Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History

This book lies halfway between (1) a history of the national parks as a whole and (2) a history and critique of National Park Service policy toward wildlife, ecosystems, and science. The first several chapters discuss the history of park system, which is characterized mostly by an absence of policy toward "nature" other than scenery. This half of the book is pretty conventional, and follows material available elsewhere. It is best seen as an update of other histories such as Runte's _National Parks: The American Experience_. The second half of the book focuses more narrowly on (for lack of a better term) "nature policy." This half provides a valuable history from a critical standpoint, and it marks the book's central contribution. Several themes reappear throughout the book. The first is the park service's disregard for scientific research. Sellars doesn't quite distinguish the two, but the NPS has little use for either the scientific method or scientific evidence. Briefly put, the NPS does not want to learn facts that conflict with current management policy. It also does not want to use a method that might give it answers that differ from the answers that it wants. Other themes can be grouped together: wildlife, forests, and fire. The NPS seems to lack any understanding of how predators and prey interact, and how top-level processes (wolves and elk) can affect other processes (aspens and beavers). It also has a purely scenic view of forests, which leads to policies that spray insecticide on native beetles in the Rockies and Sierras. Fire policy has evolved toward a greater appreciation of how fire affects ecosystems, but here politics stands in the way of better management practices. Sellars provides an excellent discussion of these and similar issues throughout the book. To understand the politics here, it would be helpful if Sellars spent more time looking outside the NPS to American society as a whole. What does the public want, and why? How has the growth of the environmental movement affected the park? How has Congress changed its management of the NPS? For example, the growth of earmarking in budget legislation has strengthened the pork-barrel elements of national park policy, ultimately leading to the embarrassment of Steamtown USA. Like most histories of national parks, Sellars takes an elitist, wilderness-oriented perspective that is critical of tourism and economic development. I'm sympathetic to that perspective, but we should recognize it for what it is. Sellars doesn't reflect on his own values here - - if an overwhelming majority of the public in a democracy want national parks developed for recreational tourism, what right does a pro-wilderness minority have to disagree? Those criticisms address more what Sellars doesn't do than what he does. I'll give it 5 stars for what he does, but it's really more of a 4.5.

The Organic Act, which in 1916 created the National Park Service, implied that preservation of nature was part of the new agency's mandate to leave parks unimpaired for future generations. The legislation did not specifically authorize scientific investigation as a part of park management. Just as the Founding Fathers did not directly address slavery in the U.S. Constitution, the authors of the act in effect placed a "to be dealt with later" stamp on the issue of how the fledgling bureaucracy would manage nature preservation. Richard Sellars, in Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History, details how the NPS, for most of its existence, has paraded as a bastion of environmental management while strongly advocating recreational tourism development and placing little importance on scientific investigation. Throughout its history, the NPS has been ignorant of its natural resources and unaware of the ecological consequences of park development. The NPS is steeped in the tradition of visitor accommodation as the most important measure of success set by Stephen Mather and Horace Albright, its first directors. In the agency's first 25 years, no public organizations demanded scientifically based management of park resources (147). Not until the 1960s, according to Sellars, was park management judged far more on ecological criteria (203). Scientific management received sporadic support in the NPS. At times the notion was shunned. The NPS wanted to do little more than meet the regulatory standards of the Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which gave science power it had never enjoyed before. George B. Hartzog, NPS director from 1964-1972, created the Division of Natural Science Studies within the bureau, but the NPS underfunded the new division and its first two directors complained that the park service hierarchy only paid lip service to scientific investigation. Five years after its inception, the division lost its high organizational status and was buried lower into the park service bureaucracy. Sellars reveals that the NPS, even as late as 1991, was short on self-criticism, overlooking its failure to adopt a truly ecological perspective on park management (277). The book's biggest strength is its abundance of self-criticism, due to the fact that Sellars served as a historian with the NPS for over 20 years. Preserving Nature in the National Parks explains a story most in the park service hierarchy would be afraid to tell. He thoroughly covers the subject of the lack of scientific management within the NPS, sometimes redundantly and with too much detail, but more critically than previous volumes on national park history. If the NPS were to respond positively to Sellars' admonition, it could be what it portends - a leader in nature preservation. If the bureau discounts such chastisement, it will continue to be a leader in only one field, recreational tourism.

The concept of national parks, setting aside unbroken tracts of land and sea for the enjoyment of people, has been called America's best idea. In Preserving Nature in the National Parks, Richard West Sellars meticulously traces the evolution of the national park concept and America's national park system from 1870 to the present. From beginning to end, he confronts readers with evidence that disputes tradition. Among other beliefs, he authoritatively challenges the romantic campfire myth of an altruistic birth of Yellowstone National Park and the national park concept. He offers in its place a pragmatic rationale more consistent with the times. This book is a scholarly presentation of carefully researched and documented facts, woven into an unbroken story. The tale unfolds from the perspective of the National Park Service, the primary governmental agency responsible for conserving parks. It starts with the campfire myth and renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. crafting and shaping the National Park Service's mission "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life [in parks]...unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." It ends with the 1993 creation of the National Biological Survey and the sweeping reorganization of the National Park Service in 1995. Throughout, readers get an insider's view of America's favorite government agency. As the story approaches the present, it necessarily shallows to encompass ever more territory, losing its rich historical texture, but gaining a journalistic perspective that serves readers well. Great new ideas always create tension and elicit vigorous debate. Sellars skillfully draws our attention to a series of tensions created by the national park idea that shaped the concept and its manifestations in the 20th century. Creation of national parks was an attempt to resolve conflict over how to wrest the greatest good and profit from the land: consumption through private exploitation or through public tourism. Sellars also examines the tension between development in parks to facilitate access, lodging, and consumptive recreation versus wilderness preservation. Landscape architects, engineers, and biologists expressed conflicting interpretations of "unimpaired" during the 1920s and 1930s. This tension has evolved into a continuing discussion of scenery or façade versus ecosystem management. Clearly, early promoters of national parks had no qualms about developing facilities in parks and consuming park resources. In promoting creation of the National Park Service in 1916, Robert Sterling Yard wrote in The Nation's Business "We want our national parks developed....We want good fishing. We want our wild animal life conserved and developed." The first two directors of the National Park Service, businessman Stephen Mather and lawyer Horace Albright, both believed the public needed to be enticed into parks with roads, lodges, and enhanced fishing,