National parks turn 150: What needs to change for conservation

Yellowstone turns 150 this month: The world's first national park and start of the National Parks movement. Photo / Sebastian Travels, Unsplash

OPINION:

The National Parks movement turns 150 this month, with the birthday of Yellowstone National Park.

The American 'preserved wilderness' was the first place in the world to recognise an uncomfortable truth: we're stuffing nature up.

It was in the 1860s that writers, thinkers and painters stumbled upon the concept in their search for wild places, of which the world was rapidly running out.

Nature needed protection from our love of nature, amongst other things.

French philospher Alexis de Tocqueville, Amercan naturalist Ralph Waldo Emmerson - and other ponderous people with equally magnificent, ponderous names - corresponded with one another on the wonder of the places they travelled to.

De Tocqueville wrote back home to hurry up and visit the fast disappearing wilderness of the Canadian frontier.

"If you delay, your Niagara will have been spoiled for you," he said.

It's the same kind of natural catastrophising you see today, that drives cruises to the Antarctic and hikes through wilderness areas. We're familiar with the "see it, before it's too late" school of climate tourism. Back then, it was pretty radical.

El Capitan: In 1890 the mountainous Yosemite became a US National Park. Photo / Johannes Andersosn, Unsplash

Painter George Catlin - whose paintings of El Capitan in what would become Yosemite and the Yellowstone helped inform the movement - called for help to preserve the great outdoors in California.

It was proposed that some land was so valuable and fragile it should belong to the public and be gifted to the people of California for preservation as a "State Park".

Having won the ear of President Abraham Lincoln, the bill was signed into law in May 1864.

The idea was so popular, a decade later, in March 1872, the first National Park was created in Yellowstone - saying the natural beauty spots were of value to the whole country. National Parks should be created so future generations could walk through the forests and wild places as they were for those that visited before.

Described as "America's best idea" by writer Wallace Stegner, it was quickly exported around the world. 15 years later the concept arrived in Aotearoa.

New Zealand was one of the first countries to recognise the value of natural places.

Just two years after Canada created its first national park - now Banff National Park - in 1887 New Zealand decided Tongariro should be a National Park. In partnership with Ngāti Tuwharetoa the Crown created a conservation area around the maunga - stopping development in the 25,000-hectare block.

From the original Yellowstone plan, today there are over 4000 National Parks in countries around the world. Enjoyed by hundreds of millions of visitors each year, in many places, the pause in international travel during the Covid-19 pandemic saw some parks hit record visitor numbers.

Last year US the Great Smoky Mountains National Park saw 14 million visitors for the first time. In the UK, the Welsh National Park of Snowdonia attracted the biggest influx of new visitors in history, doubling the previous record.

When lockdown happened, we needed open public spaces more than ever.

The Rockies, now Banff National Park, in Canada was second to be created in 1872. Photo / Miguel Carraca, Unsplash

But while the world gets doe-eyed with the rose-tinted picture over 19th-century naturalists - particularly around the 150-anniversary coverage of the US National Parks - it's worth noting there is room for improvement in the 'Great Outdoors'.

Conservationism is a Victorian pastime, like taxidermy and cartography - eccentric and hard to guage, but on the whole a benefit. Until now it has been given a free pass.

It's a world view which focuses a lot on the virtues of the natural world and the wickedness of the manmade one. Is there a danger the national park pioneers could just have been misanthropes?

They certainly didn't give much thought to the people who might have already been living there.

It wasn't until Tongariro that any dialogue was given to native and traditional landowners of proposed 'national park' land.

130 years ago, it is possible this was a little less equanimous than the Department of Conservation and Ministry for Culture and Heritage's account reads to be.

Tongariro National Park was New Zealand's first National Park and one of the first in the world. Photo / Sebastian Goldberg, Unsplash

Te Whenua, land use and land ownership, even conservation land, is deeply political.
New Zealand was one of the earliest adopters of a National Park system and today, is covered by roughly a third conservation land.

Recent issues over reserves such as Te Urewera - which ceased to be a National Park in the traditional sense in 2014 - have highlighted the complicated balance of conservation goals and the principles of Waitangi.

DoC was created relatively recently, in part, to serve a new definition of conservation.
The Conservation Act which birthed the DoC 30 years ago was founded on the ideals of Waitangi and a "good faith" relationship between the Crown and Māori.

It certainly realised there were some flaws the 19 century Anglo-American naturalists, who saw nature as needing "saved".

The Emersons and de Tocquevilles had a romantic view of nature. They saw it as something that already existed perfect and fully formed. Like Catlin's paintings, they wanted to stick it on a mantelpiece. They never presumed it could be improved upon, made easier to access for outdoor pursuits - or that people might have been shaping and looking after the landscape for years before they came along.

US conservation group Save the Redwoods is turning over land in Northern California to the descendants of Native American inhabitants. Photo / Max Forster, Save the Redwoods League, AP

Back in the US, there are signs there might be a change in conservation, 150 years on.
This year California is officially returning guardianship of the Redwoods National Park to its traditional owners.

A 211 hectare section of sequoia forest in the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park was transferred to the care of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, which represents the members of some 10 tribes which share the Sinkyone language.

It's not quite the mutual partnership model that we are familiar with in New Zealand, but it has allowed for the park to greater reflect the heritage of the land prior to being a State Park.

They have also renamed the area "Tc'ih-Léh-Dûñ".

It's a name that Crista Ray, who is of Pomo and Sinkyone ancestry, told NPR she is proud to use.

"It lets people know that it's a sacred place," she said.

"It lets them know that there was a language and that there was a people who lived there long before now."

Needless to say, national parks look pretty different from nation to nation. Although there is room to change in the name of conservation, here's hoping that 150 years from now, we would still recognise them today.