to explore. you know, certainly everybody should try plan a trip here at some point inso today we're goie

talking about landscapes and preservation and sort of how preservation unexpectedly changes the places that we set aside as parks or other protected. the intention here is really not only to sort of understand the history of these kinds of protected spaces, but then also to make the process of preservation more visible, to make easier to understand not only the history of parks and how they have changed over time, but sort of more importantly, why they changed over time. because most of us, when we think about preservation, we think about some things staying

the same, and yet preservation actually things. so that's really kind of the focus we're going to aim at today. and i'm going to manage this. so there we go. so in the context of of open space lands here in the u.s., we're often there sort of this presumption that public ownership is the best way to protect the landscape. and we even see, you know, the the mini series by ken burns from a ways back on national parks that was called america's best idea, which is actually taken from a quote from wall stegner that, you know, natural spaces that have trails and sort of height for hiking and sightseeing and so on are representative of sort of pure, pristine nature, or that's just had sort of some boundaries put around it. and it's been kept the same. like a vase in a museum just kind of static and ever never changing set aside unchanged for generations. that literally is part of the

founding legislation for the national park service which was written and passed by congress in 1916. so the park service just had their centennial last year. lots of hoopla and and so you can see that their fundamental purpose is to conserve scenery and provide for the enjoyment as well as leave it unimpaired. the impression, the impression you get from this language is that parks are unimpaired and staying the same for generations through time. and so what i'm going to sort of what my research has focused on for and what we're going to focus on today is how that unchanging this is actually sort of hiding a whole bunch of landscape change that's occurring as places are preserved. so just as little backdrop, this will be familiar to some of you from earlier in the semester. this that all ecosystems is from nancy langston, an environmental historian and mentor of mine. she states very clearly that all ecosystems are the product of

history, including both are natural and their cultural or social history. so one of the things that i do in my work is looking at how looking at landscape change over time can really tell us something about the ideas that people have about over time and how ideas changed change with changing times. so a lot of this is really underlining both why understanding environmental history is important with, but then also sort of sort of the current of that ecosystem. how and why got there from the social or cultural side as well. so we're going to start with just again, review for my class, this concept of landscape landscapes, are you sort of inherently an interaction formed by interaction between people in place? so they're always about this. pearce lewis, a geographer, wrote that there are unwitting

autobiographies that, you know, essentially we by shaping the land, by being influenced by what's on the land and is possible there come in. there's lots of seats in the front. we essentially write our own autobiographies in the landscape without realizing we're doing so. we're leaving traces of the ideas that we have, ways in which we interact with the land. all those things. and for those of us who are researchers and interested in studying environmental history, we can then come along and look at the landscape and read something as if it were a book or another kind of text. we can actually read something about who's been here and what they've been. from looking at the landscape and how it changes over time. we may use term natural landscape or cultural landscape. i always make the assertion that all landscapes are both. there is no purely cultural landscape, even downtown manhattan has little plants

growing places and there's pigeons flying everywhere. and there's a lot of nature, even in the middle of a city. and similarly, the most remote sort of pristine looking wilderness has a lot of cultural overlay, cultural management, etc. that's influencing what that place is like. and lastly, all landscapes are dynamic, always changing. there's no way of holding them still the way we do with a vase in the museum. you know, you can put the ming vase on a on a shelf and maybe have some nice climate controlled air and lighting for it and it will stay pretty much the same for centuries. and we can't do that with landscapes. there's no way of holding them still. they're constantly with climatic changes, with ecological changes, and with cultural social changes. so that's what i'm interested in looking at and in a prime example is, national parks in the way that we often don't notice that landscape change is

occurring because it happens so slowly, so many of us have visited the yosemite valley. this is a photo that i took when i was visiting there alongside the red river and. it's really striking to look at pictures of the same place over time. so again, i think the first week of this course, we looked at some of these same images. this is a photograph taken from almost exactly the same location near the merced river, but taken in 1865 by carleton watkins. and what you can see in it, a little bit difficult. trees are in the way, but you can see there's a big meadow in the back. there are some coniferous trees, but there's also a lot of oak of oak trees and sort of willows. it's a much more open landscape than what we see today. similarly, we can look at paintings from the 1870s. this is by albert. he's done a little fancy footwork with the sides of the valley. they actually don't match up. if you look at a photograph today, you'll realize that this side of the valley is about five

miles west of that side of the valley. in his painting. but what's interesting about this painting is, again, it's showing us the ecosystem of this landscape in the 1870s, which again is meadows and oak woodlands with a few coniferous trees. it's a real contrast to the landscape that see today, which is almost all dark, coniferous forest. not that one is better than the other or preferable but that the ecosystem here is changed enormously because this place was preserved. this was a place where native americans had lived for centuries and had been doing landscape management of their own, mostly through burning. once that management was stopped, the place was protected, the ecological shifts occurring. but those of us who visit today and we see this, we think, oh, this is what it's always been like, because we don't know that it has that history. so that's part of what we're going to be looking at today is to understand the ways in which parks change over time, how they change far more than we

recognize and how that helps us to understand what's going on with park protection. so what are the other things that, you know, most of us sort of take public parks for granted in a way that, you know, most of us have grown up with parks in cities and national parks to go visit. they're kind of part of our culture now, but that's fairly recent. public parks are a fairly novel invention in a lot of ways. they evolved during the hundreds, essentially of both the admiration of wealthy estates, estates in england where. they would be sort of, you know, sort of, oh, what's the tv show? the. downton abbey. yes. thank you. i always forget words. you're very downton abbey ask, you know, this huge estate with role hills and people strolling about. but of course, most people couldn't visit those estates. they were privately owned by individual families. so was an admiration for those kinds spaces. but here in the u.s., this idea

that we wanted that space to be more democratic, to be more open to the public rather than just private they also evolved in some ways from using a certain public spaces like semeta, where blair cemetery's very for going for an afternoon. it seems odd to us now that you would sort of go strolling in a cemetery. they seem much more formal now, but back in the 1800s, especially in the 1830s to the 1860s or so, that was a very common thing in a lot of large cities, was pretty much the only open space available. and so people would go out for a walk. just enjoy the view and the green grass and and the stones. so sort of a combination of these different kinds of very formal spaces that we didn't want to repeat here in the u.s. and these more informal uses, similarly preservation itself of historic buildings, say, was originally something undertaken by private, wealthy individual. george washington's estate at

mount, for instance, was protected by a the mount vernon ladies associate in a private organization. the idea that government should protect and preserve places was not just wasn't part of our culture and till the sort of late 1800s. one of the people who was most responsible for that is this guy. this is frederick law olmsted and. he was a landscape architect and park designer. he very famously designed central park in new york city. i've got the original design here. it's a little hard to see, but from from the 1860s and essentially what he was doing at the time and this was actually not central in new york city, was out in the sticks, but he had foresight to know that the city would grow up around the park and wanted to create a space of of nature for sort people to visit, to just sort of stroll around and, enjoy this idea of sort of creating and

designing a wilderness. this was not just a case of setting aside an already natural landscape and leaving it alone, which is again, what we tend to think of when we think of park protection, what he was doing was making out of what at the time was mostly old sheep's meadows. there actually is a big grassy area in central park called the sheeps meadow, and that's why because there were sheep on it. but, but you know, from this old image moving, moving earth around, planting trees and bringing nature in to a degree deeply, deeply designed. has anyone been to central park in this room? a couple of people. if when you're there, it feels very natural. i've got a picture here of new york city with central park today. it's completely forested. there's sort of hills and dales there's lakes, lots and lots of dense trees, a lot of little

paths. so it really feels like you're in a pristine piece of york forest that's just been left behind without any buildings, but almost every aspect of it was an exception of a couple of big granite boulders, all the hills, all the forest all the lakes are all completely designed and therefore artificial. but we don't feel like they're artificial. we interpret them as natural as a natural space. and so that's really this idea that olmstead brought to his work was designing nature to an end, in essence, make it more natural or more natural seeming than what might have been there originally. he also very he's very he actually had a lot of nervous conditions himself as a young man and was ill a lot. and he had really had this idea that nature could be sort of a therapy for people that not literally sort psychotherapy, but as a relief from sort of your your stresses of ordinary daily life in an urban setting

with all the noise and the sort of, you know, trains running by and all kinds of crowding and he thought what people need is sort of this is this escape valve in a sense, to go and stroll around on sunday with your sweetheart on your arm, enjoying a sort of a contemplative experience of nature. he very explicitly wanted this to be a public space, open to all classes, not to the wealthy. so that was really a big part of his of his ambition. yet the rules that he put in place for your behavior you were in the park were actually more geared toward middle class and upper class than towards working people. they had a lot of rules about you can't have a lot of noise there's no organized sports allowed. this is very much a version of nature that's contemplative and quiet and sort strolling about. whereas if you're a real working, working 9 to 5 or it wasn't 9 to 5 back then, it was

more like, you know, 6 to 8, you know, 12 or 14 hour working days, six days a week, you have one day off to kind of blow steam. so people want to play stickball all in the streets and they want to drink beer and they want to run around. and none of that was allowed. so in essence, this was created as a public space, but really privilege certain users over others. and we're going to see that these early ideas of how you're supposed to behave in a park, who the park sort of aimed toward still through and a lot of our national parks, there's a lot of presumptions that these parks are open to everybody, but that there are particular ways you're supposed to behave and interact with nature when you're there and other ways are not appropriate. so you're not to find soccer fields in a national park. you're going to find hiking trails. not everybody likes to go hiking to bed, so is sort of this this element to it as. so olmstead sort of starts off this idea of of nature of parks

as design nature. this then gets combined sort of how do we get from these designed city parks like central park to the national parks that we have in some the national parks are vintage originated with a place that didn't become a national park until much later. i think in the 1940s or fifties, which is niagara in new york before. a lot of western expansion really started bringing awareness of the big monument to the western landscapes that we are with before, in the early 1800s, niagara was considered one of the most stunning natural landscapes that north had to offer. it is pretty stunning. i have never been there. i've just seen pictures, but it's pretty great. and after the erie canal opened up easier transportation in new york area became. it still doesn't seem fast to us

would take at least two days to get from new york city to niagara falls. but that was of a week. so it was greatly easy, greatly easier to get there. and you get this big influx tourists coming from new and boston from sort of the urban cities wanting to go and visit. it's this beautiful place. they go and have their photograph taken. i couldn't find a date for this picture, but clearly sort of the late 1800s, some point. but one of the problems that niagara here's just you know the tourists alongside beautiful falls having their taken with a big view camera one of the problems niagara falls though was there weren't any public controls in a way that we understand them now again wasn't an idea people just didn't have that cultural conception government stepping in to control space in any way and and so what happened? you'd get all these little sort of tourist stands like get in a lot of places today. so setting up saying, hey, we're

going to sell postcards, you know, pay me a dollar or $0.05 or whatever the price was, and stand here and get the best view. there would be photographers plying their trade and and so you got all this sort of messiness kind of messing up the scene. great. so what ends up happening is the the sort of the grandeur of the falls gets messy. there's little stands. there's people, you know, the equivalent of hotdogs and cotton candy kind of messing up the view and a bunch of european come to visit. and they write criticism, say, oh, these tacky american, you know, they would sell their grandmother to, make a dollar they're they're essentially ruining view in order to make these sort of, you know, have this sort of small scale entrepreneurial use. and they just think it's incredibly tacky.

how dare they? and this is a time when here in the u.s. we're kind of culturally sensitive. you know, we're less than 100 years old as a nation, had recently sort of shaken off influence of europe. the great britain specifically, but europe in general. yet all of our cultural references are from europe all of the writers we read all the painters, we look at all of the sort of sense of high culture we have is european. and so there's this there's push. when the europeans are now criticizing us and saying, oh, they're so tacky, there's this push to try and say, what do we have that is unique and is different and how great the u.s. is. and one of the things that they start to focus on are the natural landscapes that especially the western sort of reveals as people are moving west. and so niagara falls, essentially a negative example, sort of of what not to do.

we don't want to mess things the way we did there. so when yosemite valley here in california is. quote unquote, discovered by a battalion of military folks who are chasing some native americans up the mahsud river and sort of come out into this amazing valley and they're stunned by this incredible scenery that they see you know, that yosemite valley is is unlike almost anywhere on earth with these huge granite cliffs just sort of dominating thing. and so to this young u.s. culture at the time, these kinds of monumental, unique, stunning, natural become symbolic of national pride, of, hey, we've got something that those crazy europeans don't have. and in fact, you see a lot of descriptions of western landscapes as people are are moving across the western territories and describing these

places, they're often describing them in comparison to castles in or old ruins in rome, saying how much cooler essentially these places are like, oh, you could have some tumbledown castle, or you could have this amazing rampart of stone and granite and, you know, there's all this sort of comparison going. so nature takes on a new meaning of sort of being symbolic of our youthful strength and vigor as a nation. it becomes very nationalistic to sort of to experience these kinds of of monumental western landscapes. and it's not just the landscape in this case, there was similar interest in the the redwood trees, both the coast redwoods here in coastal california and the giants of the sierras, again, is sort of symbolic, something our nation had that no one else had just. the sheer size of these things.

you know, there's all kinds of photographs of sliced through sequoia trees with people posing them or standing on the stump, seeing how many people they can fit on as like a dance floor to say, you look how gigantic this is. this is better than any tree ever going to find in europe. it's bigger and it's taller, and it's just, you know what we're doing. that's great. the funniest thing for me about the giant sequoias is the botanists who are all about identifying in sort of the early stages of biological science. in the 1860s or so, they have this giant over what to call the sequoias with their latin name, you know, their taxonomic name. the the british botanist all wanted sequoia wellingtonians after wellington and of course the united botanists all wanted sequoia after washington. instead it thankfully sticked

with sequoia gigantic, which is a little more descriptive. it's actually a sequoia dendreon, so, you know, and again, the descriptions of these this is a quote from surveyor clarence king describing the giant sequoias in 1864, and he writes, no fragment of human work, pillar or sand worn image half lifted over pathetic desert. none of these linked to the past as today with anything like the power of these monument sites of living antiquity. so this is this idea that we have a past. we don't need europe's. we have our own and this natural past, this natural history that's better than anything europe. so there's a lot of sort of nationalism being imbued this. why does the nationalism, it's in part where the idea of setting national parks comes from is setting aside these to keep the symbolic scenery pretty

and powerful and not sort of up the way niagara got up with all these little sort of clattering little shops and trinkets and so forth. interesting. the idea this is a it's a little hard to see this map, the the pink outline here is more or less the it's actually a little bit smaller than the current national park. the part that's labeled labeled in green is the original reservation that was aside signed by lincoln in 1864. and as you can see, hopefully from that map, all of that was protected. the original area, protected areas, very small. it was just the valley and literally sort of the view shed of the valley. so if you're standing on the valley floor where i took those photographs earlier by the mahsud river, and you're looking up at the granite walls, the boundary of the protected area is the top of those walls. we don't care about the

ecosystem, don't care about the forest. we don't about the overall sort of mountains and sort of a large what we're protecting here is the and then by making it into a public park, a government owned park remembers of this land was public land to begin with part of the public domain essentially claimed by the u.s. when we won this thus mexican-american war in 1848 and california became of the union. so all is being done is setting aside publicly owned land not homesteaders to make claims in it, not allowing miners to come in and sort of mess it up, trying to keep it nice and tidy so that tourists can come and see this grand view and feel this pride. the original proposal setting aside yosemite did not from the public at large, which is sort of how we think about today that they are for us and us and all

that sort of democratic language. the original proposal year for yosemite was a representative from one of the steamship companies that was bringing people from the east coast, sort of around the horn and bringing people to california before the transcontinental railroad. that was the only way of getting here other than a few people coming over land. and so is the steamship company saying, hey, this is great. if you set this place aside. it's really beautiful. everyone's going to go, want to go visit it and they'll have to pay us by both steamship and then stagecoach to take them there, have them in our hotel that we'll build, and then we take them back again. they pay us three times this is great. so this is, you know, it gets aside. mark david spence who you read some chapters from this week, sort of described both the yosemite valley protected area and the mariposa grove, which is further south somewhere.

i don't think it's on this map. he describes as sort of powerful symbols of national. they're being established just as the civil war is coming to a close in 1864 at least. they hope it's coming to a close. and so they think that, you know, is going to be symbolic of our once again reunited nation and its strength and vigor going forward in time. so it's both really important as this sort of public symbol, but then also there's this connection with private enterprise. first, the railroad, the steamship company in the case of yosemite, for every other national park that's established between 1864 and 1916, when the national park service itself is created. they're proposed, advocated for and then served by railroad. so again, the connection tourism and to sort of industrial tourism, if you will, you know not mom and pop setting up a little shop and selling t shirts whatever the equivalent in 1900

of t shirts is not that kind of but really organized corporate tourism is part of the national parks from day one. it's how they get established because somebody has to go to congress and convince congress to pass this legislation. it doesn't just happen. and that's who is pushing them to do this. one of the other interesting things about the yosemite reservation is that there's a clause, the legislation that creates the park insisting that the protection be permanent. he said, you know, there's sort of no point in setting aside for this kind scenic grandeur unless we're committing to protect it for all time. so it starts very early in 1864. this idea that are going to stay the same, we have this static view, sort of the sense that all of us have looking at postcards or calendars, ansel adams

photographs or our own photographs. if go to yosemite and visit of the view of what yosemite looks like. and we don't think of that as being something that changes over time. and in fact, if the park service ever moves a campground or changes, you know, a scenic pullout, people actually get upset because of like, hey that's not the one i'm used to. now looks different because i'm having to see it from a different angle. i actually ran an experiment with my environmental history class a number of years ago. rei, the early days, sort of digital photography. we didn't have instagram yet or facebook. we just had flickr. and during one of our class breaks where i had them type in into flickr search engine yosemite and view and, have it pull up all the photographs that were tagged with those words and display them as a slideshow. and i swear 90% of them were taken from exactly the same spot, which is one of the spots where the tour busses of take everybody through to what's called the tunnel view.

if you know yosemite, up on highway 140 and looking back at half dome and capitan and sort of this very classic that we all know is if we if something you know, if a hotel built in the middle of that or a great lightning bolt struck dome and cracked it in half, that's not going to happen. but we would be upset because the thing that we we think of is unchanging would suddenly change. that's part of the idea, again, of preservation this sort of natural frozen in time and staying the same sort of for generations to come. one of the last aspects of yosemite specific valley that i think is not, again, well understood, not only were they promoted in the early days, you know, sort of pitch to and then promoted by the railroads. but once you get the automobile being invented. and also our lives changing in

terms of the workweek getting shorter weekends are invented and have more leisure time. the combination of these two things really transforms the national parks. they become very auto oriented. you can see this in an old poster from the 1930s or twenties of you know yosemite's mariposa grove with a tree that just fell over, lit and last in this in the winter storms this year with a car driving through the tunnel tree. the this is a real transformation as we have more leisure the auto industry explicitly expressly wants to be places for us to go in our cars, to go visit, because the more we drive cars, the more we will buy gas. the moral buy new cars. this is much sort of a again, a corporate enterprise. so in the middle of world war one, when the national park service itself was created to manage the parks that had already been created, they had

this whole see america first campaign. you don't need to go to europe for your for your vacation. go see america. first to get in your car or get on the railroad and ride around and the country that you live in. see these sort of iconic landscapes. so parks were very even in these later days were very expressly there inform us about what being an american was supposed to be and sort of expose us to these iconic natural landscapes that we're to fill us with national and and sort of a sense of of of where we're coming from. time is it we're fine. and they did start coming. i just realized i skipped over the numbers of yosemite visitors really telling to see how it climbs up in 1855 are the first tourists entering yosemite valley even before it was created into a park. by 1863, just before it was set aside.

406 visitors arrived that year by steamboat and stage ten years later, in 1875, they'd built hotels and a road. there were wagons, cars and supplies coming in. eventually, the railroad connects the area by 1916, when the park services. created 14,000 visitors to no cemetery valley in a year. two years later, in 1918, it had jumped almost 27,000 nearly doubled because of automobile. in fact, one of the biggest advocates for establishing the national park service in 1916, again, not the general public at large, like we to think, but the triple a know the automobile industry was like, hey, we need these parks, we need agency so that people places to go. so like i said, 19, 16, 14,000, 19, 18, 27,000, and in 1997, don't ask me why i don't have more recent data. 4.2 million, almost all arriving

by car. so it's, you know, the visitation to yosemite valley is now completely insane. and in fact, there's a lot of discussion. when does a park get too much visitation and should we start restraining some people? but again, what i want you to really get from this is that parks though we think of them as these sort of pristine natural spaces have always been intended for tourism and specifically not for sort of the backpacking tourism. we think of with you know, since the of rti and people now go backpacking the time or doing other kinds of really extreme getting into the wilderness kinds of recreation these were really set up for very passive tourism of you know, driving around in your car and looking out the window and just kind of saying, gosh, that pretty and taking a picture with your your kodak instamatic or now your iphone, you know, it's all kind of the same thing. very, very tourist focused

process. one of the other important aspects of parks, though, is that these places not empty, of course, when they were set aside to make parks almost every single park in well, both the west and east but certainly the western parks, almost of them were inhabited by native americans before they became parks. and so part of the process of, understanding the story of our national parks, is also understanding the people who are displaced from parks in order that they become these sort of unchanging, iconic, natural parks. the i we're going to talk more about wilderness in in this class in a few weeks, but just to to bring up the idea very briefly, there's been a lot of critique over the last few years. i'm someone who writes about this a lot myself of how the concept of wilderness actually very ethnocentric. it tends to edit out the native peoples of the americas and pretend that they weren't there and instead sort of posit that

this idea that before white people started up in the western landscape, it was pristine nature that was sort of empty and uninhabited. and then we idealize as little as fragments of those uninhabited places, which of course is not true. again, spencer, you had some readings from today argues that uninhabited wilderness had to be create needed before it could be preserved. and the sort of type of landscape that that was being preserved then becomes he says reify sort of remake or made real in a way that it never was real before in the national parks you get these empty spaces that have only tourists running through them. of course, they're not empty. there's other people there now. they're just tourists that are visiting, but there's no longer anyone living there. and that's because we had to push those people out and then kind of edit them out of the story. in some cases they were

literally edited out of the story in the sense that they were relocated. there's a real similar time frame for when the first national parks are being created and when the first native american reservations are being created, and in many cases people are little being taken out of a park space and put on to a reservation space which is much less grand in terms of the scenery, but, you know, it really overlooks the fact that not only were native peoples place at the time, but had been these landscapes for, in many cases, millennia for or thousands of years. and there's an interesting sort of quality these are some miwok people who are living in yosemite as part of the museum exhibit in yosemite valley for decades actually in yosemite. they were initially they tried to move the native people out yosemite valley. then eventually they sort of let them back in. but on the condition essentially that they live in their ways as

part of display for the tourists, not quite like animals in zoos, something close there on display, people would come by and sort of remark on, oh, look at those outfits they're wearing, look at the things that they're doing that they're there to be of. seen by the tourists i think one of the things that's that's curious about our relationship with nature as represented by the parks is how sort of the original anglo settlers and you know these railroads and all these sort of folks that are coming in to these landscapes nps can't really quite make sense of people who live nature rather than looking nature. you know, that's that of being yosemite being a place to live in, to rely upon the resources that are there in the way that native americans do. or is it being sort of a that you stand back and you look at you go to the tunnel view which

the bus takes you to and you take your your standard photograph for you by the postcard and you get the view of the place. a very different relationship. it's not necessarily that one is better than the other, but that they're really not the same. and i think that a lot of those early anglo settlers and developers really just couldn't this different way of interacting with nature. there's even in their earliest writings there's a sense that indians in parks aren't a sort of adequately appreciative of the scenery in in an esthetic way. literally there's a doctor named lafayette bunnell who's with the military that's first enters yosemite valley's. they're chasing some of the miwok up valley as part of this military campaign. and he kept a journal and while they were doing this, this this expedition and he describes once they catch up the miwok and they start trying to ask them

questions, interpreters and so on, he refers to the resident indian sort of reverence of, yosemite valley, as being a spiritual place for them. he refers to as demon ism. you know, it's not christianity, therefore it's something terrible, that it's a negative thing. oddly he doesn't interpret that as the same kind awe that he experiences in this, even though you could argue those are actually very much the same experience sort of seeing on the grandeur having sense of a spiritual, spiritual, spiritual to a landscape. have some but you know, he just doesn't see the connection and in his in his account he wrote in none of their objections made to the abandoned of their home as being forced out. was there anything to indicate any appreciation of the scenery here? he's like these people. i don't think it's pretty. they keep talking about how there's deer, there's other resources, and it's really

comfortable to live and they like it. and their family's been for a long time. they're not saying, wow isn't it pretty? therefore they don't deserve to live here. there's sort of the sense you're supposed to have this esthetic reaction to a natural landscape and there's just no room for any other kind. therefore, these people don't belong and should be moved out. which in today's parlance just seems very strange, right? most of us like that, though of course, those are two different things. but at the time that seemed quite normal. unfortunately this idea of a national park as natural with wildlife, rivers, with mountains, without people who are residents has then been. it's become this national park ideal that we've developed over time. the national park service, when it was created was managed to i pardon was created to manage these kinds of spaces. so this what it tends to presume

parks are supposed to be like. and every time you and i go and visit a park and we keep seeing these, these natural landscapes have no residents where our movements are very choreographed through those spaces. you know, the when you get to the, the, the overlook at the tunnel view in yosemite, you can't see the lodge or curry village or the campground. they're all neatly sort of hidden away amongst the trees. all we see is the the empty natural scenery. so each time we that gets reinforced as that's what a park is supposed to be like. we similarly have exported idea. so a lot of national parks in particularly the developing world, africa and south america and asia that were created with sort of the burgeoning environmental movement in the 1970s and eighties replicate this idea started kicking their native inhabitants, their indigenous peoples out and recreating these kind of empty

wildlife parks or nature parks for then european and american tourists to come visit with their cameras. so we see this kind of pattern over and over again of, you know, often destroying the native cultures in the process or making them incredibly impoverished and forcing them into sort of more marginal existence around the edges of parks in order to create these kind of empty spaces. again they're wonderful. there's nothing sort of, you know, say, oh, this terrible nature, it's horrible but we do want to that they come at a cost that they come from removing people who are living in these places. here again, is you might have noticed in the previous picture, these these sierra miwok people are standing around in front of teepees. this is their natural, their usual form of shelter. this is from the great plains,

but it's part of the american i think this photograph is from the 1920s. it's part of sort of popular culture in the u.s. of what indians are supposed to look like. what they actually look like is, more like this in that area. they lived in these structures similar shape, totally different construct. you know, again, they're not only made part of the display sort of made to change how they are living, to fit our ideas of, what a native person is supposed to be like. so there's this real, you know, i think understanding that these national parks, these spaces have come at a cost, moving people out of changing them from being lived in nature to being this kind of iconic nature. so that sort of sierra history, starting with yosemite moving on to creating the national parks what does this have to do with my work? this is my opportunity to talk a little bit about my own research here since i just had a book out last year.

rae, which is about point raised national seashore here in california, also part of the national park system because on a coastal area it's called a national, but it's owned and managed by the same agency. it's just a few miles west here conveniently. so we can all go on a field trip some day, perhaps it's been owned and managed since 1962 by the national park service. and if you look at their web page, some of the, you know, sort of promotional material they put out, they'll tell you that, you know, it was created to protect wilderness and natural resources, sort of an a protected chunk of undeveloped california coastline. you get their little, you know, park map. here you are and this is kind of the the wild california coast that. this place is supposed to be protecting. but while you don't see very much information about it, this is what was it before became a park you know, with yosemite it was this native history that was

sort of edited out of the landscape. like i said, in the 1860s, this is made into a park in the 1960s. so maybe it different. well, it's not both. it has a native history, which i'm not an archeologist. i don't have a lot of research in that area as a historian, i'm more interested in the more recent of this place. and since the 1860s, late 1850s. the point raised was a dairying landscape with managers as a whole of of dairy ranches. this land originally a mexican or actually yeah mexican land grant in the 1930s as often happened here in california after we became part of the u.s. and became a there were a lot of legal disagreements over who owned which pieces of land. and so those would to court and in many instances including here instead of either of the two

parties fighting over the land because the legal fees were so high the land ended up in the hands of the lawyers, which was what happened here. two brothers i kid you not their name is shafter. it just seems of appropriate and. then one of them had a son in law. so you have james shafter own, part of the land. charles howard was his son in law and i forget what the oh stands for. maybe oliver shafter, the three of them co-own this entire peninsula and a system of tenant run ranches. so they owned the land. they set up all of these ranches. they were lawyers so they came up with very creative names, a ranch branch. see ranch de ranch all the way up to the point. a friend of theirs, solomon, owned tomales point. so it's called the pierce ranch. it's not part of the alphabet system. the alphabet comes back down the peninsula and eventually they run out of letters. so the southern end of the park, you have ranch names that are more natural names, like south

end and wildcat ranch and lake ranch and so on. from 1858 until sort of roughly the 1920s and thirties. this system each was run by a tenant family. there were three different sort of waves of immigrants that came to this area and that had experience running dairies. and so they were often chosen as the people to to run these. there's a group from the azores that live mostly out here and still do there's a group from ireland also big dairying landscape that are up on tomales point in the north and then inland you have more italian speaking pardon me swiss speaking, italian speaking swiss. so you get names like giacomini, gambini and dulcinea and all these. any names. what's interesting about this, the chapters own this landscape, like i said, from 1858 until the

1920s or so when the heirs to the original owners started to sell off. in an unusual twist of selling off to sort of outsiders, they sold off for the most part to the tenant. this is really one of those sort of classic and almost made up and it just seems like these never really happen sort of american stories, right? you emigrate to the u.s., you work hard as a tenant and eventually you become the landowner. very much that story. so many of the families that owned these ranches when the park was created have been there. and some of them that are still have been there for five or six generations, which for california is pretty darn old, you know for back east or in europe 150 years is nothing but out here. that's pretty unusual. around the same as this conversion from the chapter's owning the chapter family the land to the the tenant families owning it. most of the converted from producing butter cheese, which

was mostly shipped schooner to shipping to liquid milk and shipping it by by truck. roads got improved around the same time, refrigeration got improved and. now selling liquid milk is much more possible. dairies are they're pretty extensive places. this is the sea ranch out on the peninsula and. this is another one further up on tomales point. they have a lot of buildings. there's certainly lot of impacts. this is not a wilderness is the point. i'm trying to make here. there's a lot of buildings, a lot fences, a lot of land use going on here with a dairy need to be milked twice a day every day, day in, day out. they don't take vacations. they don't have weekends. so the cows are coming back to the barns twice a day. there's a lot of heavy impact around these barns in terms of environmental impact. so not a pristine space, not a wilderness yeah, this was seen as great place to put a national

seashore in the 1960s. this was a of time there was a big sort of parks, the people movement across the nation. national park service was specifically looking for places to create new parks that were close to urban areas, and that would provide specifically beach access. so this is really what the focus was, both back east. you get places like cape cod, cape hatteras, all these national seashore is a whole bunch of national lake shores in the great lakes and then a series of seashores out here, including rays, the the park was set up initially was expressly designed to try and accommodate the still operating ranches. so at that time there were 25 either dairy or beef ranches operating on the peninsula within boundaries of the seashore trying to keep them in place was both a political the locals never would have gone along with this park idea if it was going to change their local economy as much as taking out 25

ranches, it would have had a huge impact. but then also there are some, if you read through the hearings and the the other the other sort of discussion that's going on about the park, there's a real appreciate of the scenic quality of of the pastoral landscape saying for someone driving out from san, seeing cows and these beautiful pastures is actually part of the esthetic. so that was sort of being touted as one of the one of the the, the strong points of this place. but as you may, hopefully are starting to get from this lecture today, the park service is when it comes to preservation. it's not a neutral actor. it has built into that agency from its early history a really strong of what a national park is supposed be like. and those early national are what's shaping that. so places like yosemite are really kind of the model of how parks are going to be set up and managed and places that have working landscape like point

rays don't fit in as well. i'm not sure if you can quite read it. i put a quote from a park service historian on this slide. he says that given the strength and persistence of ancestral attitudes, these old ideas about what a park is to be within the service its core values are likely to last. any one director, even one who is stubbornly determined to change them. these ideas are really built into the landscape itself and into the ways that we manage these to try sort of keep them as these unchanging natural scenery, places that have lands, that have people living on them and livestock moving around in them don't fit that very well. and one of the things that's important to understand about park service is, again, when it's first set being set up, it's not a focus on natural resource this ecology as a science exist. yet in 1916, or it's barely

starting to exist. it's really a focus on the scenery, not on the science and followed through actually until fairly recently in the park service. so this can sort of help us to understand some of sometimes contradictory between what the agency sort of says they're wanting to do and what the actual outcomes of their on the landscape can be. and that's really what i found in my research at point raise. so just a quick overview of some of the things that have happened there through the sort of management and actions the park service has been slowly editing out. a lot of the human history of this place, either physically through moving buildings, roughly half of the buildings and other structures that in place in 1962 are gone now. and again, it's not necessarily that they were the best things on earth, but they've either been removed or torn down or sometimes burned for fire

training. this idea that we should push the landscape to being more looking and to have fewer structures in it, it's not a formal policy of the park service, but it's the way that their management actions tend to drive almost without noticing it. when i actually did the count, you know, tried to figure out, well, many from maps and photographs how many buildings were there in 1962 and how many are there today. i think the park service was genuinely surprised, as many have disappeared as have so that. you know, it's not that they're conscious of changes that they're causing over time, but that these things are happening sort of slowly through these ideas about what management should be driving for. there's far fewer ranches in place in operation where we went from 25 in 1962. there's currently 11 six that are dairies and five that are beef ranches within the the point reyes boundary itself. some of those ranches are being

taken care of. some of the still operating ones. they're all they're all still being lived in some of the ones that aren't being in are being taken care of like, pardon me, i'm a little off the pearce ranch, which has become a sort of a walk through exhibit. the buildings they've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fixing the buildings with very historic preservation, appropriate methodology, use the right kinds of nails for the era that this was built and the right technology for fixing them. it's it's actually the ranch is in the best shape in the park physically, but you may be able to see there's plaques and a path visitors can walk around and look at the buildings and sort of peer at them and read about them. but nobody lives there except for the main house, which is housing park staff, other ranches that have where the have either moved out on their own or actually have been evicted are not taking care of very.

this is the ranch out near drakes beach. this is the main old victorian house dating back to the 1880s and a photograph of the same spot from the 1950s when you can't see it very well from this distance. but there's beautiful roses on each side and everything's in perfect. many of the neighbors describe me that back in its day, the ranch was the prettiest ranch on the point. you know, the really was just kind of a showcase. and you can see that now it's been sitting empty about ten years. a bunch of the windows are broken, the fog is an area that's incredibly foggy, incredibly windy, a lot of salt air from. the ocean and unlived in building is going to deteriorate very quickly and. in fact, the old creamery, which also dated from the 1880s, which was just across the from this building, collapsed a few years ago. and it's now been sort of taken away with the area. there's also creation of wilderness designated making this lived in place into sort of

this wild, pristine nature. and that's come complete with wildlife. these are tully elk that had lived on the point the peninsula back in the 1800s and long before they been hunted out of out out of the area by about the 1850s, even before the dairy started moving in and were gone from this region until were reintroduced in 1978. they've since proliferated there. they're their herds are doing quite well. there's a real there's a lack large predators in what would been a natural and putting natural in air quotes a natural miwok managed you would have had coastal miwok peoples burning the landscape with some regularity and you would have had grizzly bears and mountain picking off some of the mostly the young to the elk would have kept the population in check. they're they would have been hunted by the miwok. right now there's no hunting and there's no large predators

except for a couple of mountain lions living sort of up on the inverness ridge. so there's nothing to control this population and it's booming. it's taken a few dips in recent years because of drought, but there's really been this big management question what do we do to manage these these animals? they've talked about using contraception, which i only want to know the details or possibly moving of them out to another park. it's place that's sort of almost as being wild and natural, yet it's deeply managed. it's, you know, they can't just leave the elk alone and and of leave everything untouched. there's a need to keep in keep trying to shape this place to, make it look like sort of the iconic nature that we all expect when we arrive in in a park. what historical material there is at that raise the next time you're out there, you know, check out the visitor center. check out the one at drakes beach. they there's really very little

material and sort of interpreted for visitors what there is is mostly focused on. sir drake, who probably landed for about a week when his ship was blown off course in. the 1400s some time in the more recent past terms of the ranches and the very past of the coastal miwok. neither one is very well represented in the sort of parks interpreted nation of the history of this place. what's been really striking and again, sort of wrap up with this is that not only visitors understandable that most visitors don't know the history of this place because it's not interpreted by the park service for them. but even the park managers don't don't remember don't have any ideas of what this old history was, of what was there before they showed up. park managers, park staff like any other job, has turnover,

right? so someone might work for five years and then move on to another park. the people who come in don't have a lot of material to read on the history of place. so gradually the memory of what was there fades away. they don't interact very much. the staff don't interact very much with the ranchers who still live within the seashore. and ever since i started been researching this place since the late 1990s, when people visit seashore for the first time, there's often a lot of questions about why are there cows here? what is it? why are the ranches don't like they belong in a national park? because again, we bring our own ideas of what a national park is supposed to be and we don't. seeing cows in yosemite or in yellowstone or of the other sort of big national iconic. so then it again becomes a self-replicating cycle where people question the original residents of this park and why they're still in place. they don't know the story of how they got there. and so then sort of advocate for

them to be moved out. and there's been a number of lawsuits in recent years trying to more actively some of the the last remaining out of the park. so one of the things i want you to you know, this closing here with this image of the of pastoral landscape at point raise is remembering that all landscapes have histories and even places that we think of as natural landscapes have histories that is quite invisible to us as. a as a viewer, these places were shaped by other people's lives, whether that be native americans. more recent settlers, like the ranchers at point raise. and i think there's a need to have, if not a formal recognition of their relationship with the landscape, at least a respect for the the ways in which their work has literally made these places. the reason that there are grassy fields at point res, which are very green this time of year and very lush is because of the miwok burning for hundreds or

thousands of years. and then because cattle ranching has been taking place since then. if you take cattle off, if you take the burning off, just like at yosemite, with the conifers moving in here, you have coastal brush moving, taking over. you wouldn't have green grass anymore because these coastal grasslands are not themselves natural landscapes. they're landscapes through people's work. so trying to understand and both the fact that people were in these places or if they still are valuing their their contribution to that place. so that's sort of the end of my lecture today. i wondered if you guys any questions that i can answer that actually just the first. can you that question again, what you interested in point raised in the first place. the what the questions what asked what got me interested point raise in the first place

in i very interested i come a background as a as a biologist as an undergraduate that was my my i got my my college degree in biology from uc berkeley and i thought i was good. my parents are both biologists. i thought i was going to be biologist, but i started getting really interested in the sort of social and cultural aspect of how we think of the natural world. i realized i wasn't so interested in taking the frog apart, but thinking about how we think about frogs or why we think they're important or etc. so i started getting more into sort of the science aspects of of natural landscapes and then specifically took a class at uc berkeley in, in my graduate program from, a law professor named joe sachs who was teaching a class on preservation and what was unusual was he spent half the semester talking about natural preservation, about national parks, about endangered species, about wilderness, and

then the rest of the other half of the semester. we talked about cultural preservation. so we talked about museums and communities like the who are trying to protect their sense of cultural and working landscapes like point res. and i started to realize how similar the impulses preservation are on the sort of natural and cultural side. and so i really interested in places where they come together. and to me that's what national parks are is, that there are these odd natural and cultural constructs, but we tend pretend the cultural isn't there and we only see the natural. and so point raised, because it is a lived in national that's fairly unusual in the united states today there are some there's probably 50 or 60 that have some kind of land use and or residents in the park. but of 400 some odd national park units, not very many. so was conveniently located nearby. and as i moved from being a

graduate student at berkeley and getting a job here at sonoma state, it was still conveniently nearby, but it also had that of natural and cultural that i found it very intriguing to try and understand how did we move from a fairly corporatized in way landscape, you know, one that was divided out into ranches and being utilized for economic use to something that is sort of recreated as a pristine nature and that transformation. so it's a perfect case study for seeing that change over time. other questions about preservation or parks. and the question. chapter we read for today you talk about how those in power insist influence what's valued and what's preserved.

i'm wondering what you think about current presidential administration, the impact it might have on a place like point reyes national parks that is a excellent question that i absolutely no idea how to answer. i have actually been asked this question a few times since the election in november. it's hard to the some people would presume that the new administration is more open to either private public lands. the guy that he that he's appointed zinke i think is his name as the secretary of the interior has been pretty explicitly not an advocate for privatization of public lands. so that seems like it's probably not on the table. there might be more openness to this kind of working landscape to the the wrecking rising that you can have economic uses of land and environmental protection at the same, that they don't have to be oppositional or that said, the

new administration seem particularly supportive of environmental concern signs at all so that that's where it's kind of a wild card. i think at this point in terms of how that will affect management on the ground. the other factor, this is unique, the park service and more current park service rather than the history of the park service, is that each individual, they're each created by a separate act of congress. they're not sort of there's no blanket authority over all of them. there's a there's some guidelines that the park service as its national policy. but individual superintendent of each park, each yosemite or yellowstone point, raise each superintendent has a lot of authority a lot of latitude to make their own about how to manage that place. and so there's a real very wide discretion that they have. and so a real variation in terms of how parks are managed, i have

often used a comparison of point raised to another park that's in ohio called cuyahoga valley national park. i think it is. it used to be national recreation area. where is this a place where the current superintendent has been very interested for the last 15, 20 years and actually bringing agriculture back into the park after it had been pushed out through a bunch of evictions in the 1970s and has come up with some really interesting models for possibly doing that of of creating sort of new long term leases for agriculturalists who are a will commit to being organic to having a fairly small scale production for not minding tourists coming by and looking at what doing there's a whole bunch of rules but they're sort of this new model for for encouraging agriculture. you would think a national agency, if that was happening one place, it would be happening in other in at least until fairly recently, the opposite has been happening at point ray's, where there's been a de-emphasis of the agricultural

landscape and more of the natural natural scenery. so there's this sort of lack of consistent c across parks, which means a new administration at the national level doesn't actually necessarily change very much. the each park level because those superintendents have a lot of. of discretion to kind of do their own thing and maybe go a different direction than the national levels going. so that's a long way of saying i don't know, but time tell anything else. all right. then we'll wrap up the lecture for the day. let's take a break and we will do our discussion of the readings afterwards.