One series of
"structures" that a great deal of planning and design has gone into
to create are our country's National Parks. Built to give the American people
access to the preserved natural wonders on their soil, they were put together
all those years ago to do multiple, quite contradictory, things: show and
conserve nature.
"Conservation"
in this context means management rather than protection, and the "highest
purpose of these resources is necessarily defined as their availability for
"use and enjoyment". In addition, the National Park Service has
acquired a symbolic role in the public mind that goes beyond its stated
objectives. As natural areas in the United States have diminished, the public
has come to perceive the National Park Service as its primary provider of the
wilderness experience. And yet, as the number of park visitors have grown, the
parks have moved farther and farther away from a state that could be described
as "wild". When many of the national parks, like Yellowstone, were
first established, they were not intend to be wilderness preserves at all, but
rather "public parks or pleasuring grounds."
It was only with the
passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 that the clause about leaving the parks
"unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness" was added to
the necessity for public enjoyment. How could national parks be designed so
that the public could, in essence, constantly be visiting places that have
never been visited? It's a tough and tenuous balancing act.
National parks approximate the wilderness
experience for a larger audience by presenting a landscape that reproduces a
scenic facsimile of wilderness, a mythologized image of what we would like the
wilderness to be. Evidence of human activity is carefully erased, but humans
themselves are not excluded. On the contrary, their spectral presence is
essential to the idea of wilderness. The framing of the wilderness area by
contrast to the civilization that surrounds it is a process analogous to the
picturesque framing of a landscape. Much like "outdoor museums",
national parks are designed so that huge amounts of human traffic are shuffled
in and out each day but told to pick up after themselves so that the same
amount of people will be able to see what they have seen for years into the
future.
