ABSTRACT
The US claims to have invented national parks with Congress approval of Yellowstone in Wyoming in 1872 as a ‘public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people’. The words ‘national park’ were, however, first formally applied in legislation in 1879 to an urban public open space in Sydney, in the colony of New South Wales (Griffiths and Robin, 1997). As is well documented, the first national parks in the US celebrated the spectacular landscapes that distinguished North America from Europe, natural scenes that validated nationhood in the absence of cathedrals and other evidence of ‘civilization’, and that romanticized the settler frontier experience (Ise, 1961; Runte, 1979; Nash, 1982; Everhart, 1983; Beinart and Coates, 1995; Pritchard, 1999). In the first half of the 20th century, the American national park idea ‘spread to many parts of the world and changed considerably in the course of its travels’ (Harroy, 1972, p9; Nelson et al. 1978). Even though the final product in many parts of the British world bore the name ‘national park’, the path to protected area philosophy and management did not arise there from the desire to protect unspoilt nature from unbridled capitalist exploitation, as was the case in the US where Niagara Falls had provided an alarming example, but from game preservation – that ‘pleasing British characteristic’ as colonial game warden C. R. S. Pitman expressed it (Marks, 1984; MacKenzie, 1988). The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of some of the contextual and other issues – political, personal, scientific and biological – that have had an impact on the genesis and direction of the protected area estate in South Africa. In order to illuminate some of these major transformations, three examples are presented, each from a different era and established in different parts of the country.
