An engrossing story last night, in BBC FOUR's Unnatural Histories series, about the creation of Yellowstone national park and thence the whole US national park service. It was packed with incident and argument, and wholly unsentimental – a nice change for the BBC .
As the programme blurb says, ...
As the world's first national park, Yellowstone has long served as a model for the protection of wilderness around the world. For Americans it has become a source of great national pride, not least because it encapsulates all our popular notions of what a wilderness should be - vast, uninhabited, with spectacular scenery and teeming with wildlife. But Yellowstone has not always been so. At the time of its creation in 1872, it was renowned only for its extraordinary geysers, and far from being an uninhabited wilderness it was home to several American Indian tribes.
This film reveals how a remote Indian homeland became the world's first great wilderness. It was the ambitions of railroad barons, not conservationists, that paved the way for a brand new vision of the wild, a vision that took native peoples out of the picture. Iconic landscape paintings show how European Romanticism crossed the Atlantic and recast the American wilderness, not as a satanic place to be tamed and cultivated, but as a place to experience the raw power of God in nature. Forged in Yellowstone, this potent new version of wilderness as untouched and deserving of protection has since been exported to all corners of the globe
Once the Indian Americans had been seen off, the wolves went as well (similarly, not of their own volition), and nearly all the bison, but then wolves had to be brought back after the elk had laid waste to the place. In this, ecological ideas were enabled to the end of restoring the park to what it was like before Europeans arrived, thereby completely missing the point that the Indians had been there for hundreds of years shaping the land and being shaped by it. Perhaps the real racism lies in this forgetting.
Now there is even some talk (mostly by Indians) of their being allowed back for cultural practice, though ecological ideas are not much use to them; sustainability ones might be though.
Least we feel too smug about any of this, we might pause to remember the Highland Clearances.
Respond