Talking about landscapes and preservation and sort of how preservation unexpectedly changes the places that we set aside as parks or other protected. The intention here is really not only to sort of understand the history of these kinds of protected spaces, but then also to make the process of preservation more visible, to make easier to understand not only the history of parks and how they have changed over time, but sort of more importantly, why they changed over time. Because most of us, when we think about preservation, we think about some things staying the same, and yet preservation actually things. So thats really kind of the focus were going to aim at today. And im going to manage this. So there we go. So in the context of of open space lands here in the u. S. , were often there sort of this presumption that Public Ownership is the best way to protect the landscape. And we even see, you know, the the mini series by ken burns from a ways back on National Parks that was called americas best idea, which is actually taken from a quote from wall stegner that, you know, natural spaces that have trails and sort of height for hiking and sightseeing and so on are representative of sort of pure, pristine nature, or thats just had sort of some boundaries put around it. And its been kept the same. Like a vase in a museum just kind of static and ever never changing set aside unchanged 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 Just had their centennial last year. Lots of hoopla and and so you can see that their fundamental purpose is to conserve scenery and provide for the enjoyment as well as leave it unimpaired. The impression, the impression you get from this language is that parks are unimpaired and staying the same for generations through time. And so what im going to sort of what my research has focused on for and what were going to focus on today is how that unchanging this is actually sort of hiding a whole bunch of landscape change thats occurring as places are preserved. So just as little backdrop, this will be familiar to some of you from earlier in the semester. This that all ecosystems is from nancy langston, an environmental historian and mentor of mine. She states very clearly that all ecosystems are the product of history, including both are natural and their cultural or social history. So one of the things that i do in my work is looking at how looking at landscape change over time can really tell us something about the ideas that people have about over time and how ideas changed change with changing times. So a lot of this is really underlining both why understanding environmental history is important with, but then also sort of sort of the current of that ecosystem. How and why got there from the social or cultural side as well. So were going to start with just again, review for my class, this concept of landscape landscapes, are you sort of inherently an interaction formed by interaction between people in place . So theyre always about this. Pearce lewis, a geographer, wrote that there are unwitting autobiographies that, you know, essentially we by shaping the land, by being influenced by whats on the land and is possible there come in. Theres lots of seats in the front. We essentially write our own autobiographies in the landscape without realizing were doing so. Were leaving traces of the ideas that we have, ways in which we interact with the land. All those things. And for those of us who are researchers and interested in studying environmental history, we can then come along and look at the landscape and read something as if it were a book or another kind of text. We can actually read something about whos been here and what theyve been. From looking at the landscape and how it changes over time. We may use 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 places and theres pigeons flying everywhere. And theres a lot of nature, even in the middle of a city. And similarly, the most remote sort of pristine looking wilderness has a lot of cultural overlay, cultural management, etc. Thats influencing what that place is like. And lastly, all landscapes are dynamic, always changing. Theres no way of holding them still the way we do with a vase in the museum. You know, you can put the ming vase on a on a shelf and maybe have some nice climate controlled air and lighting for it and it will stay pretty much the same for centuries. And we cant do that with landscapes. Theres no way of holding them still. Theyre constantly with climatic changes, with ecological changes, and with cultural social changes. So thats what im interested in looking at and in a prime example is, National Parks in the way that we often dont notice that landscape change is occurring because it happens so slowly, so many of us have visited the Yosemite Valley. This is a photo that i took when i was visiting there alongside the red river and. Its really striking to look at pictures of the same place over time. So again, i think the first week of this course, we looked at some of these same images. This is a photograph taken from almost exactly the same location near the merced river, but taken in 1865 by carleton watkins. And what you can see in it, a little bit difficult. Trees are in the way, but you can see theres a big meadow in the back. There are some coniferous trees, but theres also a lot of oak of oak trees and sort of willows. Its a much more open landscape than what we see today. Similarly, we can look at paintings from the 1870s. This is by albert. Hes done a little fancy footwork with the sides of the valley. They actually dont match up. If you look at a photograph today, youll realize that this side of the valley is about five miles west of that side of the valley. In his painting. But whats interesting about this painting is, again, its showing us the ecosystem of this landscape in the 1870s, which again is meadows and oak woodlands with a few coniferous trees. Its a real contrast to the landscape that see today, which is almost all dark, coniferous forest. Not that one is better than the other or preferable but that the ecosystem here is changed enormously because this place was preserved. This was a place where native americans had lived for centuries and had been doing Landscape Management of their own, mostly through burning. Once that management was stopped, the place was protected, the ecological shifts occurring. But those of us who visit today and we see this, we think, oh, this is what its always been like, because we dont know that it has that history. So thats part of what were going to be looking at today is to understand the ways in which parks change over time, how they change far more than we recognize and how that helps us to understand whats going on with park protection. So what are the other things that, you know, most of us sort of take public parks for granted in a way that, you know, most of us have grown up with parks in cities and National Parks to go visit. Theyre kind of part of our culture now, but thats fairly recent. Public parks are a fairly novel invention in a lot of ways. They evolved during the hundreds, essentially of both the admiration of wealthy estates, estates in england where. They would be sort of, you know, sort of, oh, whats the tv show . The. Downton abbey. Yes. Thank you. I always forget words. Youre very Downton Abbey ask, you know, this huge estate with role hills and people strolling about. But of course, most people couldnt visit those estates. They were privately owned by individual families. So was an admiration for those kinds spaces. But here in the u. S. , this idea that we wanted that space to be more democratic, to be more open to the public rather than just private they also evolved in some ways from using a certain public spaces like semeta, where blair cemeterys very for going for an afternoon. 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 to the 1860s or so, that was a very common thing in a lot of large cities, was pretty much the only open space available. And so people would go out for a walk. Just enjoy the view and the green grass and 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 individual. George washingtons estate at mount, for instance, was protected by a the mount vernon ladies associate in a private organization. The idea that government should protect and preserve places was not just wasnt part of our culture and till the sort of late 1800s. One of the people who was most responsible for that is this guy. This is Frederick Law Olmsted and. He was a Landscape Architect and park designer. He very famously designed central park in new york city. Ive got the original design here. Its a little hard to see, but from from the 1860s and essentially what he was doing at the time and this was actually not central in new york city, was out in the sticks, but he had foresight to know that the city would grow up around the park and wanted to create a space of of nature for sort people to visit, to just sort of stroll around and, enjoy this idea of sort of creating and designing a wilderness. This was not just a case of setting aside an already natural landscape and leaving it alone, which is again, what we tend to think of when we think of park protection, what he was doing was making out of what at the time was mostly old sheeps meadows. There actually is a big grassy area in central park called the sheeps meadow, and thats why because there were sheep on it. But, but you know, from this old image moving, moving earth around, planting trees and bringing nature in to a degree deeply, deeply designed. Has anyone been to central park in this room . A couple of people. If when youre there, it feels very natural. Ive got a picture here of new york city with central park today. Its completely forested. Theres sort of hills and dales theres lakes, lots and lots of dense trees, a lot of little paths. So it really feels like youre in a pristine piece of york forest thats just been left behind without any buildings, but almost every aspect of it was an exception of a couple of big granite boulders, all the hills, all the forest all the lakes are all completely designed and therefore artificial. But we dont feel like theyre artificial. We interpret them as natural as a natural space. And so thats really this idea that olmstead brought to his work was designing nature to an end, in essence, make it more natural or more natural seeming than what might have been there originally. He also very hes very he actually had a lot of nervous conditions himself as a young man and was ill a lot. And he had really had this idea that nature could be sort of a therapy for people that not literally sort psychotherapy, but as a relief from sort of your your stresses of ordinary daily life in an urban setting with all the noise and the sort of, you know, trains running by and all kinds of crowding and he thought what people need is sort of this is this escape valve in a sense, to go and stroll around on sunday with your sweetheart on your arm, enjoying a sort of a contemplative experience of nature. He very explicitly wanted this to be a public space, open to all classes, not to the wealthy. So that was really a big part of his of his ambition. Yet the rules that he put in place for your behavior you were in the park were actually more geared toward middle class and upper class than towards working people. They 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 sort strolling about. Whereas if youre a real working, working 9 to 5 or it wasnt 9 to 5 back then, it was more like, you know, 6 to 8, you know, 12 or 14 hour working days, six days a week, you have one day off to kind of blow steam. So people want to play stickball all in the streets and they want to drink beer and they want to run around. And none of that was allowed. So in essence, this was created as a public space, but really privilege 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 sort of aimed toward still through and a lot of our National Parks, theres a lot of presumptions that these parks are open to everybody, but that there are particular ways youre supposed to behave and interact with nature when youre there and other ways are not appropriate. So youre not to find soccer fields in a National Park. Youre going to find hiking trails. Not everybody likes to go hiking to bed, so is sort of this this element to it as. So olmstead sort of starts off this idea of of nature of parks as design nature. This then gets combined sort of how do we get from these designed city parks like central park to the National Parks that we have in some the National Parks are vintage originated with a place that didnt become a National Park until much later. I think in the 1940s or fifties, which is niagara in new york before. A lot of western expansion really started bringing awareness of the big monument to the western landscapes that we are with before, in the early 1800s, niagara was considered one of the most stunning Natural Landscapes that north had to offer. It is pretty stunning. I have never been there. Ive just seen pictures, but its pretty great. And after the erie canal opened up easier transportation in new york area became. It still doesnt seem fast to us would take at least two days to get from new york city to Niagara Falls. But that was of a week. So it was greatly easy, greatly easier to get there. And you get this big influx tourists coming from new and boston from sort of the urban cities wanting to go and visit. Its this beautiful place. They go and have their photograph taken. I couldnt find a date for this picture, but clearly sort of the late 1800s, some point. But one of the problems that niagara heres just you know the tourists alongside beautiful falls having their taken with a big view camera one of the problems Niagara Falls though was there werent any public controls in a way that we understand them now again wasnt an idea people just didnt have that cultural conception government stepping in to control space in any way and and so what happened . Youd get all these little sort of tourist stands like get in a lot of places today. So setting up saying, hey, were going to sell postcards, you know, pay me a dollar or 0. 05 or whatever the price was, and stand here and get the best view. There would be photographers plying their trade and and so you got all this sort of messiness kind of messing up the scene. Great. So what ends up happening is the the sort of the grandeur of the falls gets messy. Theres little stands. Theres people, you know, the equivalent of hotdogs and cotton candy kind of messing up the view and a bunch of european come to visit. And they write criticism, say, oh, these tacky american, you know, they would sell their grandmother to, make a dollar theyre theyre essentially ruining view in order to make these sort of, you know, have this sort of small scale 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 influence of europe. The Great Britain specifically, but europe in general. Yet all of our cultural references are from europe all of the writers we read all the painters, we look at all of the sort of sense of high culture we have is european. And so theres this theres push. When the europeans are now criticizing us and saying, oh, theyre so tacky, theres this push to try and say, what do we have that is unique and is different and how great the u. S. Is. And one of the things that they start to focus on are the Natural Landscapes that especially the western sort of reveals as people are moving west. And so Niagara Falls, essentially a negative example, sort of of what not to do. We dont want to mess things the way we did there. So when Yosemite Valley here in california is. Quote unquote, discovered by a battalion of military folks who are chasing some native americans up the mahsud river and sort of come out into this amazing valley and theyre stunned by this incredible scenery that they see you know, that Yosemite Valley is is unlike almost anywhere on earth with these huge Granite Cliffs just sort of dominating thing. And so to this young u. S. Culture at the time, these kinds of monumental, unique, stunning, natural become symbolic of national pride, of, 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 are moving across the western territories and describing these places, theyre often describing them in comparison to castles in or old ruins in rome, saying how much cooler essentially these places are like, oh, you could have some tumbledown castle, or you could have this amazing rampart of stone and granite and, you know, theres all this sort of comparison going. 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 to experience these kinds of of monumental western landscapes. And its not just the landscape in this case, there was similar interest in the the redwood trees, both the coast redwoods here in coastal california and the giants of the sierras, again, is sort of symbolic, something our nation had that no one else had just. The sheer size of these things. You know, theres all kinds of photographs of sliced through sequoia trees with people posing them or standing on the stump, seeing how many people they can fit on as like a dance floor to say, you look how gigantic this i