Love of the Land: Essential Farm and Conservation Readings from a ...

with overseeing the Forest Service, describes the motley crew of criminal perpetrators as a mix of “drunks, drugs users, or deranged environmental protestors.”¹⁵ And Rey’s revelation seems only the latest to document societal incivility and overcrowding. Here again, comparisons between our own age and a golden age prove our loving nature to death, or to danger, is nothing new. Facing the prospects of thousands of new tourists in Hetch Hetchy Valley, an exasperated John Muir registered a similarly cynical truth in 1912, writing, “Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park, strife has been going on around its borders, and I suppose this will go on as part of the universal battle between right and wrong, however much its boundaries may be shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed.”

Indeed, history shows the parks were created expressly to keep such rowdiness at bay. The creation of Yellowstone, Nathaniel P. Langford argued in 1871, would keep speculators and “squatters”—a term understood to mean poor whites and Indians—away from a region made precious by its “beautiful decorations.”¹⁶ Meanwhile, tourists from the East became the anointed visitors, the desirables, the cash cows that brought the railroad interest into the pro-Yellowstone camp. Scribner’s and other periodicals in the East salivated at the prospects of “Yankee enterprise dot[ting] the new park with hostelries and … lines of travel” (ibid 113). Hearing such braggadocio, those who loved the parks best were torn between promotion and preservation, whether to let all the world know or to keep the secret to themselves. Just as the one-armed Civil War veteran Major John Wesley Powell turned his 1869 expedition to Utah, Colorado, and Arizona into guidebooks, and guidebooks into cash, so the current debate among guidebook publishers is whether, or how much, to spread the word of the nation’s natural wonders. Apropos to the outdoor recreation industry, which has been recording dramatic annual sales increases

¹⁵ Daly, Matthew, “Park Service Reports Surge in Violence Against Rangers,” Washington Post, June 27, 2006, Associated Press, www.washingtonpost.com.

¹⁶ Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 112.