ALP = Appreciation, Lamentation, Preservation
Fireside Talk: ALP = Appreciation, Lamentation, Preservation
J. William T. Youngs
9/25/2012
Ideology and Action John Adams once said that Independence was born in the hearts and minds of the American people before the Revolution actually began. Americans were accustomed to discussing "natural rights" before they waged a war and established a government wrapped around those principals. One of their teachers was the seventeenth century British political philosopher, John Locke, who argued that governments exist to serve the people and could and should be replaced if they failed in that duty. In a moment of supreme action, the war against Britain, those ideas provided the rationale for the revolution and for a new government. Long before 1776 the ideas were in place in the colonies that Thomas Jefferson could use in drafting the Declaration of Independence.
OK, so what do the Lockean ideology and the American Revolution have to do with the American national parks?!
That earlier time provides an excellent example of the way that changes in thought can lead to changes in behavior. Lacking a widely held consensus on individual rights, we might never have had the American Revolution, and we certainly would not have had the kind of democratic government that we have today. By the same token before we could have the parks, Americans needed to develop a new way of seeing and understanding the wilderness.
Before there were parks, there was a different attitude towards wilderness than the one that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. In the days of the first European colonists, the wilderness was regarded as an object, even an enemy, to conquer. The early Puritans, for example, described the American continent as a "howling wilderness." And "howling" was not for them a term of endearment. It suggested wolves and bears and Indians -- oh my!
It also pointed to the backbreaking toil required to do something "practical" with the countryside - to convert tall trees to timber and stony land to prosperous farms. During the nineteenth century that attitude began slowly to change, for some people anyway, and here is where the concept of what I call "ALP" became important as a simple way to remember the three fundamental ingredients in the new way of understanding wilderness.
A is for Appreciation It was a matter of how you saw an object. Was a tree simply potential profit -- board feet of timber? Was a mountain simply a source of mining wealth? Or were these and other natural object valuable in their own right? The question was hardly considered in early America. An exception that proves the rule was Thomas Jefferson's encounter with Virginia's Natural Bridge in 1767. This is a natural arch, 215 feet high over a Virginia gorge. Seeing it, Jefferson reported, "It is impossible for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven." (Quoted in Duncan and Burns, 8)
Such praise for natural wonders was rare at the time. That began to change during the 1830s and 1840s as Americans began to develop a deep appreciation for their own forests, mountains, and sea shores. In many cases, the remarkable grandeur of the country's new lands in the West evoked reactions of astonishment. The Yosemite Valley, for example, found a "voice" in John Muir. In Our National Parks (1901), for example, Muir wrote: "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." (Muir, National Parks, 1901, 56) Nature's grandest scenes, in places like Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon, encouraged appreciation. But Americans were beginning to be affected by natural beauty on even a more humble scale. Henry David Thoreau, whose influence on Muir was huge, "connected" to wild nature at Walden Pond outside of Boston and crafted one of the enduring classics of American environmental writing: Walden or Life in the Woods. (1854)
L is for Lamentation At first it may have seemed that appreciation was enough. There were so many forests, prairies, rivers, mountains, and seashores in the United States, that seemingly one could exploit and destroy many of these resources, while still having many more to enjoy. But as the forests fell away and the rivers were polluted, as the carrier pigeon died and the buffalo became nearly extinct, the lovers of wild America realized that something precious was being lost.
Back in 1767 Thomas Jefferson did not need to worry about the loss of animal species or the destruction of entire forests. But by the mid-nineteenth century that had changed. The forests around Walden Pond, for example, were falling to the woodsman's ax during Thoreau's lifetime, as were the great forests of Maine, about which he also wrote. John Muir saw and lamented the rapid depletion of forests of ancient Sequoias and Redwoods.
With appreciation for American nature and lamentation at its destruction, the scene was set for a new political movement, but what would it involve. We appreciate the beauty of nature; we lament its rapid destruction. What to do?
P is for Preservation The answer may seem obvious to us today, long after the founding of so many national and state parks and other nature preserves. But these did not always exist. They came into being during the nineteenth century as men and women began to "connect the dots," to reflect that the love of wilderness and the sorrow at its destruction could fuel a new kind of political action. And now I'm going to leave you to connect those dots drawing on your initial studies in History 498. How did Americans step up to the plate, so to speak, during the second half of the nineteenth century and begin preserving the wilderness? And along the way how did their own experience of A and L induce them to practice P and create parks?
J. William T. Youngs
9/25/2012
Ideology and Action John Adams once said that Independence was born in the hearts and minds of the American people before the Revolution actually began. Americans were accustomed to discussing "natural rights" before they waged a war and established a government wrapped around those principals. One of their teachers was the seventeenth century British political philosopher, John Locke, who argued that governments exist to serve the people and could and should be replaced if they failed in that duty. In a moment of supreme action, the war against Britain, those ideas provided the rationale for the revolution and for a new government. Long before 1776 the ideas were in place in the colonies that Thomas Jefferson could use in drafting the Declaration of Independence.
OK, so what do the Lockean ideology and the American Revolution have to do with the American national parks?!
That earlier time provides an excellent example of the way that changes in thought can lead to changes in behavior. Lacking a widely held consensus on individual rights, we might never have had the American Revolution, and we certainly would not have had the kind of democratic government that we have today. By the same token before we could have the parks, Americans needed to develop a new way of seeing and understanding the wilderness.
Before there were parks, there was a different attitude towards wilderness than the one that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. In the days of the first European colonists, the wilderness was regarded as an object, even an enemy, to conquer. The early Puritans, for example, described the American continent as a "howling wilderness." And "howling" was not for them a term of endearment. It suggested wolves and bears and Indians -- oh my!
It also pointed to the backbreaking toil required to do something "practical" with the countryside - to convert tall trees to timber and stony land to prosperous farms. During the nineteenth century that attitude began slowly to change, for some people anyway, and here is where the concept of what I call "ALP" became important as a simple way to remember the three fundamental ingredients in the new way of understanding wilderness.
A is for Appreciation It was a matter of how you saw an object. Was a tree simply potential profit -- board feet of timber? Was a mountain simply a source of mining wealth? Or were these and other natural object valuable in their own right? The question was hardly considered in early America. An exception that proves the rule was Thomas Jefferson's encounter with Virginia's Natural Bridge in 1767. This is a natural arch, 215 feet high over a Virginia gorge. Seeing it, Jefferson reported, "It is impossible for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven." (Quoted in Duncan and Burns, 8)
Such praise for natural wonders was rare at the time. That began to change during the 1830s and 1840s as Americans began to develop a deep appreciation for their own forests, mountains, and sea shores. In many cases, the remarkable grandeur of the country's new lands in the West evoked reactions of astonishment. The Yosemite Valley, for example, found a "voice" in John Muir. In Our National Parks (1901), for example, Muir wrote: "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." (Muir, National Parks, 1901, 56) Nature's grandest scenes, in places like Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon, encouraged appreciation. But Americans were beginning to be affected by natural beauty on even a more humble scale. Henry David Thoreau, whose influence on Muir was huge, "connected" to wild nature at Walden Pond outside of Boston and crafted one of the enduring classics of American environmental writing: Walden or Life in the Woods. (1854)
L is for Lamentation At first it may have seemed that appreciation was enough. There were so many forests, prairies, rivers, mountains, and seashores in the United States, that seemingly one could exploit and destroy many of these resources, while still having many more to enjoy. But as the forests fell away and the rivers were polluted, as the carrier pigeon died and the buffalo became nearly extinct, the lovers of wild America realized that something precious was being lost.
Back in 1767 Thomas Jefferson did not need to worry about the loss of animal species or the destruction of entire forests. But by the mid-nineteenth century that had changed. The forests around Walden Pond, for example, were falling to the woodsman's ax during Thoreau's lifetime, as were the great forests of Maine, about which he also wrote. John Muir saw and lamented the rapid depletion of forests of ancient Sequoias and Redwoods.
With appreciation for American nature and lamentation at its destruction, the scene was set for a new political movement, but what would it involve. We appreciate the beauty of nature; we lament its rapid destruction. What to do?
P is for Preservation The answer may seem obvious to us today, long after the founding of so many national and state parks and other nature preserves. But these did not always exist. They came into being during the nineteenth century as men and women began to "connect the dots," to reflect that the love of wilderness and the sorrow at its destruction could fuel a new kind of political action. And now I'm going to leave you to connect those dots drawing on your initial studies in History 498. How did Americans step up to the plate, so to speak, during the second half of the nineteenth century and begin preserving the wilderness? And along the way how did their own experience of A and L induce them to practice P and create parks?