ABSTRACT

By the close of the twentieth century the traditional narrative that celebrated national parks as islands where pristine America could be preserved undamaged and unchanged for the pleasure of the people was facing challenges both from new understandings of science and new on-the-ground realities in the parks and the culture at large. Although science was taking on a larger role in park management, the mythic narrative based in an unchanging primordial America made it difficult to value scientific models that ran counter to it, models that emphasized, for example, change and flux more than stability and balance. On-the-ground evidence that conflicted with the island metaphor—as air pollution and exotic plants crossed into the park and bears and bison roamed out—also encouraged adaptation of both the mythic story and the management policies that flowed from it. The idea of pristine, Edenic America was further challenged by anthropological discoveries, which had previously not been seen because they did not fit the story. The evidence showed that the Native American presence had indeed altered the landscape, so the repeated ideal of reestablishing the pristine landscape that had been the New World at the time of the arrival of white Europeans no longer fit. Finally, there was a shift in the culture at large, both demographically and ideologically, that led to a realization that there were more than Euro-Americans in America. What power would the Christian story of a lost Eden recaptured in the parks have for people who did not share that story? Or for people for whom America had not been the Promised Land, but rather the place of enslavement? Or for people who did not see a sharp divide between wilderness and civilization, but who saw nature as their natural home? If America's national parks were going to continue to speak to the people of America, the narrative had to become more inclusive.