Changes the places we set aside as parks or other protected areas. The intention here is really, not only to understand the history of these kinds of protected spaces, but then also to make the process of preservation more visible. To make it easier to understand not only the history of parks and how they have changed over time, but sort of more importantly, why they have changed over time. Because most of us when we think of preservation we think of something staying the same. And yet, preservation actually changes things, so that is really kind of the focus we are going to aim at today. Im going to see if i can manage this. There i go. So in the context of open space lands here in the u. S. , there is this sort of presumption that Public Ownership is the best way to protect a landscape. We even see the mini series by can burns from ways back on National Parks. It was called americas best idea. Thats actually taken from a quote. That natural spaces that have trails for hiking and sightseeing and so on, are representative of sort of pure and pristine nature that has just had some boundaries sort of put around it and has been kept the same, like a vase in a museum. Just kind of static and never changing. Set aside unchanging for generations, that is literally part of the founding legislation for the National Park service, which was written and passed by congress in 1916. So the Park Service Just had their centennial last year. You can see their fundamental purpose is to conserve scenery and provide for the enjoyment, as well as leave it unimpaired. The impression you get from this language is that parks are unimpaired and staying the same for generations through time. So what im going so what my research has focused on for years and what we are going to focus on today is how that unchanging this is actually sort of hiding a whole bunch of landscape change that is 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 lengthen, and environmental historian and mentor of mine, she states very clearly that all ecosystems are the product of history. That includes both their natural and cultural or social history. One of the things that i do in my work is look at landscape change overtime and how it can tell us something about the ideas that people have about landscape overtime. How those ideas change with changing times. So a lot of this is really underlining both why understanding environmental history is important to begin with, but then also seeing the current state of the ecosystem. How and why it got there from the social and cultural side as well. So we are going to start with just, again, review for my class. This concept of landscape. Landscapes are sort of inherently formed by interactions between people and place. So they are always about this interaction. Pierce lewis, a geographer, wrote that there are on winning the aga fees. Essentially, by shaping the land and influenced by what is on the land and possible there, come on in. There is lots of seat in the front. We essentially right our own autobiographies in the landscape without realizing we are doing it. So we are leaving traces of the ideas that we have and the ways which we interact with the land, all of those things. And for those of us who are researchers and interested in studying environmental history, we can then come along and look at the landscape and read something as if it were a book or a another kind of text. We can actually 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 even Downtown Manhattan has little plants growing in places and there are pigeons playing everywhere. There is a lot of nature even in the middle of a city. Similarly, the most remote and pristine looking wilderness has a lot of cultural overlay and management, etc. Thats influencing with the places like. And lastly, all landscapes are dynamic. They are always changing. There is no way of holding them still the way that we do with a vase in a museum. You can put aiming boss on a shelf and maybe have some nice climate controlled air and lighting for it and it will just say stay pretty much the same for centuries. We cannot do that with landscapes. There is no way of holding them still. They are constantly shifting with climactic changes and culture changes and social changes. That is really what i am interested in looking at. A prime example is National Parks. In the way that we often dont notice that landscape change is occurring because it happened so slowly. So many of us have visited Yosemite Valley. This is a photo that i took when i was visiting there alongside the merced river. Its really striking to look at pictures of the same place over time. So, again, i think the first week of this course we look at some of the same images. This is a photograph taken from almost the same location near the merced river, but taken in 1865. What you can see in it, its a little difficult, the trees are in the way, but you can see there is a big meadow in the back. There are some conifers trees, but theres also a lot of oak trees and sort of willows. It is a much more open landscape than what we see today. Similarly, we can look at painting from the 18 seventies 1870s. Hes done some fancy work with the sides of the valley. You see they do not match up if you look at a photograph. But what is interesting about this pen painting is that it is showing us the landscape of this ecosystem in the 1870s. Its a real contrast to the landscape that we see today which is almost all dark kind of race forest. Not that one is better than the other or preferable, but that the ecosystem here has changed enormously because this place was preserved. This was a place where native american had lived for centuries and have been doing Landscape Management of their own, mostly through burning. Once that management was stopped and the place was protected, the ecological shifts started occurring. But those of us who visit today, and we see this, we think this is what it has always been like. Thats because we dont know it has that history. That is part of what we will be looking at today, its trying to understand the ways in which parks change overtime. How they change for more than we recognize and how that helps us to understand what is going on with park protection. One of the other things that most of us take public parks for granted. Most of us have lived with parks in cities and National Parks to go visit. They are kind of part of our culture now, but that is very recent. Public parks are a fairly novel invention in a lot of ways. They evolved during the 1800s. Essentially out both out of both the admiration of private estates in england where they would sort have been, whats the tv show . Downtown abby . Downtown abby, yes, thank you. I always forget words. Very downtown at the asked. You have this huge estate with Rolling Hills and people strolling about. But of course, most people could not visit those estates, they were privately owned by individual families. So with an admiration for those kinds of spaces, but here in the u. S. , the idea that we wanted that space to be more democratic. To be more open to the public rather than just private. They also involved in some ways from using certain public spaces like cemeteries very informally for going for an afternoon walk. It seems odd to us now that you would sort of go strolling in a cemetery. They seem much more formal now, but back in the 1800s, especially in the 1830s through the 1860s or so, it was a very common thing in large cities. It was pretty much the only open space available, so people would go out for a walk and just enjoy the view and the green grass and the stones. So sort of a combination of these different kinds of very formal spaces that we didnt want to repeat here in the u. S. And these more informal uses. Similarly, preservation itself of Historic Buildings say was originally something undertaken by private wealthy individuals. George washingtons estate in mount verdant for instance, was protected by the mount vernon ladies association. A private organization. The idea that government should protect and preserve places, was not part of our culture until sort of the late 1800s. One of the people most responsible for this was frederick. He was a Landscape Architect and park designer, he famously designed central park in new york city. The original design is hard to see, but from the 18 sixties. And essentially what he is doing at the time and it was not central in new york city it was actually way out in the sticks, but he had the foresight to know that the city would grow up around the park, and he wanted to create the space of nature for people to visit and to sort of strolled around and enjoy, and this idea to create and design a wilderness but it was not just a case of setting aside a natural landscape and leaving it alone. But thats what we tend to think of what we think of park protection. What he was doing was making nature what out of the time was ships meadows and theres a big grassy area in central park all the sheep meadow. Because it was cheap on it. But from this old image, literally moving around, and planting trees and bringing nature in to a degree that is deeply deeply designed and has anyone been to central park in this room . A couple of people. When you are there it feels very natural and i have a picture here of new york city, weve central park today and its completely forested, and there are hills and dales, and there are lakes and lots of lots of dense trees, a lot of paths. It feels like you are in a pristine piece of forest, which is been left behind without any buildings. But almost every aspect of it, with the exception of a few granite boulders, all the lakes and hills, theyre all completely designed and therefore their artificial. But we do not feel like theyre artificial, we interviewed them as natural. So that is this idea that homestead brought to his work of designing nature and in essence to make it more natural. Or more natural seeding, them might have been there originally. He is also he had a lot of nervous conditions himself as a young man, he was ill a lot and he had this idea that nature could be sort of a therapy for people, and not literally like psycho therapy, but a relief from your stresses of ordinary daily life in urban settings, and like noise and trains running by and crowding and he thought what people need is this escape valve in the sense and to stroll around on sunday with your sweeter on your arm, and enjoy a contemplative experience of nature and he explicitly wanted this to be a public space. Open to all classes, not just the wealthy. That was a big part of his ambition. Yet the rules he put in place, for your behavior when youre in the park, were actually much more geared toward middle class and upper class visitors, then towards working people. They had a lot of rules about you cant have a lot of noise, there is no organized sports allowed. It is very much a version of nature, that is contemplative and quiet and sort of strolling about. Where is if you are really a working nine to five or it wasnt 95 back then it was more like six to eight no or 12 or 14 working days and you have one day off. Where you can blow off steam, so people want to play stick ball in the streets and they want to drink beer and run around and none that was allowed so in essence this was created as a public space, but really privileged certain users over others. And we will see that these early ideas of how youre supposed to behave in a park and who the park is aimed towards and still carries through and a lot of our National Parks today there are a lot of presumptions, that these parks are open to everybody but there are particular ways you are supposed to behave and interact with nature when youre there. And ways it or not appropriate so you will not find soccer fields in a National Park. You will find hiking trails, not everybody likes hiking well thats too bad and there is this element to it as well so homestead starts off this idea of this parks designed nature and it goes from how do we get from this design city park like central park to the National Parks that we have the. In some ways the National Parks, where they didnt become a National Park until much later, the 19 forties and fifties. Thats Niagara Falls new york. And the for a lot of western expansion started bringing awareness of the big monumental western landscapes that we are familiar with, and 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 stunning. Ive just seen pictures but its pretty great. And after the erie canal opened up easier transportation in the new york area, it became you know it doesnt seem fast to us but takes at least two days to get from new york city, tonight are false but that was instead of a week. So its greatly easier to get there, and you get this big influx of tourists, coming from new york and boston and the urban cities, who wanted to go and visit niagara. They go their they had their photograph taken, i could not find a date for this pitcher, but certainly its around the late 1800s certainly. One of the problems of niagara, and the tourists alongside the beautiful false, having your photograph taken, with the big few camera, to one of the problems with Niagara Falls though, there were no public controls in the way that we understand them now. Again, people just didnt have that cultural conception of government stepping in to control the space anyway. And so what happened, was you get all these little tourist stands, like we get in a lot of places today and setting up and saying were going to sell postcards, you know pena dollar, or five cents or whatever the price was, and stand here and get the best view. There would be photographers, plying their trade and so you got all this messiness, kind of messing up the scene. So, what ends up happening is, the grandeur of the false gets messy and there are little stands, people selling the equivalent of hotdog and cotton candy today. They are missing up the view, and a bunch of european visitors come to visit, and they write criticisms. They say these tacky americans, they would sell their grandmother to make a dollar. They are essentially ruining the view in order to have these small scale, entrepreneurial things. And they think its incredibly tacky, and how dare they. And 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 shaken off the influence of europe, great britain, specifically but europe in general, and all of our cultural references arc from europe. All of the writers we read, all the painters we look, at all of this sort of sense of high culture that we have, is european. So there is this push, especially with the europeans not criticizing us and saying theyre so tacky, so there is this push to try and say what do we have that is unique and is different and shows how great the u. S. Is . And one of the things and they start to focus on, are the Natural Landscapes. 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 discovered quote unquote, by a battalion of military folks who are chasing some native americans up the river, and they come out into this amazing valley. And they are stunned by the incredible scenery that they see, and Yosemite Valley is unlike almost anywhere on earth. There are these huge granite cliffs, dominating this area, and 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 do not 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. They are often describing, them in comparison to castles in europe, or old ruins in rome and saying how much cooler, essentially these places are and its like you can have some tumble down cancel, or you could have this amazing round part of stone and graham night, and all this comparison going on. So nature takes on a new meaning, being symbolic of our useful strength and vigor, as a nation. It becomes very nationalistic, to experience these kinds of monumental western landscapes. And it is not just a landscape in this case, there was similar interest in the red wood trees. Both the coastal red was here, in coastal california and the giants a coy is of the sierra. Again its symbolic of something that our nation had that others didnt and just the sheer size of these things and there are all kinds of photographss of the sequoias trees. And theyre saying we have gigantic this is, this is better than any tree youre going to find in europe. Its bigger and taller and its just what we are doing thats great. And the funniest thing for me about the giant sequoias. Is the botanists who are all about identifying speech sees in their early stage, of biological science in the 18 sixties or so. And they have this giant fight over what to call the sequoias with their latin name. And the british botanists, wanted sequoias wellington, and the United States wanted sequoias washington. They see after washington. So the basically they stuck with sequoia gigantia. That is more descriptive. This is from a surveyor in 1864. He writes, no fragment of human work, broken pillar or sand worn image have lifted over pathetic deserts, none of these have anything like the power of these monuments of the living antiquity. This is the idea that we have a past, we dont need europes