Lary M. Dilsaver

The Hidden Landscape of Yosemite National Park

National parks share many obvious landscape characteristics. One of them goes largely unnoticed—infrastructure to provide water, sewerage, and garbage services. This paper traces the gradual adoption of romantic-era concepts about shielding human intrusions in parks from public view by Park Service landscape designers during the early twentieth century. It focuses on sewerage, water, and garbage facilities which were essential to serve growing numbers of visitors, but highly antithetical to the idea of wilderness parks. After several years of ad hoc practice, the Park Service ultimately crafted specific guidelines on how best to sequester sanitation and other intrusive facilities from view. These largely unnoticed utilities safeguard the public health of visitors and contribute to the consistent landscape of the park system.

The American environment : interpretations of past geographies

Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Early Explorations in Impact and Policy Chapter 3 Primary Economies and Resource Exploitation Chapter 4 Management and Environmental Change Chapter 5 Playing With Nature

The English landscape : past, present, and future

This book traces the development of the English landscape from the earliest times to the present day and beyond, bringing together the research and views of a group of distinguished scientists and historians. It is based on the 1983 Wolfson lectures. The subjects of the essays include: the geomorphological background; Man and landscape in Britain 6000 BC to AD 400; Ancient woodland and hedges; mapping the Medieval landscape; the agricultural landscape; climate and landscape; towns, industry and the Victorian landscape; Agriculture, forestry and the future landscape.

RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES ON NATIONAL PARKS

American national parks have served as research sites for geographers for close to a century. Ellsworth Huntington studied giant sequoias and published The Secret of the Big Trees in 1921. More recently, Thomas and Geraldine Vale used repeat photography to analyze vegetation change in Yosemite (1994), and David Butler has conducted research on natural hazards in Glacier National Park (1989, 1998). Since Ronald Forestas 1984 analysis of the National Park Service (NPS), growing numbers of geographers have found the parks themselves and their management worthy of research. Historical Geography featured a special section of eight articles on parks and preserved areas (Dilsaver and Young 2007). For the past two decades I have studied the American national park system and worked in some of the countrys most beautiful and iconic places. I have found that the 391 units in the park system best represent Americas heritage and are the end result of extensive and, at times, contentious public debate and legislative action. As more geographers look at these special places, the range of locations (every state except Delaware) and array of topics offered are wide (NPS 2007). Taking a cue from Donald Meinigs ten versions of the same landscape (1979), I suggest that most national park units are six types of places. The first three derive from the purposes for which they were founded: to protect natural resources, to preserve historic sites, and to provide recreation. These can and do clash in some parks, leading to complex legal questions and public antagonism. Indeed, the NPS even developed a set of three management handbooks in 1968 in order to prioritize the functions at each unit. However, park managers and Congress recognized that many parks fill all three roles. The result was the 1970 General Authorities Act, which redefined the system as a single park in which all resources are under equal protection (Dilsaver 1994a, 269-276, 371-376). The remaining three realities that are todays national parks reflect their land use, management policies and roles in society: parks as political constructions, economic entities, and social places. Within these categories lie the meaning and significance of the parks to American culture and society. Like the three purposes for which they are established, each is complex and offers many research questions to the geographer. I will briefly review these six perspectives on national parks and recommend some areas where future research is needed. THE PURPOSES OF PARKS PARKS AS RESERVES FOR NATURAL RESOURCES AND SYSTEMS Although the parks, monuments, recreation areas and historic sites differ in specific legislation, current NPS policy protects natural processes and endangered species while providing baselines for measuring environmental change (Harmon 1999). However, fire management, predator policies, and attitudes toward exotic species have evolved through time. The histories and lasting impacts of earlier policies, such as fire suppression and predator destruction, have great import for current park managers and surrounding ecosystems. As scientists advance their knowledge of natural systems, resource management requires frequent reappraisal. Global warming, the biogeographical interplay within ecosystems with extirpated, endangered, and exotic species, and the human impacts on natural systems can be monitored closely in the parks where most consumptive and destructive activities are banned (Runte 1987, 138-154,197-208; Wright 1992; Sellars 1997; NPS 2006, 35-57). Physical geographers can not only participate in such research but also study the reciprocal relationships between evolving natural systems, growing scientific knowledge, and park management policies. What have been the agencys responses to changes in extant vegetation communities in the past? As global warming stresses regionally endangered species and encourages invasion of hitherto absent species, how will NPS managers respond? …

Americans in Britain: geographic education and foreign field trips

Abstract Although geography does not have a strong base in American universities, large numbers of US students undertake short courses in the United Kingdom every year. The paper considers the problems involved in designing field trips for these students. It reports on the experience of a two‐week trip with undergraduates from the University of Southern Mississippi and suggests that the educational success of such ventures depends on a combination of clear course structure, student motivation and the imagination of the teacher.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks: One Hundred Years of Preservation and Resource Management

In 1990, when Sequoia National Park marks its centennial, Kings Canyon National Park will celebrate its fiftieth birthday. These contiguous parks in the southern Sierra Nevada constitute one of the nations finest wilderness regions. The his tory of their establishment represents a major suc cess story in preservation efforts in the United States, and the account of their management adds a valuable chapter to the history of the National Park Service.1

A National Park in the Wasteland: American and National Park Service Perceptions of the Desert

The National Park Service functions through the conceptual framework of American culture, which derives from Christian ideas born in the Middle East. Biblical societies reacted to deserts in two ways. Most people shunned arid areas as dangerous and bereft of life. But a second belief drew prophets and others who sought retreat for meditation or seclusion. The National Park Service and the public initially held the negative view of the desert, but a rise in appreciation of its sublime character challenged that perception. Joshua Tree National Park shows how that change influenced the existence and management of an arid park.

The making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the origin of America's most popular national park

unmediated eye saw. Other forms of spectacle were also on offer, from the charivari laid on by hoteliers in Alpine tourist resorts for returning mountaineers to the Alpine simulacra of Albert Smith, mountain spectacle becoming urban entertainment. Part II, ‘Literary Figures in the Alps’, provides three meditations on literary responses to the Alps. The chapter on John Ruskin focuses on his youthful guided ascents of minor peaks in the Alps and the significant impact of these early experiences on his aesthetic theory. Landscapes occluded by cloud combined with his own visual impediment led him to construct theories incorporating notions of the plasticity of the observer and the observed and the necessity of imaginative reconstruction. The argument, whilst persuasive, makes no mention of the older Ruskin’s hostility to Alpine mountaineering, nor explains how the younger Ruskin’s early physical experience, haptic and sensual, was essentially repudiated in his mature aesthetics. The chapters on ‘Gerald Manley Hopkins in the Alps’ and on the valetudinarian Robert Louis Stevenson in Davos serve to remind us that we bring to the mountains our own subjectivities, that ‘mind has mountains’. This collection of essays is, in parts, stimulating, thought provoking and insightful. But in treating the sublime as a linguistic corpus and a fixed category, it misses the intellectual avalanche that in the nineteenth century engulfed and transformed it.