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Engineering Eden: A Violent Death, a Federal Trial, and the Struggle to Restore Nature in Our National Parks

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Jordan Fisher Smith

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“At one time areas along the roadways [in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park] were carefully cut and trimmed, creating a lawnlike appearance. When a new superintendent was appointed, he ordered this practice stopped, which engendered a good deal of complain from visitors. The roadsides had been so attractive, they said, so neat, and now they had a rough and ungainly appearance. On this small but significant point the superintendent was adamant, however, and for exactly the right reason. Visitors to the park were reacting to a conventional, familiar, and deeply ingrained image of beauty - the trimmed and landscaped lawn. The goal should not be to stimulate that familiar response, but to confront the visitor with the less familiar setting of an unmanaged landscape. The mild shock of a scene to which there is no patterned response, and the engendering of an untutored personal response, is precisely what national park management should seek, even in such seemingly small details.”

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Book:Mountains Without Handrails: Reflections on the National Parks
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“It is impossible to provide unlimited visitation and the essential qualities of an unconventional, non-urban experience simultaneously. Here too a compromise is called for: a willingness to trade quantity for quality of experience. There is nothing undemocratic or even unusual in such a trade. The notion that commitment to democratic principles compels the assumption of scarcity is one of the familiar misconceptions of our time. We need a willingness to value a certain kind of experience highly enough that we are prepared to have fewer opportunists for access in exchange for a different sort of experience when we do get access.”

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Book:Mountains Without Handrails: Reflections on the National Parks
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“In letter after letter, misfortunes great and small are blamed on the wood. "I don't know how much I buy that," Matt [Smith] said.."If you're the kinda person who would take something from a national park, maybe you just have poor judgement skills.”

JudgementThievesTheftCursedNational ParksMisfortunePetrified Forest National ParkPetrified Wood
Book:Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park
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“At the heart of conventional conservation is the model of the American national park. The Indian environmentalist Madhav Gadgil writes of the influence of the top-down strategy modeled on Yosemite National Park, whose establishment in 1890 followed the forcible expulsion of the Native Americans who lived there. The history of "America's best idea" goes hand in hand with the history of white supremacy over nature and the Indigenous people of North America.”

American HistoryNational ParksYosemite
Book:Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel
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