. So many of us have visited the Yosemite Valley. This is a form of that i took when i was visiting there along the river and 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 images. This is a photograph taken from almost the same exact location near the merced river but taken in 1865 by carleton watkins. What you can see and it, its a little bit difficult to trees are in the way, but theres a big meadow in the back, there are some conifers trees but theres a lot of oak trees and sort of willows. Its a much more open landscape than what we see today. Similarly, we can look at paintings from the 18 seventies. This is by albert bear stat. Hes done a little fancy for work with the sides of the valley, they dont actually matchup. You if you look at a photograph from today, you realize that decided valleys about five miles west of the valley than that in the painting. Whats interesting about this painting is that is showing us the ecosystem of this landscape in the 18 seventies. Which again is meadows in oakland with a few conifers trees. Its a real contrast to the landscape that we see today which is almost all can efforts dark forest. Not that one is better than one another or preferable, but that the ecosystem has changed enormously because this place was preserved. This is a place where native americans love for centuries and have been doing Landscape Management of their own mostly through burning. Whats once that management was stopped in the place was protected, the ecological shift to be started occurring. But those of us who visit today, we think thats what its always been like. But we dont know that it has that history so thats part of what were gonna be looking at today is trying to understand the ways in which parks change overtime, how they change far more than we recognize and how that helps us understand whats going on with part protection. So one of the other things the most of us take public parks for graham most of us have grown up with parks in cities and National Parks to go visit. They are kind of part of our culture now. But that is fairly recent. Public parks are a fairly novel invention in a lot of ways. They evolved during the 1800s, essentially out of both the admiration of wealthy estates, private estates in england, where they would sort of be, oh whats the tv show . Downtown abby, yes. Thank you. Very downtown abbyesque. You have this huge estate with Rolling Hills and people strolling about. But of course, most people cannot visit those estates. They were privately owned by individual families. So within admiration for those kinds of spaces, but here in the u. S. This idea that we wanted this 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 bright informally for going for an afternoon walk. It seems odd to us now that you would go strolling in a cemetery, they seem much more formal now. But back in the 1800s, especially from the 1830s to the 1860s or so, that was a common thing in large cities. It was pretty much the only open space available, so people would go out for a walk and enjoy the view and the green grass and the stones. Sort of a combination of these different kinds of very formal spaces that we did not want to repeat here in the u. S. And these more informal uses. Similarly, preservation itself of Historic Buildings was originally something undertaken by private wealthy individuals. George washingtons estate at mount vernon for instance was protected by the amount vernon ladies association, a private organization. The idea that governments should protect and preserve places wasnt part of our culture until the sort of late 18 hundreds. One of the people who is most responsible for that change is this guy. This is frederik law homestead. He was a Landscape Architect and park designer. He very famously designed central park in new york city. The original design is here from the 1860s. Its a little hard to see here. What he was doing essentially at the time, this was not central in new york city, it was way out in the state. 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 people to visit. To sort of stroll around and enjoy this idea 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 what we tend to think about when we think of park rejection. What he was doing was making nature out of what was mostly old ships meadows at the time. Theres actually a big grassy area in central park called the sheep meadow and that is why, because there were sheep on it. From this old image, literally moving earth around, planting trees, bringing nature in, to a degree that is deeply designed. Has anyone been to central park in this room . A couple of people. When you are there, it feels very natural. I have a picture here of new york city with central park today. It is completely forested. There are sort of hills and dales. There are lakes. There are lots of dense trees and little paths. It feels like you are in a pristine piece of new york forest that has just been left behind without any buildings. But almost every aspect of it was an exception of a couple of big granite boulders. All the hills, all the forest, all the lakes, are all completely designed. Therefore artificial. But we do not feel like they are in artificial, we interpret them as natural, as a natural space. So thats really this idea that olmsted brought to his work, it was designing nature to, in essence, make it more natural or more natural seaming 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, not literally sort of psycho therapy, but as a relief from the stresses of ordinary daily life in an urban setting. With all of the noise and the trains running by and all kinds of crowding. He thought that what people needed was an escape valve in a sense. To go and stroll around on sunday with your sweetheart on your arm. Enjoying sort of a contemplative experience of nature. He very explicitly wanted this to be a public space, open to all classes, not just to the wealthy. So that was really a big part of his ambition here. Yet the rules that he put in place for your behavior when you were in the part were actually much more geared toward middle class and upper class visitors then towards working people. They had a lot of rules about not having a lot of noise. There are no organized sports allowed. This is very much a version of nature that is contemplative and quiet and sort of strolling about. Whereas if you are a working nine to five, it was a nine to five back then, more like six to eight, 12 or 14 hour working days, six days a week. You have one day a week to blow off steam, so people want to play stable in the streets, drink beer and run around. None of that was allowed. So in essence, this was created as a public space, but really privileged certain users over others others. We will see that these early ideas of how you are supposed to behave in a park, who the park is aimed toward, still carries through in a lot of our National Parks today. There are a lot of presumptions that both these parks are open to everybody, but that there are particular ways that you are supposed to behave and interact with nature when you are there and other ways are not appropriate. So you will not find soccer fields in a National Park. You are going to find hiking trails. Not everybody likes to go hiking, to bed. So there is sort of this element to it as well. So olmsted starts off this idea of parks as designed nature. This again this then becomes combined with, how do we get to these natural parks like central park, to the parks that we have . In some ways, the National Parks originated with a place that did not become a National Park until much later, i think in the 1940s or fifties. That 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 in the early 1800s, Niagara Falls was considered one of the most stunning Natural Landscapes that north america had to offer. It is pretty darn standing. I have never been there, ive just seen pictures, but its pretty great. After the ear canal opened up easier transportation in the new york area, its still does not seem fast to us, it would take at least two days to get from new york city to Niagara Falls, but that was instead of a week. So it was greatly easier to get there and you get this big influx of tourists coming from new york and boston, from sort of the urban cities, wanting to go and visit niagara. People would have their photograph taken. I could not find a date for this picture, but its clearly sort of the eight late 1800s at some point. One of the problems with niagara, heres another, tourists along the beautiful falls, having their photograph taken with a big view camera. One of the problems at Niagara Falls though where there are no public controls in a way we understand them now. Again, people didnt have that cultural consumption of government stepping into control space in any way. So what happened was you would get all of these little tourist stands like we get in a lot of places today. Were going to sell postcards. Pay me a dollar or five cents or whatever the price was, and stand here to get the best view. There would be photographers supplying their trade plying their trade. So you would get all this messiness messing up the scene. So what ends up happening is the sort of grand jury of the false gets messy. There is little stands. Theres people selling the equivalent of cotton candy and hotdogs today. They are kind of messing up the view. And a lot of european viewers visitors come to visit and they write criticism. They say these tacky americans, they would sell their grandmother to make a dollar. They are essentially ruining a view in order to make this small scale entrepreneurial use. They just think its incredibly tacky, how dare they . This is a time when here in the u. S. , we are kind of culturally sensitive. We are less than 100 years old as a nation, we had recently sort of shaken off the influence of europe, Great Britain specifically, but europe in general. Yet all of our cultural references are from europe. All of the riders we read, all of the painters we look at, all of the sort of sense of high culture that we have his european. So there is push, especially when the europeans are not criticizing us and saying we are so tacky, there is this push to try and say, what do we have that is unique and different and shows how great the u. S. Is . One of the things that they start to focus on our the Natural Landscapes, especially the western u. S. , sort of reveal as people are moving west. So Niagara Falls becomes essentially a negative example 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. They come out into this amazing valley and are stunned by this incredible scenery that they see. Yosemite valley is pretty unlike almost anywhere on earth with these huge Granite Cliffs sort of dominating. So to this young u. S. Culture at the time, these kinds of monumental unique stunning Natural Landscapes become symbolic of our National Pride. Saying, hey, we have 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. They are often describing them in comparison to castles in europe or old ruins in rome. They are saying, how much cooler, essentially, these places are. You could have some tumbled down cancel, or you could have this amazing rampart of stone and granted. All this sort of comparison going on. So nature takes on a new meaning of being symbolic of our youthful strength and vigor as a nation. It becomes great nationalistic to experience these kinds of monumental western landscapes. Its not just the landscape in this case, there was similar interest in the red wood trees, both the coast red woods here in coastal california and the giant red woods in the sierras. Again, symbolic of what our nation had that other nations did not have. Just the sheer sizes of these things. All kinds of photographs exist of these sliced through sequel trees with people posing by them. Or standing on the stump and seeing how many people they can fit on as a dance floor. To say, look how gigantic this is. This is better than any tree you are ever going to find in europe. Its bigger and taller and its what we are doing that is great. The funniest thing for me about the giant sacoolas is the botanist who were all