Full at http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org
In light of the interest in the national parks of the United States generated
by Ken Burns' new PBS documentary, I thought that readers might be interested
in what I wrote about the parks in my book, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An
Economist’s Travelogue. I will have some additional thoughts after I view the
entire series. I welcome reader comments. I have placed some new explanatory
remarks in brackets. The Addendum provides a sketch of one of the main
National Park concessionaires.
Whither Our National Parks
Between early May and late August [of 2004. Since then, we have been to many
more parks and monuments], we visited Joshua Tree, Grand Canyon, Petrified
Forest/Painted Desert, Rocky Mountain, Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, Bryce Canyon,
Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier, Mt. Rainier, and Olympic National Parks,
and Walnut Creek, Tuzigoot, Sunset Crater Volcano, Wupatki, Bandelier, and
Colorado National Monuments. All are national treasures; each one has scenery
as dramatic as most persons will ever see: natural bridges and arches,
waterfalls, fantastic canyons, buttes, monoliths, and hoodoos, and astonishing
rapids. We were in these parks dozens of times. Seldom were we disappointed;
almost always we were exhilarated. It is impossible to see the Balanced Rock
and Delicate Arch in Arches, Grand View in Canyonlands, the sand beaches and
lush foliage in the Narrows in Zion, the thousand-year-old trees in Rainier’s
Grove of the Patriarchs, or the eight-hundred-year-old petrified lava flows at
Sunset Crater and not be mindful of the vast indifference of nature and our
insignificant part in it. The human world, with its relentless injustices and
inequalities, is put in sharp relief and made all the more intolerable. In the
face of such beauty, it is surely an unforgivable crime for any society to let
its people live in misery.
But if the parks are beautiful, they are also the products of the social
structures that created them. Yellowstone was our first national park,
established in 1872. Already when George Catlin [painter, author, and traveler,
1796-1872] was waxing eloquent about establishing “a magnificent park, where
the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire,
galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the
fleeting herds of elks and buffaloes,” white settlers and the government had
begun brutal campaigns to remove the natives from their land. The history of
the national parks is marked by systematic and, for the most part, successful
efforts to remove indigenous people from them. In Yellowstone, for example,
many Indians traversed what is today the park to hunt, but a cornerstone rule
in the national parks is that there cannot be any hunting. In some cases the
“treaties” entered into by the U.S. government guaranteed the Indian nations
traditional hunting rights, but these agreements were routinely broken. (I put
treaties in quotes because these treaties were ordinarily faits accomplis made
after white settlers had entered and taken possession of land and the
government stood ready to ratify this theft by force if necessary.)
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