to the Borders of National Parks
(31 September 1995)
The idea of wilderness has undergone many changes, but American colonial history has evoked and reworked its meanings in significant ways which requires special attention for those involved in contemporary environmental politics. For American civilization was forged out of the "raw materials of the physical wilderness" and "with the idea or symbol of wilderness ... sought to give that civilization identity and meaning" (Nash, xi). To the pioneers, wilderness was the unknown, the disordered, the uncontrolled, and the nation was consolidated by its united effort of making it known, ordered and controlled. Roderick Nash suggests that "the American pioneer ... reexperienced the environmental situation and the anxieties of early man" (xvi), referring to the evolutionary shift of our arboreal ancestors to the plains and grasslands. For as humans learnt to privilege sight and, with their developing brain, plan ahead, "sight, height and open-ness meant security" (xv) and their old, dark and closed habitat meant insecurity. But a new cultural context added to the pioneer's idea of wilderness. Traditional Christian values saw the frontier in terms of a spiritual purging of the darkness of wilderness by the light of civilization, while economic and industrial practices, and the associated Enlightenment notion of Progress, saw the frontier as the horizon line of development towards a utopian Nation. As the frontier came to its end, officially in 1890, this idea of wilderness shifted into one which facillitated the development of wilderness reserves and national parks. But, I am arguing here, this shift towards conservation has not been an environmental move, having being bound up in the continued ideological deployment of America as a capitalist nation-state.
Though regret and concern for the loss of "primitive" animals, natives and ways of life soon turned to pessimism in the eyes of figures like John James Audubon, Thomas Cole, Washington Irwing and Francis Parkman Jr, it was George Catlin who first moved beyond passive regret to an active preservation concept. For Caitlin the primitive was "worthy of our preservation and protection" because "the further we become separated from [it] the more pleasure does the mind of enlightened man feel in recurring to those scenes" (Nash, 101)1. Henry David Thoreau consequently argued that the nation should preserve "a certain sample of wild nature, a certain primitiveness ... not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation" (102). This re-enactment of traditional Romanticism saw wilderness not as alien and inhospitable but a sanctuary from the anxieties of civilization which could inspire and rejuvenate the beholder. In the wilderness man2 matched himself against nature, proving he still had the resourcefulness to take care of himself, and when stripped of the machines of modernity was equal to his ancestors, deserving, as Nash says, "his place atop the Darwinian tree of life" (154).
The preservation of limited areas of wilderness solved the conflict between love of civilization and wilderness. Preserved areas would both "stand ... always as God made them" (104) and serve to keep wilderness out of the way of progress. Given that the Romantic valuation of nature for its aesthetic inspiration and recreation are idealistic, the American state has had the general belief that if an area has material value - if it can be mined, logged or dammed - it isn't wilderness. Congress has tried to make sure that only those areas of wilderness of no economic value were preserved, and has even reduced the borders of reserves and parks after their establishment to oblige economic interests. But for George Perkins Marsh, wilderness was necessary for material reasons. Logging had led to "drought, flood erosion, and unfavourable climactic changes. Such disasters, Marsh believed, were responsible for the decline of Mediterranean empires in power and influence" (105). The ability of the Earth to support civilization entered the argument, so that protecting wilderness and economic welfare were made compatible.
National parks here here mark a shift in the idea of wilderness, because they work towards consolidating the American capitalist nation-state. I define state here as a centralized, hierarchical system that occupies a specific geographical territory, and has a bureaucratic administrative system and a single monetary system. Alexander Wilson notes that park's have been established by those in power to thank constituents for voting them in, to detain objectors and prisoners - even natives who were seen as a threat to security (227). Those who preserved Yosemite National Park in 1864 and the Forest Preserve in the Adirondacks acted not to preserve wilderness per se, but "to prevent private aquisition and exploitation of geysers, hot springs , waterfalls and similar curiosities" (Nash, 108). And railroad interests hovered around the legislation of Yellowstone National Park, in the hope that it would become a "popular national vacation mecca like Niagara Falls ... with resulting profit to the only transportation line serving it" (111). Parks have been declared to preserve forests until they could be properly logged by major companies, and to increase water supply; they have facilitated the tourist industry, and encouraged new road and railroad developments. "Such," argues Wilson , "is the legacy of the early conservation movement" (227). Wilderness - as an idea and object - was only seen as necessary in as much as it allowed American capitalist civilization to prosper. Certainly Progress in the capitalist sense of increased state power met some opposition from natives, radical conservationists, and, later, environmentalists. But in many cases national park legislation has indicated where the government has tokenistically reconciled the oppositional interests, for example by declaring multiple use practices, or "preserving" land precious to aboriginals, ignoring the fact that it was the way of life, not the land, that they wanted "preserved".
The "idea" of a national park works to naturalize not only what occurs inside the space of its borders, but in the space beyond it. For a nation involves a group of people identifying with a common heritage and culture, living and possessing hope for the future of a specific territory and state (Zelinski, 5). And as the frontier closed the park border grew, to stand in for the national, colonial experience of the frontier. In the national park, nature is both wild and conquered, but, more importantly, is in evidence as an empirical fact or "specimen". For national parks were, in the dominant discourse of colonialism, "discovered" and described as humanized landscapes, as castles, ramparts, bridges - as historical ruins - as if they existed - and had been waiting for - humans, that is white Westerners, and their Nation. The natural heritage was here seen as a specific cultural heritage. First, a militarized heritage. National parks were American because they sublimated the frontier - glorifying the scenic wonders revealed by the West's exploration and conquest - and gave meaning to the nation's rigorous and revolutionary independance. They thus represented the Nation's ideals of Liberty and Freedom, and, by being public, they also represented the Nation's ideal of Democracy. For the national park marked a shift from the traditional Romanticism of Wordsworth, which considered that only the elite could truly appreciate beauty in nature and art because the working class were too ignorant to recognize it. Olmstead "attributed any weakness in their aesthetic faculties to the monopolization of 'the choicest natural scenes in the country and the means of recreation in them' by a very few, very rich people" (MacEwan, 4).
Second, the heritage of the land was religious through the aestheticization of its objects. There is any irony here, for there are three primary aesthetic modes: the Sublime (the unspeakable, Truth too enormous to be expressed); the Beautiful (the smooth, the harmonic - aesthetics in the "true" sense of reconciling contradictions in a human Idea or Form); and the Picturesque (highly differentiated scenes which allow the eye to wander through them). Adorno argues that natural beauty was repressed by artistic beauty, whereby the only Sublime Truth lay in man-made art, and nature - wilderness reserves and national parks - could only ever be picturesque or beautiful. The Truth was transcendental, breathed into nature by the spirit of man. But the the natural monuments were, nonetheless, held up as Sublime through their abstract magnitude. While old England had its monumental cathedrals, America had the Rocky Mountains, Niagara Falls and other landscapes. Adorno argues that "such a cult [of grandiose natural scenery] is a reflex of the bourgeois delusion of grandeur, of the social preoccupation with quantities and record bests and also of bourgeois hero worship" (103). In which case the Sublime seen in these monuments was really only a picturesque valuation of their freak enormity. Another irony here is that the comments on the "remarkable curiosities" and "unique", "rare wonders" forget that, in national parks, the lay of roads control the views, signs determine the context, and the landscape has been actively designed according to dominant aesthetics. But by showing America through its "unique geography" - as if it were Natural - the Nation which shared that geography was itself made a Sublime object. When William McAdoo pleaded: "Prefer the beautiful and sublime ... to the heartless mammon and the greed of capitals" (Nash, 115) he didn't realize that such an aesthetic was part of the ideology which maintained America's brand of capitalism. The national park links the Romantic ideology of recreation and inspiration to the Nation so that it is not wilderness that rejuvenates the tourist, but the Idea(ls) of the Nation which they believe they are seeing manifested in it.
This Nation naturalizes the state as a unified Platonic Form, and so denies the recent phenomena of the global circulation of capital whereby states lose their local power to the free-floating values of the market. For while states still have political power over the citizens inside their geographical borders, "the complexity of the global order mean[s] that such control [is] less important to the economic organization of the state than developments in the global system" (Stratton, 11). While the state was initially consolidated by capitalism, at present we have a global democracy which depends more on random power drifts and the contradictory forces of large capitalist pressure groups, such as oil companies, than on the representation of individual voters. In as much as tourism is an ecomonic form, and economics is a global, not a local, process, the conservation of wilderness in reserves and parks for tourists contradicts any sense of nation that really exists in the parks. The American land is less important to the system than the state's economy, which operates outside geographical borders like a trans-national company. And the tourist trade which shuttles the workers in and out of the national parks is patronized by a rich minority, such as those who own the railroads, who may not be American nor ever lived in America. The idea of a national park is blatently ideological, and though the Nation sees itself through this ideology as democratic, that ideal doesn't hold with the reality of the state.
Just as the nation obscures inter-state processes, the national park naturalizes the fact that isolating a piece of land hermetically seals it off from the ecosystem under the Nation's transcendental jar, denying evolutionary processes which might otherwise transform it. This implies that the way a species is in a reserve or park, and the way the nation-state is outside the reserve or park boundaries, will - and should - remain the way it is forever. Wilderness reserves and national parks qualify their definitions by degrees, using various means to to measure "wilderness quality" - for example by lack of roads, or the lack of Western settlement. But it can be argued that there is, technically, no wilderness left, if wilderness is land unaffected by human civilization. For the greenhouse effect is a product of human industrial development and effects the whole planet. Indeed
from an ecological perspective, the whole globe was effected in some way the moment the human species first evolved. If the planet can be seen as an organism, then every species on the planet has some function in the global ecosystem.
The Nation here makes a single homogeneous Idea out of thousands of years of heterogeneous experiences and so masks the brutal history of colonization. Whose Nation is it? Who is it for? Certainly not the land itself, or the animals or natives, for the West has a tendency to collapse wilderness and native cultures. When a government "funds" an aboriginal culture so that they can live a "traditional" way of life, it forgets - like some nationalist movements in post-colonial situations - that the native's culture is already traumatized by, hybridized with, the colonizer. In some cases aboriginals have had to prove a continuity between themselves and their inherited culture, and act the role of the native as the West conceptualized it was prior to colonization, denying the changes that have re-defined their experience of their own identity. So what is "protected" and "preserved" by the West is not really given the right to live. Natives, animals, even plants, are enslaved actors making coerced statements of their freedom and their exotic "otherness" to humans. These "others" deny the relationship between humans and nature, and so repress a more valid and integrated sense of what it is to be "human".
It was not until the 1930's that a part of the Florida Everglades was designated as the first "wilderness" national park; now multiple use, zoning, World Heritage and Biosphere reserves mark an awakening of the environmental consciousness - an aesthetics of more than just surfaces - in legislation. But given the dominant ideological construction of wilderness, demographics will always force a reconsideration of the boundaries of reserves and parks. If it comes to a managerial decision between developing for a growing population and preserving wilderness, then vested interests will always choose to develop, in which case the growth of the human inherently means the destruction of the global ecosystem. It is obvious that between the subjective idea of wilderness and the objective preservation of a site of land is a lot of cultural mediation. However in as much as the idea of preserving a fixed site is not an environmental one, reserves and parks may be a necessary tactic in a larger environmental strategy of re-addressing human relation to the ecologies in/by which it is constituted so that when the system widens its perspectives nature will have a broader base to evolve from. If we fail to pursue alternative environmental models, supplanting the rhetorics of wilderness reserves and national parks with a global ecological politic, conservation and preservation will fail to preserve anything.
Notes
1 The references to Nash's text indicate the pages where he footnotes the sources of the quotes I have used with some detail of their context.
2 I use the label "man" instead of "human" only because I am recounting the dominant, male-privileged discourse. Sexism still marks much environment rhetoric, for example in projects like Man and the Biosphere, with nature and woman objectified concomitantly.
References
Adorno, T.W. "The beauty of nature." Aesthetic Theory. London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1984.
MacEwan, Ann and Malcolm. "The history of national parks." National Parks: Conservation or Cosmetics? London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982.
Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982.
Oelschlaeger, Max. "The Idea of Wilderness." The Idea of Wilderness. (Photocopy.)
Stratton, Jon. "The State and the Time of Terror." Modern Time. (Manuscript).
Wilson, Alexander. "From Reserve to Microenvironment." The Culture of Nature. Cambridge MA and Oxford US: Blackwell Publishers, 1992.
Zelinsky, Wilbur. "State, Nation, and Nation State..." Nation Into State. USA: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
