JOHN HENNEBERGER is retired from the U.S. Park Service and is working on a book on the history of parks.
Fundamentally a park is nature, bounded, preserved, and protected for a wide range of uses and values. The form of the park has unfolded as part of the general trend of human cultural development from an initial simplistic form to the numerous, specialized varieties of today.
The basic form of the park emerged within the symbolic realm of early people when natural species were chosen for social and religious symbols, sometimes enclosed within sacred areas. Restrictions were placed on their use as an integral part of the relationship humans had with nature. These limitations grew in scope and stringency. The strictest now occur in reserved areas called "parks." Tracing out the forms of the park shows a series of transformations with sequentially greater restrictions on the use of nature for a growing number of purposes and values. Parks exist throughout the world in a wide range of forms, often called park, but also preserve, refuge, reserve, natural area, and monument. They have national, state, regional, and city designations. Within many parks are recreational, historical, parkway, memorial, trail, scenic, wild river, and wilderness area zones. Many parks have combinations of purposes, forms, designations, and zones.
The significance in examining the "park" in its earlier forms is to discover the basic cultural elements that constitute the later, more complex structures. There is a branch-like development at each level of transformation that shows continuity with its predecessor, yet is something different. Each form of the park is an advance on its predecessor, with the possible result that in a series of transformations, the development of "park" quite likely ends up where it began.
Park forms have developed within the general trend of culture moving from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, along a path that is still operative in the world. The bounding of natural species by early peoples within areas of ritual practice, with concomitant restrictions on the use of these natural species, was a rather limited, inexact proposition compared with the multitude of park forms today.
People in small groups, separated from other groups by territorial imperatives (though usually united with adjacent groups through kinship relations), experienced an associated type of living where ritual controlled all facets of their lives. Groups shared a comparable mythology. Natural resources within their territory were held communally, and shared with neighboring groups. Socially, they operated as politically autonomous, semi-nomadic bands, hunting and gathering in small family groups. The first communities were essentially religious societies that sought to maintain a correct relationship with the supernatural power who had the good of the group at heart. Towards this goal, natural species were chosen as social and religious symbols because they were "good to think."1 Nature was brought into the human order, becoming an object and a means of thought. The process of humans restricting their use of nature initially enters culture via religious observance because animals are "good to forbid."2 Animals used as totems lend themselves especially well in observances where individuals through ritual identify with them and the world at large. This is mediated by the binding rules of abstinence or performances labelled taboos. "Order implies restrictions," notes Mary Douglas when speaking of the danger of disorder to the patterns of society maintaining order and the survival of the group.3 Ritual recognizes the potency of order. Ritual sets up a form that has external boundaries, margins, and an internal structure. This is the essential structure of sacred space and subsequent forms of the park. It was these sacred sanctions generated through ritual that shaped relationships between people and other life-forms.
There are two aspects to boundaries on the landscape to be considered.One is boundary applied to territory denoting a relationship between a people and nature. The other is where boundary engages nature in a system of social relations.4 The first aspect occurs in hunter-gatherer societies where people obtained their means of subsistence through ranging over a landscape from central habitation sites. They did not divide up the world among themselves. The land tenure of hunter-gatherers is of places, sites, or locations, often having ancestral or clan totemic significance. In the second aspect, Neolithic people "worked" the land as agriculturalists and pastoralists, displacing naturally diverse wild plants and animal species with a few domesticated varieties. A separation of land from its embodiment in the landscape occurs. Specific fixed boundaries are placed upon land to denote tenure between individuals, thereby engaging nature within a system of social relations. In the process, human populations increase dramatically, material things are produced, social structure changes, economies are transformed, religion is altered, and there begins the process of separation of humans from the balance of nature both in thinking and in actual residence. Two dimensional boundaries come into play to delineate areas of land dedicated first to agricultural practices and herding areas, then sections for site plots, villages, cities, forests, refuges, and parks.
Early people had an understanding of the conservation of nature that did not involve delineations on the land. There appears to have been care and respect for the land and all forms of life that contained the element of prohibition of wanton destruction. Limits on harvest and hunting at certain times were employed. Delineations of sacred space were in the form of the ritual cave, a grove of trees, the sacred stone, a mountain, and waterhole. The rituals practised at sacred areas, or directed toward it, differentiated it from other spaces. Specific focus was on the use of negative restrictions or taboos linked with rituals held in sacred spaces which connected people to the whole of Creation.
For example, the Tallensi tribe of Ghana place the python, crocodile, tree-lizard, and water-lizard under a restriction, the "Tabus of the Earth" that protects animals they meet in the territory of shrines dedicated to particular ancestor cults. The selected animal is linked to their ancestor. To kill it amounts to murder. A covenant is perpetuated with the chosen animal because the species is as perpetual as the lineage. The totem species are assimilated into a quasi-human status - a sort of kinship symbiosis envisaged as a kind of person, a living force, complementary to the Tallensi collective ancestors. The ancestors, the human descendants, and the sacred animal are all united in a territorial link. The Ngaju Dayak of South Borneo erect a "Tree of Life;" the Murgrin in Australia hold waterholes to be sacred. The Celts had religious ceremonies performed in forest sanctuaries involving cults of rivers, wells, and trees. Their wilderness sanctuaries were unmodified sacred groves where nature worship occurred. A close feeling toward nature led them to place restrictions on their use of the natural environment by not wantonly wasting trees, other plants, and the animals on which they lived.
Such feeling was a "spiritual tool" where early peoples were concerned about relationship with the rest of the universe.5 The tool was psychological, expressed in methods formalized as techniques. The intellectual portion was concerned with method and then collected as science. The spiritual part was assembled in mythologies and religion. It enabled people to monitor and manage their actions by reference to the "feeling" which they experienced for the consequences of changes they made in their environment. Presently, this tool is called ethics as applied to restrictions on the use of nature in the name of developing values. Early people considered themselves close members of the natural community, so the tools were used to maintain the stability of the natural environment that sustained the community. As separation from nature occurred toward an urban-industrial, materialistic locus, these tools were used to mine the natural environment.
In primordial times, rituals as imitations of things done by mythical beings were often held in temporary enclosures. A wall was erected, or there was a placing of stone. Deep cavern recesses were often reserved. The prehistoric ritual practices underlying the totemic element can be detected in pictorial representations found in decorated caves in the great caverns of southern France, dating back some 20,000 years. Rituals were performed to manage the activities of the chase as depicted on the walls by pictures of wounded animals. The notion shown here is one of linkage whereby particular peoples are connected with specific areas of land and natural phenomenon. The union of people to the land is in situations quite specific to the character of each. Eventually, the circle of stones, the back ends of caverns, the waterhole, the habitat of totemic animals, and the sacred groves are restructured into components of the first ceremonial temple complexes to hold the essence and image of the numinous natural forces with which people engaged religiously as they dealt with living in emerging urban settings.
In the shift of some human groups from the hunter-gatherer subsistence level to the beginnings of Neolithic agriculture and pastoralism, and then toward Bronze Age urbanization, each developing society continued with the myths and rituals of their tribal ancestors with a systematizing and amplification that led to the establishment of garden/park sacred space within their villages and cities. The first ceremonial parks appeared under religions that tended to dramatize cosmology by reproducing on Earth a reduced version of the Cosmos whose origin lay in a paradise setting. The Sumerians, who created the intellectual and artistic values of the Mesopotamian region, personified a series of natural forces into divinities whose name and function changed several times over two millennia of shifting political power. Elaborate structures were built to serve both individual and community ceremonial worship.
The prototype temple of 5,000 B. C. E. was followed by additions of subsidiary rooms, stairways, a central sanctuary, lateral chambers, and the raised temenos (sacred precinct), culminating in the stagetower (ziggurat) with broad terraces landscaped with trees, shrubs, and ponds. A mythical realm was fashioned and incorporated into the temples to relate the affairs of the divinities, telling of their involvement in the creation of the universe, of mankind's origin, and of human culture. The landscaping in and around the temples was initially in the form of a garden, usually on a sacred parvis or esplanade designed for open-air worship. Ceremonies in Mesopotamia were mostly that of the akitu - the sacred marriage. There was a collective outing of the city and the image of the god or goddess that began in the temple. The procession often led to an out-of-town sanctuary structure located in a parklike setting. A later variation involved the ritualistic slaying of lions and wild oxen in a wildlife park called an ambassu.
One ancient park was the kirishauru, "The Park in the Center of the City," a 600 by 1500 foot area connected to a temple complex. This religious park within the temenos of Nippur was outlined on a map that dates to at least 1500 B. C. E. For the first time a park is shown to be delineated upon the land. Linguistically, kirishauru stems from the basic determinative kiru, which has primary meaning in an agricultural sense as a garden, orchard, or palm grove. Kiru was also used in cultic contexts as gardens and parks connected to temples and the ceremonies. It later formed the basic element for the name of the garden and park (kirimahu) of kings, of palaces, and gardens in the city. The in-city and outlying ambassu were game preserves that seemed to support both ritualistic and recreational hunting. The development of ancient Egyptian parks and gardens connected to their temples was similar in pattern and progression to the Mesopotamian experience. Natural elements were incorporated into temple complexes regarded as the center of the original creation of land. All subsequent religious, governmental, residential, and necropolis architecture in Egyptian life shared in and reflected this essential quality of the beginning in paradise. One temple at Hermopolis in the New Kingdom period had trees and ponds in re-creation of the primeval paradise-garden. It was a pilgrimage objective by the general public who made a journey in life to paradise as they would be doing in their afterlife. One High Priest complained about having to repair the park grounds after pilgrims overran them during the religious season. "I protected the enclosure of the park," he held, "to stop it from being trampled on by the people, for it is the place where all the gods were born at the beginning of the whole land, and it did no good to Egypt."6
Ancient Chinese parks possessed many of the major features of those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, yet had several distinct qualities relating to Chinese ideas on cosmic order, and quite specific to an extensive and varied natural environment of great rivers, plains, marches, forested mountain ranges, and an abundant, varied flora and fauna. One ancient Chinese text refers to these areas as "national parks," which indicates some large preserves were conceived as being empire in scope.7 The large "Numinous Preserves" of the Han were thought as micro-representative of the Chinese cosmic order. These "parks as empire" stemmed from the prototype divine parks of the mythical "Golden Age" that held symbolic meaning for the Chinese in their control over nature. They were practical, earthly paradises where sacrifices to the gods were performed to assure an orderly world. Feudal control over empire was exercised at the magnificent Shang-lin Park at the capital city where the four corners of the empire joined. The ancient Chinese park was a varied semi-religious, semi-political, semi-economic, and semi-recreational land use entity that flourished as an important part of their society to the 9th century C. E. when burgeoning population pressures and an imperial, elitist disregard for natural resources caused their demise.
The garden/park was gradually moved outside the sacred precinct as monarchs assumed the prerogatives of divinity. Royal largesse provided the means by which the palace and temple displayed the wealth and power of a ruler like Hammurabi as well as showing the importance of his patron god Marduk. The spoils of war, tribute from subjugated cities, and gifts from intimidated neighbours added to the output from temple, royal, and private lands. Some of that wealth was exotic animals brought home from captured capitals and from hunting expeditions in the mountains and plains for display as curiosities and to express power as empire. Personal enjoyment and the beginnings of scientific inquiry of nature occurs in Mesopotamia to be extended in ancient Egypt under Akhenaten when he removed his residence from a religious center to el-Amarna, breaking away from the established order with its thinking that everything in Egyptian society came out of the past and was unchangeable. Great garden estates were laid out along the Nile. Royalty and the wealthy enjoyed gardens, flowers, gay villas, and hunting in the park marshes distinct from the religious complexes. The Nile for two millennia was a river of pleasure, hunting, and fishing where each Pharaoh and nobleman possessed a wealthy estate that had its own pond, pleasure-marshes, and villa garden-park. The Persian conquerors, the later Macedonians and Ptolemaic dynasties, and then the Romans all built garden-parks and hunting preserves into more complex and sophisticated forms to where the earthly paradise talked about in myth and religion was truly achieved for them in their lifetimes. The kiri, kirishauru, kirimahu, and ambassu varieties are an endpoint legacy of Mesopotamia garden/park land uses. The expansion of the Persian Empire under Cyrus II swallows the last Mesopotamian nation and incorporates much of their culture into greater empire.
Parks were part of Persian urbanism. The Greeks admired the pairidaeza in both the capital and the provincial centers. They were impressed with the grandeur of the Near Eastern monarchs. Xenophon, a Greek Army commander and historian, wrote (c400 B.C.E.) of the palace pleasure garden-parks and of outlying hunting preserves. He observed that the king was as much interested in his gardens as he was with war. Xenophon wrote an idealized account of the upbringing and education of Cyrus, relating how the prince is taught to hunt in enclosed wildlife preserves near the capital where he would be presented to the animals who were in the paradeisos. Hunting marked the transition from childhood to adulthood for future kings. Parks and wildlife served as training tools for war as well as for recreational pursuits, much as they were to do for kings and nobility into the Medieval period. Xenophon integrated elements of the Persian pairidaeza into his own estate constructed around Socratic thoughts on managing properties as an art form. This Greek estate was an odd mixture of a shrine to Artemis, a park designated by an oracle of Apollo (consisting largely of wild grounds well-stocked with game), and also a farm providing the means to maintain the sanctuary for wildlife. Xenophon had taken his knowledge of the Persian pairidaeza and blended the hunting elements into Greek landscape, religion, and culture to form the Greek paradeisos. Pairidaeza were in a land of social aristocracy and political feudalism. Greek parks were mainly of individuals in a land of democratic institutions. Wildlife sanctuaries as private hunting estates were a common feature of Greek and later Roman life. As empire grew in size, power, and wealth, emperors and the wealthy would have a variety of in-city and outlying gardens and parks. Sacred groves were a useful entity in preserving natural landscape tracts. Greek sacred groves developed as natural sanctuaries devoted to specific gods and goddesses whose origins in myth tied them to natural phenomenon. Many took on the aspects of a park in the preservation of natural features. Regulations against the cutting of trees and for the protection of wildlife were enacted. Groves were aesthetic agoras for forum. One could write poetry, commit suicide, or hold an orgy in some groves. In Plato's ideal city, the park was combined with cult places that had a public, community focus. Conscious city planning was emerging in this ancient world to give urban areas the form of today that includes the park as public open space. There was a blending of sacred groves, wildlife sanctuaries, public park-like open spaces in the Greek polis that under Periclean democracy moved the park more into the public sector. Religious elements within the paradeisos began to be expunged by the Greeks. Christianity and Islam completed the removal of cult aspects from Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Egyptian, and Germanic tribal sacred groves. With the fall of Rome, paradeisos transforms into park in feudalistic medieval Europe to denote specific enclosures exempt from forest law.
The park as a special enclosed area reserved for hunting was associated with the forest, but distinct from it. "Forest" in this period was a legal delimitation outlining the reserved usage of mostly wooded lands. The concept extended beyond royal lands to any lands placed under the bannum (ban), the royal prerogative to command, prohibit, and punish. The ban dealt with other specialized protected zones that restricted hunting. This led to the development of game reserves, wood reserves, timber reserves, and the park (park). These zones were forerunners to later wildlife refuges, forestry and forests, and parks. A park was delineated by royal charter where the royal privilege of the hunt was excluded from forest law. Stone and wooden walls, sometimes ditches and hedges, were placed around a park to control game. The Normans have a distinct place in the development and administration of the concept of the forest and park by furnishing models of centralized government to French kings, and influencing the development of English law. Normandy was the channel through which Frankish and feudal custom flowed to England via William the Conqueror. William had considerable land holdings in France and England that included forests and parks which played an important role in his semi-nomadic existence of war, travel, hunting, and feasting from the castles and lodges connected to them. The administrative apparatus of his realm went with him from place to place as he alternated his life between war and the hunt. For this he needed forests and parks scattered about wherever he went. This thinking and apparatus was transported to England in 1066, and applied to the Anglo-Saxon people.
The English Crown created the most parks in the early Medieval period. The important parks tended to be associated with royal forests where hunting lodges were constructed for leisurely, comfortable recreation. There were hundreds of deer parks owned by royalty, church officials, and the wealthy. The park in this period had a multiple use value for hunting, as a social and recreational retreat, and a source of meat for the table, as well as some economic timber and grazing usage. The number of deer parks was greatly reduced by 1600 by the Black Death when labor was too scarce to maintain the fences enclosing the parks. Many parks were converted to ornamental amenity parks whose numbers increased with the desires of a growing landed gentry seeking status symbols, together with recreational, social, and scientific interests. Changes in fashion spawned the "landscape park" of the country house set in its own gardens, as well as those connected to towns and cities.
Gardens and parks took on an increasingly relaxed, more informal style associated with the political liberty evolving after the French Revolution. The landscape park was incorporated into English cities and towns to become public areas for recreation. Early in the 19th century small featureless plots in industrial towns were converted to public recreation grounds. While many of these parks, like Birkenhead Park in 1844 in Liverpool, aimed toward providing open space for workers, many were largely financed from the sale of adjoining plots for grandiose mansions. The park became a public fixture in urban England, featuring a tradition of contrived informality. This aspect of English legacy in the urban public park arena reached American shores via the first English colonialists and from men like Francis Bacon, who as prophet of the modern park, set in motion the concept of progress in human affairs. Early in the seventeenth century, Bacon composed a fresh vision of utopia where in his model for a new society was set somewhere on an island west of the New World, he envisioned:
We have also Parks and Enclosures of all Sorts, of Beasts and Birds; which wee use not only for View and Rarenesse, but likewise for Dissections, and Trialls; That thereby we may take light, which may be wrought upon the Body of Man.8
Wildlife would be protected, preserved, viewed, and used for scientific research to aid in the march of progress toward a fuller society. It was a prophetic call for a form of land use that did not exist in the world in his day except partly in a few private and university botanical and zoological gardens. Bacon's contribution to the establishment of the American national park centuries later lies in his influential thinking contributing to the beginnings of scientific humanism, initially via the founders of the Royal Society. Their scientific direction travelled to American Colonial shores where it prompted a tremendous undertaking of investigations in natural history, physics, and geological explorations, culminating in the "Great Surveys" over the American West which were instrumental in the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872.
The principal American colonies all developed small city parks as amenities to their cities. By 1840 urbanization and industrialization had begun to change American society, inaugurating open space pleasure parks, like Central Park in New York in 1853, to place people in natural settings. Fredrick Law Olmsted mainly followed the English model in the general design and purpose of Central Park. This spawned a series of parks and gardens in all major American cities within the contrived informality proposition. Olmsted originated "greenway" and "greenbelt" concepts where natural elements were introduced into urban areas. Greenway ingredients were extended from the 1860's to parkways, linked parks, garden cities, state parks, regional park groupings, and then to national urban parks in major cities in the 1970's as multi-faceted parks of natural, recreational, cultural, and historical values, which are catch-all conglomerations of beaches, rivers, open space, historic structures, and facilities providing for mass urban recreation and cultural activity. The urban park set the conceptual framework for the national park that came about with Yellowstone National Park in 1872.
The national park idea as pleasuring grounds evolved out of the connective association between the American landscape, and the American people and their myths. The wild landscapes of the West generated nationalistic desires to have monuments equal to European cathedrals and palaces. This urge was coupled with the democratic egalitarian ideals of the American Revolution calling for public rather than private control. Woven into the establishment of the national parks was the myth associated with the mystical draw of the westward lands. Another pertinent myth was the frontier experience shaping the American character and soul. The elements of trees, water, mountains, and wildlife within parks suggests spiritual links to the Paleolithic sacred areas and ancient ceremonial centers constructed as replicas of paradise settings. The national parks have been interpreted as ceremonial landscapes, religious in character, with a prescription for personal conduct where the natural environment must not be defaced, littered upon, or commercialized - with social penalties for violations of the landscape ethic. Ritualistic pilgrimages are made with seasonal regularity to places of beauty in hope of spiritual rejuvenation.
The landscape, the people, and their myths came together on realization of the nation's wild country disappearing. Natural resources were becoming impacted, as noted by George Marsh in 1864. Marsh's analysis of the critical natural environment situation was a major factor leading to public-interest conservation and reservation movements that produced national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges. As wild America disappeared under relentless colonization, its loss was noted by wilderness travellers, artists, writers, and poets who cried for some form of preservation for the remaining remnants. The nation progressed through several stages of attitude and action over the wild landscape within the public domain lands. The initial post-revolutionary stage was one of acquisition through exploration, conquest, and purchase to settle the land and forge a nation. In the mid-nineteenth century it became one of disposal into private hands under belief in individual enterprise over government control.
An era of reservation emerged at the time of Yellowstone, stemming partly off the Naval Forest Reservations of 1800-1830's, the Hot Springs Reservation of 1834, the Yosemite State Grant of 1864, and under recognition of the uncontrolled waste and fraud of public timber. Federal control began to exert itself over the affairs of the nation. The forest reserves of 1891, the national park creations of the 1890's, and the national wildlife refuges (1903) placed considerable public land in reservation status requiring Federal custodial management. Much of the public lands wound up in "standing reserve" categories to be managed for forest production, grazing, wildlife, as watershed, pleasuring grounds, for scientific investigation, education, and preservation of threatened species. This reserve concept was articulated by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who held "Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there so that it may be on call for further ordering."9
The standing reserve is one where the bureaucratic administration of land incorporates the principles of hierarchy, elitism, control, and rational means to efficient ends. Natural resources are seen as raw products in the service of the human species. Land is available to serve selected ends directed toward obtaining control over all aspects of life, mainly within a market economy worldview committed to mastery over nature. In this conceptualization, parks are objects on call for aesthetics, recreation, scientific investigation, and education to serve the dominant worldview. The expansion of the national park idea moved steadily in its ordering to include varieties of natural, historical, recreational, and cultural significance under the guidance of a nationwide plan to protect and exhibit the best examples of America's great landscapes, life communities, and important historical landmarks. It is an all-inclusive system of national parks, monuments, memorials, military areas, parkways, seashores, lakeshores, wild rivers, biological and scientific reserves, national trails, and national preserve designations. National parks, refuges, and forests also became aimed in a concurrent, tighter preservation-oriented direction. Guided by developing ethical feelings that contained Paleolithic sentiments on nature, more restrictions were placed on the use of nature within some areas. The action encompasses an understanding that the essence of nature harbors within itself the growth of a power to save itself, as set forth by the conscious portion of the process. Delineating wilderness areas within national forests and parks became the geographical pathway for a process of re-integrating human species with the rest of nature.
William Wordsworth and Henry Thoreau developed the particular thesis of experiencing the wild directly through primary experience. This thinking was later elaborated on by Muir and Leopold. Leopold is the key activist in the wilderness movement who bridges the transition between the idea of wild land as a place to hunt, fish, and camp to the idea of wild land as a site to renew social and psychological well-being. Leopold in 1921 developed a functional definition of wilderness as a continuous stretch of land preserved in a natural condition, devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, and other structures, open to hunting and fishing, and big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip. His proposal indicated a forested, mountainous area, immense, uninhabited, possessing natural beauty attractive to the recreational visitor.
The Gila Wilderness Area in New Mexico came about in 1924 via local administrative order. Additional areas were created under Regulation L-20 in 1929, and the U-Regulations in 1940 led to additional categories and areas. More preservation-oriented natural, research, scientific, and scenic zones were created within national parks, forests, refuges, and domain lands under management, master, and working plans. All boundaries were subject to administrative change. Concern by preservation organizations led to more restrictive ordering via the Wilderness Act of 1964 creating a National Wilderness Preservation System. This was augmented in 1968 by the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Here lay the geographical element of the standing reserve in the enjoyment of nature as an integral part of the consumer society, but also enabling the achievement of a higher state of consciousness toward nature within an emerging belief that nature had intrinsic worth. It was a monumental advance in repairing the separation of humans from nature.
Current national parks and wilderness preserves exist within an ideology of preservationism where nature is thought of in ecosystem terms, although still appealing to human utility in regards to recreation, aesthetics, and science. This is a shift toward a fuller ecocentric direction identified by the work of Arne Naess who divided the ecology movement into the Shallow and the Deep. A number of environmental philosophers hves taken the deep ecology movement's long-range principles toward a conscious reconciliation with nature. The non-geographical functional elements are population stabilization or reduction, the elimination of a permanent war economy, control of excessive materialistic consumption, and a re-orientation of contemporary society toward the stability of natural areas untouched by technology. Such a goal could be included in major religious tenants, or in the development of an ecocentric spirituality where the landscape, people, and new myths would reunite under a direction of sustainable landscape. Another approach is a mandate for a global charter for nature that would implement a World Conservation Strategy aimed at creating a sustainable society where human life and culture and nature's capital are maintained for present and future generations.
Parks are geographical vehicles managed under laws to protect and preserve wild nature. They depend upon attitudes and feelings in support of wilderness boundaries. Where attitudes and feelings recognize the inherent value of nature, the park takes on the dimension of an ethical park within the latest stage in park transformation emerging in the postmodern world. Evidence of the ethical park lies within the creation of extensive Alaskan wilderness parks encompassing entire ecosystems managed primarily for their preservation. This action indicates an understanding, and contains the element of, an advanced symbiotic relationship that can exist between people and nature. Alaskan National Preserve designations allow for subsistence hunting and residency by indigenous Alaskan people. A national park in Finland preserves reindeer for hunting by Laplanders. The Kalahari Game Preserve for Bushman has a similar objective. The Kayapo people in the Amazon region occupy a five million acre reserve. These are natural/cultural reserves preserving wild habitat connected to traditional life in a retention attempt of direct people/nature relationships.
In several American national parks, master plan zoning has placed certain areas off-limits to human use, except occasional research to prevent species extinction. The Upper portion of Kipahulu Valley in Haleakala National Park in Hawaii is such a designation where traditional visitor park uses are banned. The plight of threatened species was placed above that of the traditional visitor use mandate of the National Park Service. The reintroduction of the grey wolf into Yellowstone National Park is a restorative deed that counterbalances an attitude and policy of decades ago of predator control. Reintroducing the grey wolf is sound scientific resources management, and an intrinsic value judgement by the National Park Service and its supporters who have moved toward ethical park dimensions.
Biosphere Reserves are core zones of undisturbed landscape (often a national park) embracing a region's diversity, buffered by ecologically similar areas, multiple use, experimental research, rehabilitation, and traditional use areas making for a global network of the world's ecosystems. The boundaries or edges between the various buffer areas and the core zone are demarginalized, promoting greater landscape harmony within the total region.
These ethical park propositions incorporate a higher consciousness that does not disassociate itself with prior park stages, but includes these stages within itself. They are the best geographical mechanisms that Western culture can offer at its present stage of ethical development in regards to nature. All park and wilderness area designations are temporary holding measures to preserve as much natural habitat and diversity of species as possible while working out a better relationship with wild nature that could well be a return to the beginning when preservation boundaries were spiritual in nature, and there were no fixed lines on the landscape.
Residence in wildness requires transferring the concept of the ethical park to daily lives. The retention of parks cannot be successfully made through economic justification or by advocating them for purely aesthetic and recreational values. Thoreau and Leopold spoke to the necessity of wildness in people's lives. Current writers on ecosophy opt for approaches that seek identification with nonhuman beings where there are no boundaries, or, the boundaries are broader, not hard, legal proscriptions sharply demarcated on the landscape. New ways of understanding ourselves and our relationship with nature beyond Baconian/Cartesian thinking are needed. They have indeed entered the discussion, though are not common in the political, social, and scientific mainstream. Required are new ecologically sustainable visions, a Bill of Rights that includes nature, fresh songs and stories, new routes and maps, and a bringing of new words into the discussion. There is a shift underway from looking at the Earth as an object designed as human artifact to seeing Earth as a wild, living subject requiring respect. Sought is a return in spirit and orientation to the Paleolithic condition, confirming Adam Kuper's transformation thesis that we wind up about where we began, though moving on a bit, encouraged by an understanding that "Perhaps the notion of transformations will help us guess the next move."10
1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism. trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 89
2 Meyer Fortes, Religion, mortality and the person: Essays on Tallensi religion. edited by Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 144.
3 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 94.
4 Tim Ingold, The appropriation of nature: Essays on Human ecology and social relations. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), p. 136.
5 Edward Hyams, Soil and Civilization. (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976), pp. 274-275.
6 G. A. D. Tait, "The Egyptian Relief Chalice," Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 49 (December 1963): 93-139.
7 Pan Ku, Text I, 49 in Cho-yun Hsw, Han Agriculture: The formation of early Chinese agrarian economy (206 BC to AD 220). edited by Jack L. Dill (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), pp. 180-181.
8 Francis Bacon, New Atlantis: A Worke Unfinished, facsimile of original book (1627), edited by Alfred B. Gough, London Oxford University Press, 1915), p. 38.
9 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977) p. 17.
10 Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society. (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 243.
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