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Art & Ecology

Photoessays: Art and the Earth



Orientations to the Land

The National Parks and Wilderness Preservation Movement

by Jenny Siegenthaler, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Between the mid- and late nineteenth century, America was transformed from an agrarian society to an industrial one. The growth of industrialization brought people from rural settings to cities, where new manufacturing jobs were available. The American people, the majority of whom were city dwellers by the end of the century, ceased living as close to nature as their forebears had; however, urbanization and industrialization had made many Americans nostalgic for a more pastoral, preindustrial era by the 1890s. In this period began America's first environmental movement.7

One of the first Americans to realize the basic importance of conservation--the controlled use and systematic protection of natural resources--was George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), often considered the father of American environmentalism. In his widely-read publication Man and Nature (1864) he described the enormous changes wrought by "human action in the physical conditions of the globe."8 The book was conceived while Marsh was serving as the United States ambassador to Italy. There he became convinced that the fall of the Roman Empire was due in large part to the depletion of forests in the Mediterranean region. He held up the collapse of that great empire as a warning to his own country.

Members of the public became active in the conservation movement througha number of garden and nature clubs that sprang up around the turn of thecentury. One of the earliest of these was the Sierra Club, established in1892 under the leadership of the highly influential naturalist John Muir (1838-1914), a major figure in American environmentalism and one of the strongest advocates of a national park system. The club existed to introduce people to wilderness through nature hikes and camping trips. The National Audubon Society, named after John James Audubon (1785-1851), famous for his detailed paintings of American birds, was formed in 1905 to work for the protection of the nation's birds and other wildlife.

One of the first Americans to address the need for establishing and protecting natural places for recreation was Frederick Law Olmstead (1822-1903). Olmstead is credited with almost single-handedly introducing large-scale landscape architecture to America. One of his best-known projects is New York City's immense Central Park (designed in 1858 and completed around 1871). One purpose of the park, according to Olmstead, was "to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God's handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances."9 Olmstead believed in naturalistic park design and incorporated existing glacial rock outcrops and rough-hewn stone bridges, but also borrowed ideas from more rigidly organized French parks. The conception for Central Park influenced the design of cities across the nation. By the turn of the century,writers described park-making as a great national art. One exclaimed that "parks and park systems are the most important artistic work which has been done in the United States."10

Olmstead was also one of the first advocates of setting aside areas of wilderness free from private ownership and exploitation. He started the movement to preserve the valley of Yosemite and the area that surrounded it. In 1864 Yosemite Valley came under the protection of California as the nation's first state park. (In 1905 it became a national park.) He also argued for the restoration of Niagara Falls and its surrounding area, which had been scarred by refuse dumps and ugly industrial structures by the 1850s. As a result of his efforts the United States side of the falls was placed under the supervision of New York state in 1885.

Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s painters and photographers regularly accompanied government-sponsored surveying expeditions to the West, bringing back exciting images of Yellowstone, the Rocky Mountains, and Yosemite. In 1871 the photographer William H. Jackson (1843-1942) and painter Thomas Moran (1837-1926) accompanied Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden (1829-1887) onone of his expeditions to Yellowstone, in Wyoming, known for its geysers, pools, and waterfalls. The purpose of Hayden's expeditions was to assess the resources and economic possibilities of the lands he surveyed. (His reports were best-sellers among developers and corporations.) In 1871 Jackson took the first photographs ever made of Yellowstone; Moran painted huge canvases depicting scenes of the area upon returning to his home in the East (a smaller painting of Yellowstone by Moran is depicted here). These images were widely reproduced and helped make Americans aware of the beauty of the western wilderness and its natural wonders. Though they may have done more to inspire tourism than to promote concerns about preservation, these artworks were an important factor in establishing the national park system. Yellowstone became thefirst national park, designated by an act of Congress in 1872.

In the following decades a number of other national parks were created,including Mount Rainier, in Washington (1899); Mesa Verde, in Colorado (1906);the Grand Canyon, in Arizona (1908); and Glacier, in Montana (1910). TheNational Park Service, established to coordinate the management of parklands, was created by an act of Congress in 1916. The national parks werecontroversial from the beginning, primarily because powerful commercial interests were opposed to removing land from potential exploitation. As a result the government moved slowly and cautiously in establishing these areas.


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