Search Results

This chapter discusses the Southern Pacific's interest in conservation, particularly the preservation of the wilderness. It examines the effect of the construction and operation of these rail lines on the natural ecological systems present in California and the western regions. The chapter shows the participation of Southern Pacific leaders in resource conservation programs and the environmental policies of the Southern Pacific. It then moves on to examine the partnership of the Southern Pacific with John Muir, in order to build the Yosemite National Park. The discussion considers the various obstacles they faced, as well as the other national parks that they built, such as the Sequoia National Park.

This chapter examines the visitors, volunteers, and rangers in Yosemite National Park. It discusses how the environment is managed to create the impression of harmony between nature and culture. It explores the historical roots of this trend, as well as its persistence in park management in the present. Through interviews with park visitors, the chapter demonstrates that their attitudes towards nature shape their understanding of the spiritual and/or religious significance of their experience. Contrary to the hikers who were interviewed in Chapter 2, visitors to Yosemite demonstrate a different religious aspect of recreation, one in which “nature” is both more civilized and more consistently ascribed with religious value. This chapter demonstrates how park rangers appreciate this diversity within the visitor population, and how the trope of spirituality allows them to cater to a wide range of visitors.

In 1911 Charles Ives wrote “The New River,” a song unique among his works for its outspoken environmentalist stance. Composed in direct response to the diversion of waters from Ives's beloved Housatonic River to feed New York City reservoirs and plans for constructing a dam, the song also captured widespread national outrage over the Hetch Hetchy Dam being built at the same time through Yosemite National Park. Combining transcendentalist understandings of nature with more contemporary arguments to save Hetch Hetchy published by Robert Underwood Johnson and John Muir, Ives's song sounds his belief “the fabric of life weaves itself whole.”

The relationship between zoos and the wild is complex and often contradictory. The controlled and curated character of their existence means that zoo animals are not fully “wild,” at least compared to their counterparts in nature. Emerging trends in zoo design emphasizing greater exhibit naturalism, however, have reduced (at least aesthetically) some of the distance between the zoo and the wild. This chapter reflects on the search for wildness and naturalism in zoological parks by examining the plan for “Zootopia,” an expansion of Denmark’s Givskud Zoo. Zootopia’s innovative “cage-free” design promises to minimize the separation between people and zoo animals, offering a heightened sense of environmental immersion and wildness in the contrived setting of a zoological park. Yet as zoos seek to become significantly more naturalistic and more park-like they will confront a number of thorny questions, including whether the attempt to get closer to wild conditions only underscores the biological and philosophical gulf between zoos and "real" nature. Past examples of failed attempts to meld the wild and the zoo, such as the largely forgotten animal menagerie at Yosemite National Park in the early twentieth century, remind us of the difficulty of this challenge.

During the second half of the 19th century, San Francisco grew from a village to a major city. Located on a peninsula, the city faced a perpetual water problem. Mayor James Phelan realized that if the city was ever to reach its full potential, it needed an abundant and pure water supply from the Sierra Nevada. After studying a number of different sites, the Tuolumne River and the Hetch Hetchy Valley emerged as the preferred location. But the valley lay within the newly-established (1890) Yosemite National Park. Yet San Francisco continued its quest, purchasing land within the valley and seeking legislation to allow reservoir development.

For decades, Carl Leopold had watched rafts of pine logs swaddled together like organ pipes, from a block to a half-mile in length, float down the Mississippi from the northern forests of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. By the turn of the century, these rafts had dwindled in frequency and length. Most of the two-to five-hundred-year-old white pine forests that had surrounded the Great Lakes and the eastern seaboard had been sliced to stubble, and logging companies were abandoning these leavings for the untouched forests of the West. Carl couldn’t help but notice. His business was built on wood, and if wood supplies ran out, so would his source of income. Greed and waste were the razors of the lumber trade, and Carl knew well that the forests of the West would fall to their blades if the public did not protest. Just as he monitored the number of ducks and geese he hunted, Carl believed in guarding the number of trees cut. So, despite his longing for Aldo to follow him in the family business, he unintentionally primed his eldest for a very different profession. Carl scanned newspapers and outdoors magazines seeking forest news, expounding on his findings to his eldest. Edwin Hunger tagged along on some of Carl’s outings with his sons and described them as “lectures on the move” in which the boys learned “much about the woods in general and how they should be managed and preserved.” While Aldo was in elementary school, Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland set aside millions of acres out West in forest reserves. Members of the lumber, mining, and ranching industries responded with outrage; they wanted no limits on their use of public lands. But increasingly, concerned citizens were pushing for national laws to protect the remaining forests. One prophet in the fray was John Muir. He preached a gospel of preservation: Stop the wasteful destruction and let the forests manage themselves. Cut only populous common trees, and then only sparingly and carefully, “for every right use.”