National Park or National Pork?

Managing our natural resources, for fun and profit

Reviews by Bob Pavlik, Free Press Contributor

t is the mark of good literature to stimulate a reader; it is a sign of great writing when the author effects a change in the reader's way of thinking. This book has changed the way I think about the National Park Service. Its honesty, clarity, and deep research all mark this work as a landmark in NPS historical treatises.

The author, himself an employee of the Service, gives a critical, unflattering assessment of the history and development of the bureau as it relates to the care and management of natural resources. Using the NPS Organic Act as a springboard, he carefully details how the various directors, superintendents, and rangers charted a course for the system that vacillated between resource protection and exploitation, providing services to visitors and pandering to their needs and desires, without regard for how silly or destructive those wants might have been.

The philosophy of the founding fathers of the National Park System, Stephen Mather and Horace Albright reverberated throughout the system for years following their departure. The early need to justify the existence of national parks and to increase their popularity among the Congress and the general population led them to popularize the parks in sometimes inappropriate ways. The tule elk paddock and bear feeding platforms in Yosemite are just two examples of their misguided attempts at increasing visitor attractions at the expense of natural conditions. In Yellowstone, the control of the park's buffalo herd pitted biologists against park managers and naturalists. Wildlife officials wanted to establish and maintain a stable population that would not overgraze the sensitive rangeland and thereby threaten their own survival in lean years. Park managers and naturalists felt that maintaining a large population (through winter feeding and animal husbandry) served to attract and please larger amounts of park visitors, a primary purpose for maintaining the herd.

The battles didn't simply end with outlandish attractions, however.

Several serious conflicts developed between park managers and foresters and the embattled biologists who differed in their approaches to maintaining healthy ecosystems. While the park wildlife biologists wanted to allow natural systems to occur unabated (fire, insect infestation) the foresters felt the need to control these potential threats through fire suppression and intensive manipulation of the forest's flora, including ribes removal (to control blister rust) and the application of herbicides and pesticides on large tracts of land. Oftentimes these considerations were driven by the differing needs of the parks' neighbors, most often National Forests, where commercial harvesting of healthy timber is a priority. Park managers, therefore, engaged in incompatible practices in order to coexist with other land managing agencies.

These practices were antithetical to the Park Service's small cadre of biologists, who have never had an easy time working within the system.

Even with the support of such luminaries as Joseph Grinnell and A. Starker Leopold, other professionals (landscape architects, engineers, and foresters) have dominated decision making in the parks and have always outnumbered biologists within the Service.

Threats to the system have come from within as well as from outside.

Beginning in the 1930s, the Park Service began a dramatic program of expanding its holdings to include historical parks and national recreation areas. The creation of additional parks is not, in itself, a bad thing; on the contrary, these new units can preserve and protect lands and resources while providing interpretive, educational, and recreational services to the public. What has been unfortunate is that, according to Sellars, "Once an area was placed under the Service's administration, the specifics of its natural resource management--the treatment of elk, fish, forests, and the like--seem to have been of not much concern." The development of the parks' campgrounds, roads, trails and concession facilities and other visitor service amenities took precedence over resource concerns.

It is Sellars' insightful analysis and interpretation of the historical record that gives this book its credibility and value. He has mined the archives of the National Park Service, using a large amount of material never before utilized. And he has conducted numerous interviews with current and former NPS employees in order to corroborate or expand on his findings. Sellars is currently preparing a companion volume on the history of cultural resources management within the National Park System. His work will redefine how scholars and park watchers think about the NPS. This book should be recommended reading for all NPS personnel, from newly hired seasonals to seasoned superintendents, and interested members of the public.

The review originally appeared in the journal Yosemite published by the Yosemite Association (Spring 98 issue).

t the turn of the century several important social and cultural movements left their marks on the North American landscape. It was a time of great upheaval and unrest, with women's suffrage, labor strife, political reform, and conservation struggles all on the upswing. America had entered its post-frontier era searching for a new identity as a world power, and the realization that the wealth of our natural resources equaled the historical and cultural achievements of other countries gave the United States a much needed base on which to establish its own unique identity. At the same time, the nation's rapidly expanding population and growing industrial strength heightened the need for respite and escape from an increasingly fast paced life. It was during this period that the National Park Service was created in 1916, supported in large part by wealthy industrialists and businessmen who championed the preservation of public parks and pleasuring grounds for the renewal and reinvigoration of the population at large (who, in turn, would maintain high levels of production for the corporate good).

Concurrent with the creation of the Park System came the need to create a style of architecture that would harmonize with the spectacular natural surroundings, while accommodating growing numbers of employees, concessions and visitors.

The task was enormous. Not only were modern roads required to convey increasing numbers of motorists to and through the parks, but campgrounds, trails, restrooms, visitor centers, employee housing, maintenance facilities, and sewer and water systems. In short all the needs and requirements of small cities, tucked into sensitive environments.

Building the National Parks is a detailed, descriptive chronicle of the efforts of the nascent National Park Service to develop the parks in a harmonious fashion. The author, Linda Flint McClelland, is a NPS Landscape Architect who has written several articles and handbooks on historic and cultural landscapes. In this comprehensive work she provides an historical context for the type of architecture that has become known as the "NPS Rustic Style." McClelland shows its origins in the Arts and Craft movement and the Shingle style that became popularized on both coasts at century's turn. The architects of the age, including Charles S. Greene and Henry M. Greene, Bernard Maybeck, Frank Lloyd Wright and others, emphasized the handmade and rejected an increasingly impersonal modern machine-like, mass-produced age. They relied, in turn on the work of their predecessors, Andrew Jackson Downing, H.H. Richardson, and Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. to inform their ideas regarding architecture and landscape design. These individuals and movements had a great influence on the architects hired by the NPS both as contractors and as employees.

The author provides useful and interesting sections on some of the landscape architects and designers who worked in the national parks. Among those featured are Charles P. Punchard, the first NPS "landscape engineer;" Daniel Hull; Thomas Vint; and Herbert Maier. In addition, there were several architects and engineers engaged in private practice that designed significant structures, including Bernard Maybeck, Walter Huber, Charles Sumner, Myron Hunt, and Gilbert Stanley Underwood. The harmony and uniformity that these buildings exhibit, both with each other and in their respective environments, is a credit to their designers and the NPS landscape architects who oversaw their placement in the park.

The advent of the Great Depression was a boon to the parks, as a series of "alphabet agencies" (CWA, PWA, ECW) were created by President Franklin Roosevelt for the purpose of unemployment relief and the development of the nation's infrastructure. These "Armies of the unemployed" built water and sewer systems, trails, roads, and numerous structures still in use today.

These developments made the national parks accessible to millions of tourists, and displayed the best features of the parks to a rapidly expanding cadre of outdoor enthusiasts. McClelland rightfully devotes an entire section of the book to this important era in National Park development.

The post-World War II era, in particular "Mission 66" (inaugurated in 1956 by director Conrad Wirth in preparation for the service's 50 year anniversary ten years later) is treated in a cursory fashion. This important time in the park service's history-its abandonment of the Rustic Style, the embrace of modern architecture and road building standards, and the seemingly uncritical accommodation of record numbers of visitors warrants a greater examination than this volume allows. Nonetheless, Building the National Parks is a thorough and comprehensive study of the physical development of the parks, and provides important information in an era of rising visitation and shrinking maintenance dollars.

Robert Pavlik is an Associate Environmental Planner and Historian with the California Department of Transportation in San Luis Obispo. He was formerly employed as an environmental education instructor with the Yosemite Institute (1981-83) and as a graduate student-historian with the National Park Service (1984-86).