Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lectures In History Laura Watt On Lan

Find it where you listen to podcasts. So, today were going to be talking about landscapes and preservation and sort of how preservation unexpectedly changes the places we set aside as parks and protected areas. The intention here is really not only to sort of understand the history of the protective spaces but to make the process more visual, to make it easier to understand not only the history of parks and how they have changed over time but why they have changed over time. We think of some things staying the thing. This changes things. Thats the focus were going to aim at today. And im going to theres often a presumption that Public Ownership is the best way to protect ownership. We see the series on americas parks called americas best idea, that natural spaces that have trails and for hiking and sightseeing and so on are representative of pure pristine nature thats 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 for generations, that literally is part of the founding legislation for the National Park service, which was written and passed by congress in 1916. So, the park service had their centennial last year, lots of hoopla. And so you can see that their fundamental purpose is to conserve scenery, as well as leave it unimpaired. The impression you get from this language is that parks were unimpaired and staying the same through generations through time. What my research is focused on for years and what were going to focus on today is how that unchangingness is hiding a bunch of landscape change thats occurring as places are preserved. So, just as a little backdrop, this will be familiar to some of you from earlier in the semester, this idea that all ecosystems this is from nancy langston, environmental historian and mentor of mine. She states clearly that all ecosystems 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 at landscape change overtime can really tell us something about the ideas that people have about landscape over time and how those ideas changed change with changing time. 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 a social or cultural side as well. So, were going to start with just, again, review for my class, this concept of landscape. Landscapes are sort of inherently form interactions between people and place. So, theyre always about this interaction. Pierce lewis, a geographer, wrote there are come on in. There are lots of seats in the front. We write our own autobiographies in the landscape without realizing were doing it. So, were leaving trace of the ideas that we have, the ways in which we interact with the land, all those things. For those of us that are researchers and interested in studying environmental history, we can come along and 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. Downtown manhattan has little plants growing places and pigeons flying everywhere. Theres a lot of nature even in the middle of the city. And similarly the most pristinelooking wilderness has a lot of cultural overlay, cultural management, et cetera, thats influencing what that place is like. And then lastly, all landscapes are dynamic. Theyre always changing. Theres no way of holding them still the way that we do with a vase in a museum. You can put the meng vase on a shelf and maybe have some nice climate controlled 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 changing with climate changes and economic changes and cultural and social changes. So, 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 change is occur because it happens so slowly. Many of us have visited the valley. This is a photo i took while i was visiting there alongside the river. Its really striking to look at pictures of the same place overtime. I think the first week of this course we looked at some of these same images. This is a photograph taken from almost the same location near the river but taken in 1865 by carl watkins. And what you can see in it, a little bit difficult, the trees are in the way. But you can see theres a big meadow in the back. Theres some coniferous trees but also a lot of oak trees and sort of willows. Its a much more open landscape than what we see today. Similarly, you can look at paintings from the 1870s this is by albert. Hes done fancy footwork with the sides of the valley. They dont watch up. If you look at a photograph today, youll realize this side of the valley is about five miles west of that side of the valley. Whats interesting about the painting is its showing the ecosystem of the landscape in the 1870s which is meadows and oak woodlands with a few coniferous trees. Its a real contrast to the landscape we see today which is almost all dark coniferous forest. Not that one is better than the other or preferable but that the ecosystem here has changed enormously because this was a place that was preserved. Native americans had lived here and done management of their own through burning. Once that management was stopped and the place was protected, the ecological shifts started occurring. Those of us that visit today think this is the way its always been because we dont know it has that history. Thats part of what were going to be looking at today is understanding 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. So, one of the things that most of us take Public Participation in. Most of us has grown up with parks in cities and National Parks to go visit. Theyre part of our culture now. But thats recent. Public parks are a novel invention in a lot of ways. They evolved during the 1800s out of both the admiration of wealthy private estates in england where there would be sort of whats the tv show . Downton abbey. I always forget words. Very downton abbey. You had this huge estate with Rolling Hills and people strolling about. Of course most people couldnt visit those estates. They were privately owned by individual families. With an admiration of those kinds of spaces. But here in the u. S. That we wanted that space to be more democratic, 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 you would go strolling in a cemetery. They seem much more formal now. Back in the 1800s, especially in the 1830s and 1860s, that was a common thing in large cities, the only open space available. People would go out for a walk and enjoy the view and the green grass and the stones. So, sort of a come by [ inaudible questionnation of these different kind of spaces that we didnt want to repeat here in the u. S. And the more informal uses. Similarly preservation itself of historic buildings, say, was originally something undertaken by private wealthy individuals. George washingtons estate at mt. Vernon, for instance, was protected by the mt. Vernon ladys association. The idea the government should protect places wasnt part of our culture until the late 1800s. One of the people whos most responsible for that change is this guy, frederick law olmsted. He was a architect and park designer. He famously designed central park in new york city. Ive got the original design here. Its hard to see, from the 1860s. What he was doing at the time this was not central in new york city. It was way out in the sticks. 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 just 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, 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 is a big grassy area in central park called the sheep 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 . 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, lot of little pads. It really 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, without an 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. Thats the idea that olmsted 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 hes very he actually had a lot of nervous conditions himself as a young man and was ill a lot. He really had this idea that nature could be sort of a therapy for people, that not literally psychotherapy, but as a relief from your stresses of ordinary daily life in an urban setting with all the noise and the trains running by and all kinds of crowding. You thought what people need is an escape valve in a sense to go stroll around on sunday with your sweetheart on your arm enjoying a contempt la tif 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 he put in place for behavior in the park were geared toward middle class and upper class visitors than towards working people. We had a lot of rules about 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 strolling about, whereas if youre a real working 9 to 5 it wasnt 9 00 to 5 00 then. It was 6 00 to 8 00. 12 or 16 work hours, you have one day off. People want to play stick ball in the streets and 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. And were going to see that these early ideas of how youre supposed to behave in a park, who the park is sort of 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 natures when youre there and other ways are not appropriate. Youre not going to find soccer 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, olmsted sort of starts off this idea of parks as designed nature. This then 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 in 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 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 stunning. I have never been there. Ive just seen pictures, but its pretty great. And 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 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, this beautiful place. They go and have their photograph taken. I couldnt find a date for this picture, but its clearly the late 1800s at some point. But one of the problems with niagara heres another just the tourists alongside the beautiful falls having their photograph taken with the big view camera. One of the problems of Niagara Falls though is there werent any public controls in a way that we understand them now. Wasnt an idea. People didnt have that cultural conception of government stepping in to control space in any way. And so what happened was you would get all these little tourist stands like we get in a lot of places today. Setting up saying hey were going to sell postcards, pay me a dollar or five cents or whatever the price was and stand here and get the best view. There would be photographers with their trade. Youve got all this sort of messiness kind of messing up the scene. Great. So, what ends up happening is sort of 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 these tacky americans. They would sell their grandmother to make a dollar. Theyre ruining the view to have this smallscale entrepreneurial use. And they just think its incredibly tacky, how dare they. And this is a time when here in the u. S. , were kind of culturally sensitive. You know, were less than 100 years old as a nation, had recently sort of shaken off the influence of europe, Great Britain specifically, but europe in general. Yet all of our cultural references from europe. All the writers we read, all the painters we look at, all of the sort of sense of high culture that we have is european. And so theres this theres push, especially when the europeans are now criticizing us and saying, theyre so tacky, theres this push to cry 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 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 native americans up the river and come out into this amazing valley and theyre stunned by this incredible scenery that they see. Yosemite valley is pretty much almost unlike anywhere else on earth with these huge Granite Cliffs dominating this thing. 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. And 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 describes them in comparison to castles in europe or old ruins in rome and saying how much cooler, essentially, these places are. Like, ah, you could have some tumbled down castle, or you could have this amazing rampart of stone and granite, all this sort of comparison going on. So, nature takes on a new meaning of sort of being symbolic of our youthful strength and vigor as a nation. It becomes very nationalistic to sort of 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 sierres as symbolic of something our nation had that no one else had. Just the sheer size of thaez things. Theres all kinds of photographs of sliced through sequoia trees with people posting on them or 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 youre ever going to find in europe. Its bigger and taller and its just its what were doing. Its great. The funniest thing for me about the giant sequoias is the botanists who are all about identifying species in 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, their tax nomic name. The british botanists all wanted sequoia wellingtonia and the United States botanists wanted sequoia washingtonia. Instead, it stuck with sequoia giganticia. The descriptions of these places, this is a quote describing the giant sequoias in 1864. He writes, no fragment of human work, broken pillar, or sand worn image hagt lifted over pathetic desert. None of these linked to the past as today with anything like the power of these monuments of live 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 idea of setting National Parks comes from. Its setting aside these landscapes to keep the symbolic scenery pretty and powerful and not messed up the way niagra got messed up with all the clattery shops and trinkets and so forth. Interestingly the idea this is a little hard to see this map. The pink outline here is more or less the its actually a little bit smaller than the current yosemite Public Ownership<\/a> is the best way to protect ownership. We see the series on americas parks called americas best idea, that natural spaces that have trails and for hiking and sightseeing and so on are representative of pure pristine nature thats 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 for generations, that literally is part of the founding legislation for the National Park<\/a> service, which was written and passed by congress in 1916. So, the park service had their centennial last year, lots of hoopla. And so you can see that their fundamental purpose is to conserve scenery, as well as leave it unimpaired. The impression you get from this language is that parks were unimpaired and staying the same through generations through time. What my research is focused on for years and what were going to focus on today is how that unchangingness is hiding a bunch of landscape change thats occurring as places are preserved. So, just as a little backdrop, this will be familiar to some of you from earlier in the semester, this idea that all ecosystems this is from nancy langston, environmental historian and mentor of mine. She states clearly that all ecosystems 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 at landscape change overtime can really tell us something about the ideas that people have about landscape over time and how those ideas changed change with changing time. 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 a social or cultural side as well. So, were going to start with just, again, review for my class, this concept of landscape. Landscapes are sort of inherently form interactions between people and place. So, theyre always about this interaction. Pierce lewis, a geographer, wrote there are come on in. There are lots of seats in the front. We write our own autobiographies in the landscape without realizing were doing it. So, were leaving trace of the ideas that we have, the ways in which we interact with the land, all those things. For those of us that are researchers and interested in studying environmental history, we can come along and 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. Downtown manhattan has little plants growing places and pigeons flying everywhere. Theres a lot of nature even in the middle of the city. And similarly the most pristinelooking wilderness has a lot of cultural overlay, cultural management, et cetera, thats influencing what that place is like. And then lastly, all landscapes are dynamic. Theyre always changing. Theres no way of holding them still the way that we do with a vase in a museum. You can put the meng vase on a shelf and maybe have some nice climate controlled 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 changing with climate changes and economic changes and cultural and social changes. So, thats really what im interested in looking at. And a prime example is National Park<\/a>s. In the way that we often dont notice that landscape change is occur because it happens so slowly. Many of us have visited the valley. This is a photo i took while i was visiting there alongside the river. Its really striking to look at pictures of the same place overtime. I think the first week of this course we looked at some of these same images. This is a photograph taken from almost the same location near the river but taken in 1865 by carl watkins. And what you can see in it, a little bit difficult, the trees are in the way. But you can see theres a big meadow in the back. Theres some coniferous trees but also a lot of oak trees and sort of willows. Its a much more open landscape than what we see today. Similarly, you can look at paintings from the 1870s this is by albert. Hes done fancy footwork with the sides of the valley. They dont watch up. If you look at a photograph today, youll realize this side of the valley is about five miles west of that side of the valley. Whats interesting about the painting is its showing the ecosystem of the landscape in the 1870s which is meadows and oak woodlands with a few coniferous trees. Its a real contrast to the landscape we see today which is almost all dark coniferous forest. Not that one is better than the other or preferable but that the ecosystem here has changed enormously because this was a place that was preserved. Native americans had lived here and done management of their own through burning. Once that management was stopped and the place was protected, the ecological shifts started occurring. Those of us that visit today think this is the way its always been because we dont know it has that history. Thats part of what were going to be looking at today is understanding 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. So, one of the things that most of us take Public Participation<\/a> in. Most of us has grown up with parks in cities and National Park<\/a>s to go visit. Theyre part of our culture now. But thats recent. Public parks are a novel invention in a lot of ways. They evolved during the 1800s out of both the admiration of wealthy private estates in england where there would be sort of whats the tv show . Downton abbey. I always forget words. Very downton abbey. You had this huge estate with Rolling Hills<\/a> and people strolling about. Of course most people couldnt visit those estates. They were privately owned by individual families. With an admiration of those kinds of spaces. But here in the u. S. That we wanted that space to be more democratic, 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 you would go strolling in a cemetery. They seem much more formal now. Back in the 1800s, especially in the 1830s and 1860s, that was a common thing in large cities, the only open space available. People would go out for a walk and enjoy the view and the green grass and the stones. So, sort of a come by [ inaudible questionnation of these different kind of spaces that we didnt want to repeat here in the u. S. And the more informal uses. Similarly preservation itself of historic buildings, say, was originally something undertaken by private wealthy individuals. George washingtons estate at mt. Vernon, for instance, was protected by the mt. Vernon ladys association. The idea the government should protect places wasnt part of our culture until the late 1800s. One of the people whos most responsible for that change is this guy, frederick law olmsted. He was a architect and park designer. He famously designed central park in new york city. Ive got the original design here. Its hard to see, from the 1860s. What he was doing at the time this was not central in new york city. It was way out in the sticks. 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 just 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, 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 is a big grassy area in central park called the sheep 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 . 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, lot of little pads. It really 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, without an 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. Thats the idea that olmsted 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 hes very he actually had a lot of nervous conditions himself as a young man and was ill a lot. He really had this idea that nature could be sort of a therapy for people, that not literally psychotherapy, but as a relief from your stresses of ordinary daily life in an urban setting with all the noise and the trains running by and all kinds of crowding. You thought what people need is an escape valve in a sense to go stroll around on sunday with your sweetheart on your arm enjoying a contempt la tif 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 he put in place for behavior in the park were geared toward middle class and upper class visitors than towards working people. We had a lot of rules about 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 strolling about, whereas if youre a real working 9 to 5 it wasnt 9 00 to 5 00 then. It was 6 00 to 8 00. 12 or 16 work hours, you have one day off. People want to play stick ball in the streets and 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. And were going to see that these early ideas of how youre supposed to behave in a park, who the park is sort of aimed toward still carries through in a lot of our National Park<\/a>s 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 natures when youre there and other ways are not appropriate. Youre not going to find soccer fields in a National Park<\/a>. 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, olmsted sort of starts off this idea of parks as designed nature. This then gets combined with how do we get from these designed city parks like central park to the National Park<\/a>s that we have . In some ways, the National Park<\/a>s originated with a place that didnt become a National Park<\/a> until much later, i think in the 1940s or 50s, which is Niagara Falls<\/a> 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<\/a> was considered one of the most stunning Natural Landscapes<\/a> that north america had to offer. It is pretty darn stunning. I have never been there. Ive just seen pictures, but its pretty great. And 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 Niagara Falls<\/a>, 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, this beautiful place. They go and have their photograph taken. I couldnt find a date for this picture, but its clearly the late 1800s at some point. But one of the problems with niagara heres another just the tourists alongside the beautiful falls having their photograph taken with the big view camera. One of the problems of Niagara Falls<\/a> though is there werent any public controls in a way that we understand them now. Wasnt an idea. People didnt have that cultural conception of government stepping in to control space in any way. And so what happened was you would get all these little tourist stands like we get in a lot of places today. Setting up saying hey were going to sell postcards, pay me a dollar or five cents or whatever the price was and stand here and get the best view. There would be photographers with their trade. Youve got all this sort of messiness kind of messing up the scene. Great. So, what ends up happening is sort of 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 these tacky americans. They would sell their grandmother to make a dollar. Theyre ruining the view to have this smallscale entrepreneurial use. And they just think its incredibly tacky, how dare they. And this is a time when here in the u. S. , were kind of culturally sensitive. You know, were less than 100 years old as a nation, had recently sort of shaken off the influence of europe, Great Britain<\/a> specifically, but europe in general. Yet all of our cultural references from europe. All the writers we read, all the painters we look at, all of the sort of sense of high culture that we have is european. And so theres this theres push, especially when the europeans are now criticizing us and saying, theyre so tacky, theres this push to cry 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<\/a> that, especially the western u. S. , sort of reveals as people are moving west. And so Niagara Falls<\/a> 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<\/a> here in california is, quote unquote, discovered by a battalion of military folks who are chasing native americans up the river and come out into this amazing valley and theyre stunned by this incredible scenery that they see. Yosemite valley is pretty much almost unlike anywhere else on earth with these huge Granite Cliffs<\/a> dominating this thing. To this young u. S. Culture at the time, these kinds of monumental, unique, stunning Natural Landscapes<\/a> become symbolic of our National Pride<\/a>, of saying, hey, weve got something that those crazy europeans dont have. And 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 describes them in comparison to castles in europe or old ruins in rome and saying how much cooler, essentially, these places are. Like, ah, you could have some tumbled down castle, or you could have this amazing rampart of stone and granite, all this sort of comparison going on. So, nature takes on a new meaning of sort of being symbolic of our youthful strength and vigor as a nation. It becomes very nationalistic to sort of 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 sierres as symbolic of something our nation had that no one else had. Just the sheer size of thaez things. Theres all kinds of photographs of sliced through sequoia trees with people posting on them or 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 youre ever going to find in europe. Its bigger and taller and its just its what were doing. Its great. The funniest thing for me about the giant sequoias is the botanists who are all about identifying species in 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, their tax nomic name. The british botanists all wanted sequoia wellingtonia and the United States<\/a> botanists wanted sequoia washingtonia. Instead, it stuck with sequoia giganticia. The descriptions of these places, this is a quote describing the giant sequoias in 1864. He writes, no fragment of human work, broken pillar, or sand worn image hagt lifted over pathetic desert. None of these linked to the past as today with anything like the power of these monuments of live 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<\/a> 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 idea of setting National Park<\/a>s comes from. Its setting aside these landscapes to keep the symbolic scenery pretty and powerful and not messed up the way niagra got messed up with all the clattery shops and trinkets and so forth. Interestingly the idea this is a little hard to see this map. The pink outline here is more or less the its actually a little bit smaller than the current yosemite National Park<\/a>. The part thats labelled in green is the original reservation that was set aside signed by lincoln in 1864. As you can see, hopefully from that map, all that was protected the original protected area was very small. It was just the valley and literally sort of the view shed of the valley. If youre standing on the valley floor like where i took the photographs earlier by the river and youre looking up at the granite walls, the boundary of the protected area is the top of those walls. We dont care about the ecosystem. We dont care about the forest. We dont care about the overall sort of mountains and large landscape. What were protecting here is the view. By making it into a public park, a governmentowned park, remember all this land was public land to begin with. Part of the Public Domain<\/a> essentially claimed by the u. S. When we won the mexicanamerican war in 1848 and california became part of the union. So, all that is being done is setting aside already publiclyowned land, not allowing homesteaders to make claims in it, not allowing miners to come in and mess it up, trying to keep it nice and tidy so the tourists can come and see this grand view and feel this nationalistic pride. The original proposal for setting aside yosemite did not come from the public at large, which is sort of how we think about parks today, that theyre for us and by us and all that sort of democratic language. The original proposer for yosemite was a representative from one of the steam Ship Companies<\/a> that was bringing from the east coast around the horn and bringing people. Before the transcontinental railroad, that was the only way of getting here. So, it was the Steam Ship Company<\/a> saying this is great, if you set this place aside, its really beautiful, everyones going to want to go visit it, and theyll have to pay us by both steam ship and then stagecoach to take them there, have them stay in our hotel that well build, and then we take them back again. They pay us three times. This is great. So, this is you know, it gets set aside, mark david spence, who you read some chapters from this week described both the Yosemite Valley<\/a> protected area and the grove which is further south somewhere. I dont think its on this map. He describes them as powerful symbols of national unity. Theyre being established just as the civil war is coming to a close in 1864. At least they hope its coming to a close. And so they think that, you know, this is going to be symbolic of our once again reunited nation and its strength and vigor Going Forward<\/a> in time. So, its both really important as the sort of public symbol, but then also theres this connection with private enterprise. First the Steam Ship Company<\/a> in the case of yosemite for every other National Park<\/a> thats established between 1864 and 1916 when the National Park<\/a> service itself was created. Theyre all proposed, advocated for and then served by railroads. So, again, the connection to tourism and to industrial tourism, if you will, not mom and pop setting up a little shop and selling you tshirts whav, whatever the equivalent in 1900 of tshirts is. Not that kind of tourism but organized corporate tourism is part of the National Park<\/a>s from day one. Its how they get established. Because somebody has to go to congress and convince congress to pass this legislation. It doesnt just happen. And thats whos pushing them to do this. One of the other interesting things about the yosemite reservation is that theres a clause in the legislation that creates the park, insisting that the protection be permanent. He said, you know, theres sort of no point in setting something aside for this kind of scenic grandeur unless were committing to protect it for all time. So, it starts very early, in 1864, this idea that parks are going to stay the same. We have this static view, the sense we all have from looking at postcards, ansel adams paragraphs or all photographs if we go to yosemite and visit of the view of what yosemite looks like. If the park service moves like a campground or changes scenic pull out people get upset. I ran an experiment with by environmental history class a number of years ago at the early days of digital photography. We didnt have instagram yet. We just had flicker. During a class break, i had them type into flicker Search Engine<\/a> yosemite and view and have it pull up all the photographs that were tagged with those words and play them as a slide show. I swear, 90 of them were taken from exactly the same spot which is one of the spots where the tour buses sort of take everybody through to whats called the tunnel view, if you know yosemite, up on high 140 and looking back at half dome and el captain and this classic view that we all know. If something if a hotel is built in the middle of that or a great lightning bolt struck the dome and cracked it in half thats not going to happen but we would be upset because the thing we think of as being unchanging would suddenly change. Thats part of the idea, again, of preservation, this sort of natural landscape frozen in time and staying the same for generations to come. One of the last aspects of yosemite, not only were they promoted in the early days, pitched to congress and promoted to the railroads, but once you get the automobile being invented and also our laives changing in terms of the work week getting shorter, weekends are invented and people have more leisure time. The combination of these two things really transforms the National Park<\/a>s. They become very auto oriented. You can see this in an old poster from the 1930s or 20s of yosemites grove with a tree that just fell over in the winter storms this year, with a car driving through the tunnel tree. This is a real transformation as we have more leisure. The Auto Industry<\/a> expressly wants there to be places for us to go in our cars to go visit. Because the more we drive cars, the more well buy gas, the more well buy new cars. This is very much sort of, again, a corporate enterprise. So, in the middle of world war i when the National Park<\/a>s service itself was created to manage the parks that had already been created, they had this all see America First<\/a> campaign. You dont need to go to europe for your vacation. Go see America First<\/a>. Get in your car. Get on the railroad and ride around and see the country that you live in. See the sort of iconic landscapes. So, parks were very even in these later days were very expressly there to inform us about what being an american was supposed to be and sort of expose us to these iconic Natural Landscapes<\/a> that were supposed to fill us with National Pride<\/a> and sort of a sense of where were coming from. What time is it . Were doing fine. I just realized i skipped over the numbers of yosemite visitors. Its really telling to see how it climbs up. In 1855 are the first tourists r entering Yosemite Valley<\/a> even before it was created into a park. By 1863 before it was set aside, 406 visitors arrived that year by steam boat and stage. Ten years later in 1875, they had built hotels and a road. There were wagons and supplies coming in. Eventually the railroad connects the area. By 1916 when the park service is created, 14,000 visitors to Yosemite Valley<\/a> in a year. Two years later in 1918, it had jumped to almost 27,000, nearly doubled, because of the automobile. In fact, one of the biggest advocates for establishing the National Park<\/a> service in 1916, again not the general public at large like we tend to think, but the triple a, the Automobile Industry<\/a> was saying we need these parks, we need this agency so that people have places to go. So, like i said, 1916, 14,000. 1918, 27,000. And in 1997 dont ask me why i dont have more recent data 4. 2 million, almost all arriving by car. So, the visitation to Yosemite Valley<\/a> is now completely insane and theres a lot of discussion about when does a park get too much visitation, should we start restraining some people. But, again, what i want you to really get from this is that parks, even though we think of them as these sort of pristine natural spaces values been intended for tourism. And specifically not for the backpacking tourism we think of today. Since the advent of rei and people now go backpacking all the time or doing other kinds of really extreme getting into the wilderness kinds of recreation. These are set up for very passive tourism, driving around in your car and looking out the window and just kind of saying, gosh, isnt that pretty . Taking a picture with your kodak or now your iphone. Its all kind of the same thing. Very tourist focused process. One of the other important aspects of National Park<\/a>s though is that these places were not empty when they were set aside to make parks. Almost every single park in both the west and the east, but certainly the western parks, almost all of them were inhabited by native americans before they became parks. So, part of the process of understanding the story of our National Park<\/a>s is also understanding the people who are displaced from parks in order that they become these sort of unchanging iconic natural scenery parks. Were going to talk more about wilderness in this class in a few weeks, but just to bring up the idea very briefly. Theres been a lot of critique over the last few years. Im someone who writes about this a lot myself, of how the concept of wilderness is ethnocentic. It tends to edit out the native peoples of americas and pretend that they werent there and instead sort of posit this idea that before white people started showing up in the western landscape, it was pristine nature that was sort of empty and uninhabited. Then we idealize wilderness as little fragments of those uninhabited places, which of course is not true. Again, spence, you had some readings from today, argues that uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved. And the sort of type of landscape that was being preserved then becomes, he says, remade or made real in a way that it never was real before in the National Park<\/a>s. You get these empty spaces that have only tourists running through them. Of course theyre not empty. Theres other people there now. Theyre just tourists that are visiting. Theres no longer anyone living there and thats because we had to push those people out and edit them out of the story. In some cases, they were literally edited out of the story in the sense that they were relocated. Theres a real similar time frame for when the first National Park<\/a>s are being created and when the first native American Reservations<\/a> are being created. In many cases, people are literally being taken out of a park space and put on a reservation space, which is much less grand in terms of the scenery. But it really overlooks the fact that not only were native peoples in place at the time, but had been in these landscapes for, in many cases, millenia, for hundreds or thousands of years. And theres an interesting sort of quality. These are some People Living<\/a> in Yosemite Valley<\/a> as part of the Museum Exhibit<\/a> in Yosemite Valley<\/a> for decades actually. They tried to move the native people out of Yosemite Valley<\/a>. They eventually let them back in but on the condition they live in their traditional ways as part of the display for the tourists. Not quite like animals in zoos but something close. They were on display and people would come by and remark at look at the outfits theyre wearing, look at the things theyre doing. Theyre there to be seen by the tourists. I think one of the things thats curious about our relationship with nature as represented by the parks is how sort of the original anglosettlers and these railroads and all these folks that are coming into these landscapes cant really make sense of people who live in nature rather than looking at nature. You know, thats that difference of being yosemite being a place to live in. Or is it being a scene that you stand back and you look at. You go to the tunnel view, which the tour bus takes you to and you take your standard photograph, you buy the postcard and get the view of the place. Its a very different relationship. Its not necessarily that one is better than the other but that theyre really not the same. And i think a lot of those early anglosettlers and developers really just couldnt understand this different way of interacting with nature. Theres even in the earliest writings, theres a sense that indians living in parks arent sort of adequately appreciative of the scenery in anesthetic way. Literally theres a doctor with the military group that first enters the valley as part of the military campaign. He kept a journal while they were doing this expedition. And he describes, once they catch up with the mee work and start trying to ask them questions through interpreters and so on, he refers to the indians being a spiritual place for them, he refers to as de demonism. Its not christianity, so its something terrible. Its a negative thing. He doesnt interpret that as the same kind of awe he experiences in these places. You could argue those are the same experience. Sort of seeing awe in the grandeur, having a sense of Spiritual Connection<\/a> to a landscape, have some similarity. But, you know, he just doesnt see the connection. In his account, he wrote in none of their objections made to the abandonment of their home while theyre being forced out was there anything said to indication appreciation of the scenery. These people dont think its pretty. They keep talking about how theres deer and other resources and its a really comfortable place to live and they like it and their family has been here a long time. Theyre not saying, wow, isnt it pretty. Therefore they dont deserve to live here. Theres sort of the sense that youre supposed to have this aesthetic reaction to a natural landscape and theres no room for any other kind. Therefore these people dont belong and should be moved out, which in todays parlance just seems very strange, right . Of course those are two different things. But at the time that seemed quite normal. Unfortunately this idea of a National Park<\/a> as natural scenery with wild life, with rivers, with mountains, without people who are residents has then been its become this National Park<\/a> ideal that we developed over time, the National Park<\/a> service when it was created was created to manage these kinds of spaces. So, this is what it takes to presume parks to be like. Every time you and i go and visit a park and we keep seeing these Natural Landscapes<\/a> that have no residence, where our movements are choreographed through the spaces, when you get to the overlook at the tunnel view in yosemite, you cant see the lodge or Curry Village<\/a> or the campgrounds. Theyre all neatly sort of hidden away amongst the trees. All we see is the empty natural scenery. So, each time we visit, that gets reinforced. Thats what a park is supposed to be like. We similarly have exported this idea. So, a lot of National Park<\/a>s in particularly developing world, in africa and south america and asia, they were created with sort of the burgeoning Environmental Movement<\/a> in the 1970s and 80s, replicated this idea, started kicking their Indigenous Peoples<\/a> out and recreating these empty wild life parks or nature parks for european and american tourists to come visit with their cameras. So, with see this kind of pattern over and over again of, you know, often destroying the native cultures in the process or making them incredibly impoverished and forcing them into more marginal existence around the edges of parks in order to create these kind of empty wilderness spaces. Again, theyre wonderful places. Theres nothing oh, theres this terrible nature. Its horrible. But we do want to understand that they come at a cost, that they come from removing people who are living in these places. Here again is you might have noticed in the previous picture these people are standing around in front of tepees. This is not their natural, their usual form of shelter. This is from the great plains. But its part of the american this photograph is from the 1920s. Its part of the Popular Culture<\/a> in the u. S. Of what indians are supposed to look like. What they actually look like is more like this in that area. They live in this wooden structure, similar shape, totally different construct. You know, again theyre not only made part of the display but made to change how they are living to fit our ideas of what a native american is supposed to be like. So, theres this real, i think, understanding that these National Park<\/a>s, these wilderness spaces have come at a cost of moving people out, of changing them from being lived in nature to being this kind of today aye conic nature. So, thats sort of sierra history starting with yosemite moving on to creating the National Park<\/a>s. What does this have to do with my mork . This is my opportunity to talk a little bit about my research here since i just had a book out last year, hooray, which is about Point Reyes National<\/a> seashore here in california, also part of the park system. Because its on a coastal system, its called the National Seashore<\/a>, but its owned and managed by the same agency. Its just a few miles west of here, conveniently. So, we can go on a field trip someday perhaps. Its been owned since 1962 by the National Park<\/a> service. If you look at the material they put out, theyll tell you it was created to protect wilderness and natural resources, sort of a protected chunk of undeveloped california coastline. You get their little park map, here you are, and this is kind of the wild california coast that this place is supposed to be protecting. But what you dont see very much information about at this park is what was it before it became a park . With yosemite, it was this native history that was edited out of the landscape like i said in the 1860s. This was made into a park in the 1960s. Maybe is it different . Both, it has a native history because im not a archaeologist i dont have a lot of research in that area. As a historian, im more interested in the recent history of this place. Since the 1860s, point reyes was a landscape with whole series of dairy ranches. This was a mexican land grant in the 30s. As often happened in california after we became the u. S. And became a state, there were legal disagreements over who owned which pieces of land. So, those would go to court n. Many instances, including here, instead of either of the two parties fighting over the land, because the legal fees were so high, the land ended up in the hand of the lawyers, which was what happened here. Two brothers, i kid you not, their last name is shafter. It just seems appropriate. One of them had a soninlaw. So, you have James Shafter<\/a> owned part of the land. Charles howard was his soninlaw. And i forget what the o stands for, oliver maybe, oliver shafter. The three of them coowned this entire peninsula and created a system of tenant run ranches. They owned the land. They set up these ranches. They were lawyers so they came up with creative names, a ranch, b ranch, c ranch, d ranch, all the way up to the point a friend of them saw it. Its called the pierce ranch. Its not part of the alphabet system. The alphabet comes back down the peninsula and they run out of letters. The southern end of the park you have ranch names that are more natural names like south end and wild cat ranch and lake ranch and so on. Until roughly the 1920s and 30s, each ranch was run by a tenant family. There were three different sort of waves of immigrants that came to this area and had experience running dairies. They were chosen as the people to run these ranches. Theres a group that live mostly out here and still do. Theres a group from ireland, also big dairy landscape, that are up on the point in the north. And then inland you have more italianspeaking pardon me italianspeaking swiss. So, you get names, all these ini names. The shafters owned the landscape from 1858 until the 1920s or so when the heirs to the original owners started to sell off chunks. In an unusual twist, instead of selling off to outsiders, they sold off for the most part to the tenant families. This is one of those classic and almost made up it just seems like this never really happened sort of American Dream<\/a> stories. You immigrate to the u. S. , you work hard as a tenant, and eventually you become the land owner. Very much that story. So, many of the families that owned these ranches, when the park was created, have been there and some of them there are still there have been there for five or six generations, which for california is pretty darn old. Back east or europe, 150 years is nothing, but out here thats pretty unusual. Around the same time as this conversion from the shafters owning the shafter family owning the land to the tenant families owning it, most of the dairies converted from producing butter and cheese, which was mostly shipped by skooner, to creating liquid milk and shipping it by truck. Roads got improved around the same time. Refrigeration got improved. And now selling liquid milk is much more possible. Dairies are theyre pretty extensive places. This is the sea ranch out on the peninsula. And this is another one further up. They have a lot of buildings. Theres a lot of impacts. This is not a wilderness is the point im trying to make here. Theres a lot of buildings, a lot offen fences, a lot of land use going on here. Cows need to be milked twice a day every day, day in, day out, they dont take vacations. The cows are coming back to the bodi barns twice a day. So, not a pristine space. Not a wilderness. Yet this was seen as a great place to put a National Seashore<\/a> in the 1960s. This was a period of time there was a big sort of parks for the People Movement<\/a> across the nation. The National Park<\/a> service was specifically looking for places to create new parks that were close to urban areas and that would provide specifically beach access. So, this is really what the focus was. Both back east, you get places like cape cod, all these National Seashore<\/a>s, a bunch of National Lakeshores<\/a> in the great lakes, and a series of National Seashore<\/a>s out here including point reyes. The way the park was set up initially was expressly dezieped to try to accommodate the still operating ranches. At the time, there were 25 either dairy or beef ranches operating on the peninsula, within the boundaries of the seashore. Trying to keep them in place was both a political necessity. The locals never would have gotten along with this park idea if it was going to change their local economy as much as taking out 25 ranches. It would have had a huge impact. But then also theres some if you read through the hearings and the other sort of discussion thats going on about the park, theres a real appreciation of the scenic quality of the pastoral landscapes. For someone driving out from san francisco, seeing cows and these beautiful pastures is part of the aesthetic experience. So, that was really being touted as one of the strong points of this place. But as you may, hopefully, are starting to get from this lecture today, the park service is when it comes to preservation, its not a neutral actor. It has built into that agency from its early history a strong sense of what a National Park<\/a> is supposed to be like. And those early National Park<\/a>s are whats shaping that. Places like yosemite are the model of how parks are going to be set up and managed. And places that have working landscapes like point reyes dont fit in as well. Im not sure if you can quite read it. I put a quote from a park service historian on this slide. He says that given the strength and persistence of ancestral attitudes, these old ideas about what a park is supposed to be within the service, its core values are likely to unlast any one director, even one who is steadily determined to change them. These ideas are really built into the landscape itself and into the ways that we manage these spaces to try and sort of keep them as these unchanging natural scenery places that have working lands that have People Living<\/a> on them and livestock mauving around in them dont fit that very well. And one of the things thats important to understand about the Park Services<\/a> again, when its first being set up, its not a focus on natural resources. Ecology as a science doesnt exist yet in 1916, or its barely starting to exist. Its really a focus on the scenery, not on the science. And thats followed through, actually, until fairly recently in the park service. So, this can sort of help us to understand some of the contradictory differences between what the agency says theyre wanting to do and what the actual outcomes of their management on the landscape can be. Thats really what ive found in my research at point reyes. So, just a quick overview of some of the things that have happened there. Through the sort of management policies and actions, the park service has been slowly edited out a lot of the Human History<\/a> of this place. Either physically through moving buildings roughly half of the buildings and other structures that were in place in 1962 are gone now. And again, its not necessarily that they were the best things in earth, but theyve either been removed or torn down or sometimes burned for fire training. This idea that we should push the landscape to being more natural looking and to have fewer structures in it. Its not a formal policy of the park service, but its the way that their management actions tend to drive almost without noticing it. When i actually did the count, tried to figure out how many from maps and photographs, how many buildings were there in 1962 and how many are there today . I think the park service was generally surprised that as many have disappeared as have. So, that its not that theyre conscious of these changes that theyre causing over time, but that these things are happening sort of slowly through these ideas about what management should be driving for. Theres far fewer ranches in place in operation now, where we went from 25 in 1962, theres currently 11, six that are dairies and five that are beef ranches within the point reyes boundary itself. Some of those ranches are being taken care of. Some of the stilloperating ones, theyre all still being lived in. Some of the ones that arent being lived in are being taken care of like pardon me, im a little off the pierce ranch which has become sort of a walkthrough exhibit. The buildings, theyve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fixing the buildings up with very Historic Preservation<\/a> appropriate methodology. They used the right kinds of nails for the era this was build and the right technology for fixing them. Its actually the ranch thats in the best shape in the park physically. But you may be able to see theres little plaques and a path. Visitors can walk around and look at the buildings and peer at them and read about them but nobody lives there, except the main house which is housing park service staff. Other ranches where the residents have moved out on their own or been evicted are not necessarily taken care of very well. This is the d ranch out near drakes beach. This is the main old victorian house dating back to the 1880s and a photograph from the same spot from the 1950s. You cant really see it very well from this distance, but theres beautiful roses on each side and everythings in perfect shape. Many of the neighbors describe to me that back in its day the d ranch was the prettiest ranch on the point. It really was a show case. You can see now its been sitting empty for about 10 years. A bunch of the windows are broken. The fog this is an area thats incredibly foggy, incredibly windy, a lot of salt air from the ocean. An unlived in building is going to deteriorate quickly. The old creamery which dated to the 1880s which was across the way from the building collapsed a few years ago and has been taken away. With the area, theres also been creation of wilderness, designated wilderness, making this lived in place into sort of this wild pristine nature. And thats complete with wild life. These are elk that had lived on the peninsula back in the 1800s and long before. They had been hunted out of the area by about the 1850s, even before the dairy started moving in and were gone from this region until they were reintroduced in 1978. Theyve since proliferated. Their herds are doing quite well. Theres a lack of large predators in what would have been a natural im putting natural in air quotes a natural managed landscape. You would have had coastal peoples burning the landscape with some regularity. You would have had grizzly bears and mountain lions picking off mostly the young tuly elk. Would have kept the population in check. They would have been hunted. Right now theres no hunting and no predators except a couple mountain lines living on the ridge. Theres nothing to control the population and its booming. Its taken a few dips in recent years because of drought but theres been this big management question of what do we do to manage these animals . Theyve talked about using contraception which i dont want to know the details of or possibly moving some of them out to another park. Its this place thats almost masquerades as being wild and natural yet its deeply managed. They cant just leave the elk alone and leave everything untouched. Theres a need to keep trying to shape this place to make it look like sort of the iconic nature that we all expect when we arrive in a park. What little historical material there is at point reyes, the next time youre out there, check out the visitor center. Check out the one at drakes beach. Theres little historical material sort of interpreted for visitors. What there is is mostly focused on sir Francis Drake<\/a> who probably landed for about a week when his ship was blown off course in the 1400s sometime. The more recent past in term of the ranches and the very long past of the coastal miwok neither one is wellrepresented in the place. Whats been really striking, again, ill wrap up with this, is that not only most visitors its understandable that most visitors dont know the history of this place. Its not being interpreted by the park service for them. Even the park managers dont remember or dont have any ideas of what this old history was, of what was there before they showed up. Park staff, like any other job, has turnover. Someone might work there for five years and move on to another park. The people who come in dont have a lot of material to read on the history of this place. Gradually the memory of what was there fades away. They dont interact very much, the staff dont interact with the ranchers who still live within the seashore. Ever since i started, ive been researching this place since the late 1990s. When people visit the seashore for the first time, theres a lot of questions about why are there cows here . Ranches dont seem like they belong in a National Park<\/a>. We bring our own ideas of what a National Park<\/a> is supposed to be and we dont remember seeing cows in yosemite or yellowstone or other parks. It becomes a selfreplicating cycle where people question the original residence of this park and why theyre still in place. They dont know the story of how they got there and so then advocate for them to be moved out. Theres been a number of lawsuits in recent years trying to push some of the last remaining residence out of the park. So one of the things i want you to just closing with this image of the landscape at point reyes is remembering that all landscapes have histories. And even places that we think of as Natural Landscapes<\/a> have histories that often is quite invisible to us as a viewer. These places were shaped by other peoples lives, whether that be native americans or more recent settlers like the ranchers at point reyes and i think theres a need to have if not a formal recognition of the relationship with the landscape, at least a respect for the ways in which their work has made these places. The reason that there are grassy fields out at point reyes which are very green this time of year is because of the miwok burning for hundreds of thousands of years and because cattle ranch b has been taking place since then. If you take the cattle off and the burning off, just like at Yosemite Valley<\/a>, here you have coastal brush moving in, taking over. You wouldnt have green grass because these coastal grasslands are not in themselves Natural Landscapes<\/a>. Theyre created landscapes through peoples work. So trying to understand both the fact that people were in these places or if they still are, valuing their contribution to that place. So thats sort of the end of my lecture today. I wondered if you guys had any questions that i can answer. What got you interested in point reyes in the first place. Can you ask that question again . What got you interested in point reyes in the first place . I got very interested i come from a background as a biologyist, that was my i got any College Degree<\/a> in biology in uc berkeley and my parents are biologists, i thought i was going to be biologist but i started getting interested in the concept of how we think about the natural world. I was interested in thinking about how we think about frongs or why we think theyre important. I started getting into the social science aspects of nature landscapes and i took a class at uc berkeley in my graduate program from a law professor who was teaching a class on preservation law and what was unusual, he spent half the semester talking about Natural Preservation<\/a> about National Park<\/a>s, endangered species, wilderness and the other half we talked about cultural preservation. Museums, communities, the amish who are trying to protect their sense of cultural identity and working landscapes like point reyes. And i started to realize how similar the impulses of reservation are on the natural and cultural side. I got interested in places where they come together. To me, thats what National Park<\/a>s are. Theyre these odd natural and cultural constructs but we pretend that the cultural isnt there and we only see the natural. Point reyes, because it is a livedin National Park<\/a>, thats unusual in the United States<\/a> today. There are some. Theres probably 50 or 60 that have some kind of land use or residents living in the park. Out of 400 units, thats not have many. It was conveniently located nearby and as i moved from being a graduate student at berkeley and getting a job, it was still conveniently nearby. But it also had that mixture of natural and cultural i found it very intriguing to understand how did we move from a fairly corporatized, in a way, landscape, one that was divided out into ranches and being utilized for economic use to something that is sort of recreated as pristine nature and understanding that transformation. Its a perfect case study for seeing that change over time. Other questions about preservation or parks . I have a question. In the chapter we read for today you talk about how those in power in society influenced whats valued and whats preserved. Im wondering what you think about the current president ial administration, the impact it might have on a place like point reyes and other National Park<\/a>s. Thats an excellent question that i have absolutely no idea how to answer. Ive been asked this question a few times since the election in november. Its hard to say. Some people would presume that the new administration is more open to either privatizing public lands. The guy that hes appointed zinke, as the secretary of the interior, has been not an advocate for privatization of public lands. So that seems like its probably not on the table. There might be more openness to this kind of working landscape, to the recognizing that you can have economic uses of land and Environmental Protection<\/a> at the same time. They dont have to be oppositional. That said, the new administration doesnt seem particularly supportive of Environmental Concerns<\/a> at all. So that is where its kind of a wild card, i think at this point, in terms of how that will effect management on the ground. The other interesting factor that is unique to the park service and more current day park Service Rather<\/a> than the history of the park service, each individual park, theyre each created by a separate act of congress. Theres no blanket authority over all of them. Theres some guidelines that the park service has as its natural policy, each park, each superintendent, has a lot of authority a lot of latitude about how to make their own decisions about how to manage that place. Theres a wide discretion that they have. A real variation in terms of how parks are managed. Ive often used a comparison of point reyes to another park that is in ohio. It used to be National Recreation<\/a> area. This is a place where the current superintendent has been very interested for the last 15, 20 years in bringing agriculture back into the park after it had been pushed out through a bunch of evictions in the 1970s and has come up with interesting models for doing that, of creating new longterm leases for agriculturists who will commit to being organic, having a smallscale production, for not minding tourists coming by and looking at what theyre doing. Theres this new model for encouragi encouraging agriculture. I would think if that was happening one place, it would be happening in others. The opposite has been happening at point reyes, theres been a deemphasize of the cultural landscape. Theres this lack of consistency across parks which means that a new administration at the National Level<\/a> doesnt actually necessarily change very much at the each park level because those superintendents have a lot of discretion to kind of do their own thing and maybe go a different direction than the National Level<\/a> is going. Thats a long way of saying, i dont know. But time will tell. Anything else . Well wrap up the lecture for the day, take a break, and do our discussion of the reading after words. This week, were featuring American History<\/a> tv programs. Tonight, 102 minutes the untold story of the fight to survive inside the twin towers. The author conducted interviews of families who made lastminute contact with friends and relatives on the morning of september 11th 2001. Enjoy American History<\/a> tv this week and every weekend on cspan3. Every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History<\/a> tv on cspan3, go inside a Different College<\/a> classroom and hear about topics ranging from the american revolution, civil rights and u. S. President s to 9 11. Thanks for your patience and for logging into class. With most campuses closed, watch professors transfer teaching to a virtual setting to engage with their students. Gorbachev did most of the work, but reagan met him halfway, reagan encouraged him, reagan supported him. Freedom of the press, madison called it freedom of the use of the press and its freedom to print things and publish things, its not a freedom for what we refer","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"archive.org","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","width":"800","height":"600","url":"\/\/ia800401.us.archive.org\/16\/items\/CSPAN3_20200911_165000_Lectures_in_History_Laura_Watt_on_Landscape_Preservation_and_National_Parks\/CSPAN3_20200911_165000_Lectures_in_History_Laura_Watt_on_Landscape_Preservation_and_National_Parks.thumbs\/CSPAN3_20200911_165000_Lectures_in_History_Laura_Watt_on_Landscape_Preservation_and_National_Parks_000001.jpg"}},"autauthor":{"@type":"Organization"},"author":{"sameAs":"archive.org","name":"archive.org"}}],"coverageEndTime":"20240716T12:35:10+00:00"}