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Debating Burns’ Thesis on National Parks’ Value
Living on the doorstep of Acadia National Park, my family hardly needs to be reminded that national parks are a good idea. But are they America’s best idea, as Ken Burns’ PBS documentary suggests?
Scott Klinger and Rebecca Adamson of the First People’s Alliance challenge Burns’ unequivocal enthusiasm. They credit Burns for acknowledging the violence against first peoples that stains the history of our parks. But for them the problem with the parks endures.
The annihilation of a people was accompanied by a war on worldviews. We suffer from the consequences of that war. Klinger and Adamson contrast “a worldview that holds People as intricately within and part of nature versus a worldview that holds nature as a place to visit separate from People. This dichotomous worldview is dangerously out of balance. Belief that there is some land that we exploit and other land which we insist remain pristine, is rapidly extinguishing the beliefs of the land’s previous caretakers, who saw all land as sacred and thereby worthy of protection. From the Indigenous paradigm of protection and production, production and protection, evolved complex conservation regimes whereby you protected the land because it produced for you and it produced for you because you protected it. This is in stark contrast to the practice of protecting small plots of land, while removing the vast rest from protection, a paradigm which has led to the unprotected earth shutting down its productive capacity.”
Many Americans seem to harbor a schizophrenic understanding of nature. The parks provide an opportunity for communion with the permanent harmonies of a redemptive nature. Nature outside the parks, however, is regarded as fully controllable and endlessly exploitable for our purposes. In life outside the parks Americans appear hardly ready to concede that the economic growth machine should stop. Within the limits of currently cramped budgets, consumers will maintain their quest for the latest video game, cell phone or automobile.
But do we derive comfort and happiness from this ceaseless exploitation of the natural world? Our garbage tells an interesting story. A recent case study of New York City garbage points out 4,385,000 tons a year “is gathered by collection trucks which crush it into compact piles. It is then taken to a transfer station and from there either to an incinerator where it will be burned, releasing cancer-causing dioxins into the air, or more likely to a landfill where it will decompose into a hazardous brew that leaches liquid waste and releases landfill gases.
Many of the goods we so badly crave we often hardly even get to know. “Organic still fresh fruits and vegetables, fancy olive breads, cured meats, bagels, doughnuts and other delectables, still sealed in non-biodegradable packaging and more durable goods like books, clothes, toys, furniture and electronic items in near perfect condition.”
Critics of this endless spiral of material goods are often derided as elitists seeking to impose an austere lifestyle. Yet survey research consistently shows that once minimal needs are met, increased affluence does not correlate with greater happiness. Perhaps the real elitists are the ad executives who spend so much of our money to seduce even the youngest children into a life of consumption, or the corporate CEOs who won’t allow us to trade future gains in productivity for more time off rather than higher salaries.
Perhaps we might come to regard nature as evolving, mysterious, pluripotential. We are only one of its surprises. Neither its master nor the servant of some static natural harmony, humans have evolved a capacity to interact with organic and even inorganic nature in ways that enhance culture and nature. Some, though not all, indigenous spiritualities embodied such understandings and are a modern lesson.
Klinger and Adamson properly endorse recent trends in Canada and Australia to “inhabited parks, where the traditional protection-production can flourish, is spreading.” They also advocate “protecting inhabited areas not now legally protected from unbridled development.” Protection can include architecture that reveals our connections to natural surroundings. (Think Frank Lloyd Wright, for example.) Protection also entails free time that opens us to deeper reflections on our evolving states of mind and land use policies that build in preservation of and access to many splendid vistas still to be found in much of our nation.
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14 Comments so far
Show AllPure B.S.
Why?
How about we go on preserving and conserving the parks and not inhabit them but let wildlife do that, and simply start protecting nature where we already inhabit.
And by the way we should be vigilant against "private interests" "managing" our parks, with such things as happy trails for snowmobiles, and our entrance fees being paid to them.
There is already a long and sad record of rapacious development in what was supposed to be public park land.
RFK Jr. for head of EPA under Nader and Kucinich '08!
And starting 1/1/10 guns will be allowed in the parks.
Those that ride Amtrak to the parks may soon be able to pack heat on Amtrak and in the parks.
And I still can't take my swiss army knife through the TSA shakedown at the airport.
This is the first I've heard that First Nations people are protesting being removed or prohibited from traditional use when National Parks were founded. One would think that there is plenty of land for the traditional first-nations uses outside the parks. This was a big issue in Great Smoky and Shenandoah National Parks in the 1930's, where many "hillbilly" families farmsteads were condemned for incorporation into the park. I like traditional Appalacian culture, but these subsistince farming-hunting families wiped out all the wildlife and had caused severe damage to the land through their clearing and farming of the steep slopes.
The land healed and the wildlife returned to an incredible degree. But now, rampant development and pollution running right up against the parks borders is destroying it again. Shenandoah is now pretty much a showcase of ecological destruction - a perfect storm of air pollution, invasive pests, exurban sprawl and a warming climate, wiping out much of it's ecologically valuable tree spicies. The only thing more apalling is how the DC yuppies cruising Skyline Drive in their BMW SUV's are so completely oblivious to it - They can't tell a White Oak from a (now nearly wiped out) Hemlock.
This is the land where I remember like yeaterday, as a 14 year old, having left the noisy boy scout campsite behind, I had, from this particular rock on the slope of Old Rag Mt., what I guess would be called a satori, and longed to escape to the wild areas ever since. But when I return to this park now all I get is depression. The exquisite shade and stillness of the ancient Hemlocks in the hollows, broken only by the exquisite call of the Hermit Thrush, and darting Brook Trout in the limpid pools - Gone!
One of the main points of Burns film was to illustrate how the protection of natural places can provide the opportunity to realize our connection and dependence on the natural world. We are 100% dependent on nature. Without air,water, food etc. we would perish in a matter of minutes. The lessening of the purity of these elements lowers the quality and clarity of our awareness which in turn muddles our sense of connectedness to the natural world resulting in massive abuse to the very thing that keeps us alive. These somewhat wild and undisturbed places can transmit the awareness of connection more powerfully than any intellectual understanding about nature can. For this reason alone, burns statement "americas best idea" may be true. To return the parks to ' live in ' caretaker status would not heighten the transmission powers of nature. On the contrary, the increase population of humans, to any natural area , no matter how 'enlightened' , diminishes our chance of realizing this connectedness. In this case,less is more. Once, a majority of the worlds people realize their deep connection to nature, the argument surrounding caretaker parks becomes irrelevant.
Ken Burns set the bar pretty high with his previous great documentaries on jazz, baseball, and the Civil War. Much of what is in the current project on national parks as America's greatest idea is excellent, but tends to get a little tedious. For my taste, there's too much focus upon the "great (invariably white) man" theory of how history always supposedly evolves - too much anecdotal homage paid to the parade of various influencial swells who had an epiphany while on a particular backpacking wilderness expedition to experience the wonders of yet another particular ecologically and aesthetically unique area of the north American landscape.
That said, I consider Burns' PBS account of the life of John Muir and Muir's complex, lengthy relationship with the incredibly complex Teddy Roosevelt to be well worth the watch all by itself. The gap between Muir the spiritual pacifist and Roosevelt the big game blood sport enthusiast seems to me to mark the real dividing line in this debate. Life or death. Not a whole lot of room for compromise.
Bill from Saginaw
If we want to live, we will have to --and I really do mean WILL have to-- get rid of economic feudalism and shift to a lifestyle in which we spend our lives conserving the natural world of which we are a part.
That would mean that all the world would become a park, a veritable 'Gan Eden' (the very idea of which I'm sure will send the religiosity-loonies into spittle-flecked frenzies). We'll manage not only our human population, but the populations of other high-order species as well.
When I think about it, I envision a world that's a sort of global Japanese garden, carefully kept clean of rubbish and detritus, with every vantage point tweaked to present its unique beauty. A world where every prospect pleases and man is no longer vile.
america the land of both mental retardation and illness.
we are a country bent on the constant of always having
our way or the highway. unfortunately the highway appears
to be winning.
humans are nature. nature is humans.
in separating the two the implication is that we are alien.
maybe its true? some religious folk might argue a similar point. but didnt god create adam from "dirt"?...
humans came from silly putty, the same stuff gods are created from.
Damn, I always wondered.
Grant