American Realities with Bill Youngs
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      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
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        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
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ALP (Appreciation, Lamentation, Preservation) Revisited

Fireside Talk

ALP (Appreciation, Lamentation, Preservation) Revisited

J. William T. Youngs

Posted December 5, 2012

We began History 498 by consldering ALP (Appreciation, Lamentation, and Preservation) as fundamental to the beginnings of the National Parks story. (Fireside Talk, Topic One) “Before we could have the parks, Americans needed to develop a new way of seeing and understanding the wilderness.”

With the end of the quarter approaching, I want to repost some words from my original “Fireside Talk” on ALP and then review those observations from the perspective of the almost 150 years of National Park History and ten weeks of our class. (Remember, Lincoln signed the Yosemite Bill in 1864.)

Ideology and Action (Original Post)

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.

Ideology and Action (Revisited)

We have certainly seen that attitude change. Millions of Americans now agree with John Muir that “we need beauty as well as bread.” But fear of wildness has not vanished from our popular culture: look at all the films of the recent years, for example, that portray predatory wolves, bears, and sharks! And on the utilitarian side look at Sarah Palin’s popular campaign slogan of 2008: “Drill, baby, drill.”