ABSTRACT
Conservation in Britain and much of Europe is largely concerned with maintaining lived-in landscapes – the countryside. This is inevitable since forest clearance in much of Europe was mostly prehistoric and very extensive. Thus when Wordsworth was arguing in 1835 that the English Lake District was ‘a sort of National property in which everyman has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’, he was concerned to protect landscapes that had been farmed for millennia. People were an integral part of these landscapes and Wordsworth was equally concerned at the loss of small farmers and local manufacture from them. American philosophers, notably Emerson, Thoreau and Muir, shaped similar ideas to the American experience of a continent much less changed by human impact. Their emphasis was placed on undefiled nature and the untouched wilderness as a source of spiritual renewal for urban populations. They were influential in the establishment of the world's first National Parks, which as a result were protected as tracts of wild uninhabited country whose sole use was to be public recreation. The Native American Indian population was resettled outside Yosemite before it was made the first park in 1864 and much the same was still done with farmers in the 1930s when Shenandoah was designated a National Park. This preservationist approach of the North American National Parks set the model followed throughout the world. It has prevailed almost everywhere until relatively recently when it has begun to be undermined by the new ecological and socio-economic insights introduced in the last chapter.
