Understand the history of these kinds of protected spaces but also to make the process of preservation more visible, to make it easier to understand not only the history of parks and how they have changed over time, but more importantly, why they have changed over time. Most of us when we think about preservation, we think about something staying the same, and yet preservation actually changes things. That is the focus we will aim at today. There we go. In the context of open space lands in the u. S. , there is a presumption that a Public Ownership is the landscape. We see the miniseries by ken parks, it wasnal called americas best idea. That natural spaces that have trails and hiking and sightseeing a representative of pristine nature that had some boundaries put around it and has been kept the same, like a vase in a use them, static and never changing. Set aside unchanging for generations. That literally is part of the founding legislation for the service, which was passed by congress in 1916. They just had their centennial last year. Oopla. F who block h the fundamental purpose is to preserve scenery and leave it unimpaired. The impression is get from the language is that parks are unimpaired and staying the same for generations through time. On forarch has focused years, and what we will focus on today, is that the unch angingness is hiding changes. , this idea that all ecosystems, this is from a mentor of man, she states clearly that all ecosystems are the product of history, natural and cultural or social history. One of the things i do in my landscapeoking at how change over time can tell us something about the ideas that people have about landscape over time. And how those ideas change with changing times. A lot of this is really why understanding environmental history is important to begin with, but also seeing the current state of the ecosystem, how and why it got there from the social and cultural side, as well. With aoing to start review from my class, this concept of landscape. Landscapes are sort of an interaction between people and place. There always about this interaction. A geographer wrote that they are unwitting autobiographies. Essentially by shaking the land, eating influenced by what is on the land and what is possible in, there are lots of seats in the front. Ownssentially write our autobiographies in the landscape without realizing we are doing it. There leaving traces of ideas we have, the ways in which we interact with the land, all of those things. Who aree of us researchers and interested in studying environment of history, we cannot look at the landscape and read something as if it were or text. Task, book who has been there and have a landscape changes over time. Assertion that all landscapes are cultural and Natural Landscapes. Downtown manhattan has little plants growing. There is a lot of nature even in the middle of the city. Pristine looking wilderness has a lot of cultural overlay and management that is influencing what the places like. Arely, all landscapes dynamic. There always changing. There is no way to hold them still the way we do with a vase in a museum. On aan put a ming vase shelf and have Climate Control and it will stay pretty much the same for centuries. We cannot do that with landscapes. There is no way of holding them still, they are constantly shifting with climactic changes, ecological changes and cultural and social changes. That is what i am interested in looking at. A prime example is National Parks. In the way we often dont notice landscape changing is occurring because it is happening so slowly. Many of us have visited Yosemite Valley. This is a photo i took when i was visiting there. It is striking to look at pictures of the same place over time. Again, i think the first week of this course, we looked at some of these same images. This is a photograph from almost the same location near the merced river, taken in 1865. What you can see in it, a little bit difficult, the trees are in the way. You can see there is a meadow in the back. Trees, someous willows and oak trees. A much more open landscape than today. You can look at paintings from he has done some fancy footwork with the side of the valley, they dont match up if you look at a photograph, the side of the valley is about five miles west of the site this side on the painting. That it is showing the ecosystem of the landscape in the 1870s, meadows and if you coniferous trees. It is a contrast to the landscape we see today, most all dark, coniferous forest. Not that one is better or preferable, but the ecosystem has changed enormously because this place was preserved. Natives of native americans have a different centuries and done landscape management. Once that was stopped in the wase was rejected protected, the ecological shifts started occurring. We see this and think, this is what it has always looked like. We dont know it has had this history. What we will be looking at is understanding the ways in which parks change over time, more than we recognize. Public parks for granted in a way. Most of us have grown up with parks and cities and National Parks to visit. They are part of our culture now. But that is fairly recent. Public parks are a novel invention in many ways. 1800s,lved in the essentially out of the apparition of wealthy, private where therengland, would be what is the tv show . Downton abbey, yes. Hills estate with rolling and people strolling about. But most people cannot visit the estate is, they were privately owned by families. With an admiration for those kinds of spaces, but in the u. S. We had a idea we wanted the space to be more democratic and open to the public. They also a fault in some ways from using certain public spaces like cemeteries very informally, walk. Ing for afternoon it seems odd to us now you would go strolling in the cemetery, they seem more formal now, but in the 1800s, especially the 1830s through the 1860s, it was a common thing in large cities, as the only open space available. People would go for a walk and enjoy the view and green grass and stone. So a combination of these different formal spaces we did not want to repeat in the u. S. And informal uses. Similarly, preservation itself, of historic buildings, it was something taken on by private, wealthy individuals. Estate wasingtons protected by the melbourne and association, a private organization. The idea that the government should attacked places was not part of our culture until the late 1800s. One of the people most responsible for that change is this guy, frederick olmsted. He was a Landscape Architect and a park designer. He famously designed central park in new york city. Fromriginal design here, 1860s. What he was doing at the time, this is actually not central in new york city, but he had the foresight to know the city would grow around the park and wanted to create a place a space of nature for people to visit, to stroll and enjoy. The idea of creating and designing a wilderness, this was not just a case of setting aside an already natural landscape and leaving it alone, just what we tend to think of when we think of a park protection. What he was doing was making nature out of what at the time ss mostly old sheep meadows, and theres actually a grassy place in central park called the sheep meadow, and that is why. From this old image, literally moving earth around, planting trees, bringing nature in to a degree that was deeply designed. Has anyone been to central park . A couple of people. When you are there, it feels very natural. I have a picture here of new york city with central park today. It is completely forest it, there are hills, there are lakes, lots of dense trees, lots of little paths. It really feels like you are in a pristine piece of new york forest that has been left behind without buildings. But almost every aspect, with the exception of some big boulders, all of the hills, all the forests, all of the lakes are designed and therefore artificial. But we dont feel like they are artificial. We interpret them as natural, a natural space. That is the idea that olmsted brought to his work, designing nature to in essence make it more natural seeming than what might have been there originally. Very, he had a lot of nervous conditions as the young man and was ill a lot, and he had the idea that nature could be a sort of therapy for people. Not literally psychotherapy, that as a relief from the stresses of daily life in an urban setting with the noise, trains running by and all kinds of crowding. What people needed was an escape valve, to stroll on sunday with your sweetheart enjoying a contemplative experience of nature. He explicitly wanted this to be a public space, open to all classes, not just the wealthy. That was a big part of his ambition. Yet the rules he put in place for your behavior in the park were actually much more geared toward middleclass than upperclass visitors than toward working people. Noise,not have a lot of there were no organized sports allowed. It is a version of nature that andontemplative and quiet sort of strolling about. Working ninereal to five, although it was more like six to eight, you have one day off to blow off steam, people want to play stickball and drink beer and run around, and none of that was allowed. In essence, it was created as a public space, but really privileged certain users over others. We will see these early ideas of how youre supposed to behave in a park, who the park is aimed toward, still carries through a lot of our National Parks today. There is a lot of presumption that these parks are open to everybody, that there are particular ways youre supposed to behave and interact with nature will you are there. You will not find soccer fields in National Park speared you will find hiking trails. Not everybody likes hiking. Too bad. There is that element to it, as well. Lstead starts out this idea. How we get from designed city parks to the natural parks we have . The National Parks originated with a place that did not become a National Park until much later, i think in the 1940s or 1950s, which is Niagara Falls in new york. For a lot of western expansion before a lot of western expansion brought awareness of monumental western landscapes we are familiar with, in the early 1800s, Niagara Falls was considered one of the most stunning Natural Landscapes north america had to offer. It is pretty stunning. Erier the eureka now e canal opened, transportation in the new york area, it still does not seem fast to us, it would take two days to get from your city to Niagara Falls, that that was as opposed to a week. There andsier to get you have an influx of taurus rists coming from urban cities wanting to visit Niagara Falls. They have the photograph taken. I could not find a date for this picture, but is clearly the late 1800s. One of the problems with ourists, the t alongside the falls. One of the problems is there were not public controls the way we understand them now. Tople did not have the call of government stepping into control space it anyway. What happened is you would get all of these little tourist bands. Postcards, stand here and get the best view. Photographers plying their trade. Messinessl of this messing up the scene. Great. What insect happening is the sort of grandeur of the falls gets messy. Sellinge stance, people hotdogs and cotton candy messing up the view. A bunch of european visitors visit and they write criticism. They say, these tacky americans, they would sell their grandmother to make a dollar, they are ruining the view. They think it is incredibly tacky, how dare they. This is a time when here in the u. S. , we are kind of culturally sensitive. Oldre less than 100 years as a nation, had recently shaken ,ff the influence of europe Great Britain specifically for europe in general, yet all of our cultural references are from europe. All of the writers we read, all of the painters, all of the sense of high culture we have is european. Push, especially when the europeans are now criticizing us and saying we are tacky, there is a push to say, what do we have that is unique and different and shows how great the u. S. Is . One of the things they started focus on was the national Natural Landscapes, especially the western landscapes. Niagara falls becomes essentially a negative example of what not to do. We dont want to mess things up the way we did there. So when Yosemite Valley here in by aornia is discovered battalion of military folks chasing native americans of the merced river and comes out into this amazing valley, and they are stunned by the incredible scenery. The Yosemite Valley is unlike most anywhere on earth, huge granite cliffs. To this young u. S. Culture of the time, these kinds of monumental, unique, dunning, Natural Landscapes become symbolic of our National Pride. Saying, hey, we have something those crazy europeans do not have. You see a lot of descriptions of western landscapes as people are moving across the western territories and describing these places, they are often describing them in comparison to castles in europe or old ruins in rome and saying how much cooler essentially these places are. You can have some tumbledown castle or this amazing rampart of stone and granite. All of this comparison going on. Nature takes on a new meaning, being symbolic of our useful strength and vigor as a nation. It becomes very nationalistic to experience these kinds of monumental western landscapes. It is not just the landscape in this case. There was similar interest in the redwood trees, both the coastal redwoods and the giant sequoias in the sierra. It is something we had that no one else had to the sheer size of these things. There are all kinds of posing bys of people them. Seeing how many people can fit on. This is better than any tree you can find in europe, bigger and taller, and what we are doing is great. The funniest thing for me about the giant sequoias is the aboutsts are all identifying species, they have this giant fight over what to call the sequoias with their latin name. It british botanists wanted to be after wellington, and the u. S. Botanists wanted it after washington. Thankfully, they stuck with sequoia gigantia. Ive. Is more descript 1864. S from a surveyor in he writes, no fragment of human work, broken pillar or sand worn image have lifted over pathetic deserts, none of these have anything like the power of these monuments of the living antiquity. This is the idea that we have a past, we dont need europes past, and it is a natural past. History, better than anything europe has appeared there is a lot of nationalism in butte in this. What is nationalism matter . Is setting aside these landscapes to keep the symbolic scenery pretty and powerful and not messed up the way niagara got messed up with all of these little shops and trinkets. It isngly, the idea a little hard to see, this map. The pink outline here is more or less, a little smaller than the current yosemite National Park. The part in green is the original reservation set aside, signed by lincoln in 1864. As you can see hopefully from that map, all that was protected the original protected area is very small. Just the valley and the view shed of the valley. If you are standing on the valley floor looking up at the granite walls, the boundary of the protected area is the top of those walls. We dont care about the ecosystem, we dont care about the forest, we dont care about the overall mountains and large landscape. What we are protecting is the view. By making it into a public parks, a government owned park, or member this was all public land to begin with, part of the Public Domain essentially claimed by the u. S. When we won the mexicanamerican war and california became part of the union. All that is being done is setting aside publicly owned land, not allowing homesteaders to make claims in it, not allowing iminers to mess it up. Sts can it tidy so touri come and see the view and feel nationalistic pride. The original proposal to not come from the public at large, just how we think about public parks today, they are for us and by us. The original proposer was a representative from a Steamship Company that was bringing people from the east coast around the horn to california, before the transcontinental railroad. It was the only way to get here other than a few people coming overland. The Steamship Company is saying this is great, if you set this place aside, it is beautiful, everyone will want to visit. Byy will have to pay us steamship and stagecoach to take them there, have them stay at our hotels we will build, and we take them back again. They play us pay us three times. It gets set aside. Mark david spence, you read some chapters from this week, sort of describes the Yosemite Valley protected area and an area further south. I dont think it is on this map. It describes them as powerful symbols of national unity. They are being established just as the civil war is coming to a close in 1864. They think it will be symbolic of our once again reunited nation and its strength and they are and vigor. It is important as a public symbol, but there is a connection also with private enterprise. First the Steamship Company in the case of yosemite, and for every other National Park established between 1864 and 1916, when the National Park service is created, they are all proposed, advocated for and served by railroads. ,he connection to tourism industrial tourism if you will, not momandpop setting up a ,hop and selling you tshirts whatever the equivalent is, not that kind of tourism. Tourism iscorporate part of the National Parks from day one. Its how they get established. Summary had to go to congress and convince congress to pass the legislation. It doesnt just happen. That is who is pushing them to do this. One of the other interesting the yosemite reservation is that there is a clause in the legislation that creates the park insisting that the protection be permanent. It says, there is no point in setting something aside for scenic grandeur unless we are committed to protected for all time. It starts very early in 1864, this idea that parks will stay the same. View, the sense that all of us have from looking at postcards or calendars, ansell adams photographs. Go ton photographs if we yosemite. The view of what it looks like. We dont think it as changing over time. And in fact, if the park Service Changes something, people get upset. They say, hey, that is not what im used to. It looks different because i have to see it from a different angle. Iran experiment with my environmental history class a number of years ago in the early days of digital photography. , we did notflickr have facebook. I have them type in into the flcikr search engine, yosemite. I display the photographs returned in a slideshow and 90 of them were returned from were taken from the same spot. The tunnel view, the same please for every tour bus stopped, anding back at el capitan the classic views that we all know. If a hotel was built in the middle of that, a great lightning throat struck it and correct in half, it will not happen, but people would be upset because the thing that we can go as unchanging, would suddenly change. That is part of the idea and preservation. This natural landscape frozen in time and staying the same sort of for generations to come. One of the last aspects of if somebody specifically often yosemite specifically, that i think is not very well understood is that not only were they promoted in congress and then by the railroad, but once you get the automobile being invented, and also our lives changing in terms of the work week getting shorter, weekends invented, people having more leisure time, a few things transformed National Park. They became very autooriented. Poster fromin this the 1920s or 1930s of yosemites growth where a tree had just fallen over in the winter storm this year by the way a car driving through the total tree tunnel tree. This is a real transformation when we had more leisure time. We had places to go in our cars to go and visit cause the more we drove cars the more we bought the more we bought new cars. It was very much sort of again a corporate enterprise. On middle of all caps of world war i when the national theyservice was created, had this whole c America First campaign you do not have to go to europe for vacation, go and see America First. Getting your car, get on the railroad, right around and eat the country were born in. So, parks were very, even in the later days were very asked rest as they are to inform us as being what americans are supposed to be, and sort of expose us to these iconic and natural land date. So that we could be instilled with National Pride and a sense of where we were coming from. Time] numbers of yosemite visitors, it is really telling to see how it climbs up. In 1855, the first tourists entered the valley before it was created into a park. By 1863, before it was satisfied, 406 visitors arrived that year by steamboat. 10 years later, in 1875 they build hotels a road, wagons and supplies coming in and eventually the railroad connected to the area. When the park service was created, 14,000 visitors to Yosemite Valley in a year. 1918, it hader, in jumped almost 27,000, nearly doubled because of the automobile. Biggest one of the advocates for establishing the National Park service in 1916, again, not the general public at large liquid tend to think, but it was the aaa. The Automobile Industry said hey, we need these parks and agencies so that people have places to go. Said, 1918, 20 7000, 1997, 4. 2 million visitors, almost all arriving by car. Is the visitation to you 70 completely insane the visitation to yosemite is completely insane. There was a discussion about whether the park and get too much visitation and whether we should start restraining too many people. We think of these parks are nash pristine places intended for tourism and not for the backpacking tourism that we think of today, since the advent , people going backpacking all the time and doing things that are extreme, getting into the wilderness these are more set up for passive tourism, driving around in your car and looking out the window. Saying, gosh, is that really pretty . Taking pictures with your kodak instam medic kodak a,tic a very passive process. One of the other important aspects of National Parks is that places were not empty. When they were satisfied to make parks, almost every single part in both the yosemites and certainly the western parts, almost all of them were inhabited by native americans before the came parks. The process of understanding the story of our National Parks is also understanding the people who were just placed from them in order that they would become these unchanging iconic scenery parks. We will talk more about wilderness in this class in a few weeks, but just to bring up the idea very briefly, there have been a lot of critiques of the last few years, i am someone who writes this a lot but myself how the concept of wilderness is actually very ethnocentric. It tends to edit out the native people of america, to say that they were not there and in that deposit the idea that and instead posit the idea that before when people started showing up there, it was pristine nature that was empty and uninhabited. We idealize wildernesses as little fragments of uninhabited laces, which of course is not true uninhabited places which of course is not true. A reading from today argues that uninhabited wilderness is had to be created before they could be preserved. That sort of type of landscape that was being preserved becomes and made intomade what it was not before. We get these spaces that have only tourists running through them, of course, it is not empty, there are tourists who are visiting but there was no longer People Living there because we had to push these people out and edit them out of the story. In some cases they were literally edited out of the story in a sense that they were relocated. There is a similar time frame for when the National Parks were being created, and when the First American reservations were getting created. In many cases, people were literally getting taken out of a park space and getting put into a reservation which was less ground in terms of the sinner he. The scenery. It really overlooks the fact that not only were native americans there at the time, but had been there in many cases for millennia, hundreds of thousands of years. And there is an interesting sort of quality. These are People Living at Yosemite Valley as part of the Museum Exhibit it Yosemite Valley for decades actually, and in yosemite, they initially tried to move the native people out of the valley and eventually they sort of let them back in but on the condition essentially that they lived in their traditional ways as part of the display for the tourists. Not quite like animals in zoos, but something close. There are on display, people would go and remark on the outfits they were wearing, the things they were doing, that they were there to be seen by the tourist. I think one of the things that is curious about our relationship with nature as represented by the parks, is how sort of, the original anglo settlers and all of these railroads and folks coming into the landscape cannot really quite make sense of people who live in nature, rather than looking at nature. That is the difference of being all just somebody being a place to live in and to rely upon the resources that are there, the way that native americans do, or is it a c where sceneand up eighta which you stand back and look at, or you get a postcard of the place. It is a very different relationship. Not necessarily that one is better than the other, but it is really not the name. A lot of the early anglosettlers and developers cannot understand a different way of interacting with nature. There is even in the earliest writings, offense that a sense that indians living in the parks were not adequately appreciative of the scenery, in an aesthetic way. Dr. Named lafayette, who was entering with the military who was chasing the indians out of the valley as part of a military campaign and kept a journal will they were doing this expedition. He describes that once they catch up with the miwak and they tried to ask them questions with the interpreters and so on, and he describes the indianss reverence for the valley as sort of a demon in some, not first nots a demonism, christianity, and he does not interpret that with all that he experiences the place. Seeing and grandeur, having sort of race virtual connection to a landscape, have some similarity. He does not see the connection, and in his account he wrote in none of their objections made to their abandonment of their homes as they were being forced out was there anything said to indicate any appreciation of the inari. These people do not think it is pretty they do not think the scenery is pretty. Please talk about how there are resources and how it is a comfortable place to live, but they are not saying, well, it is not pretty. Therefore, they do not deserve to live here. There is a sense that we are supposed to have this aesthetic reaction to a natural landscape and there is no room for any other kind. Therefore these people do not belong, and they should be moved out. It todays arlance, it just seems strange. The idea of a National Park as natural scenery with wildlife, without people who are residents , it has become this National Park ideal that we have developed over time. The National Park service, when it was created was created to manage these kinds of spaces. This is what it tended to presume, parks are supposed to be like. Every time you and i go and visit a park and we keeps you in these Natural Landscapes that have no residents, were movements are very choreographed youhose spaces, that when get to the overlook end of the tunnels in yosemite, you cannot see the campgrounds the villages, they are hidden away amongst the trees. All we see are the empty, natural scenery. Every time we visit, that gets reinforced, and that is what a park is supposed to be like. We have exported this idea similarly and a lot of National Works in particularly the develop the world, africa, south america and asia are created with this burgeoning Environmental Movement in the 1970s and 1980s and they started kicking out the natural inhabitants of these areas and recreating these empty parks so that the european and american tourists can go and visit with their cameras. We have seen the pattern over and over again. The nativeoying cultures in the process, and making them incredibly impoverished and forcing them into marginal existence around the edges of parks, in order to create these kind of, empty fullness laces. Again empty wilderness places. We do want to understand that they come at a cost, these places come from removing people who are living in these places. You might have noticed, in the previous picture, these miwak people of the sierras are standing around their teepees. This is not their usual form of shelter, this is from the great playing but it is part of the american this photograph is from 1920 heart of the Popular Culture in the united dates of what Indian Culture is supposed to look like. What they actually looks like is like this, they lived in when instructors, similar shape but different construct totally. Made tohey are change how they are living to fit our idea of what a native persons residence is supposed to look like. The understanding that these National Parks and spaces have come at a cost of moving people changingeir homes, their living in nature to being this iconic nature. Sierra history, starting with you 70, moving on to creating National Parks, what does this have to do with my work . This is my opportunity to talk about the research here. I just put a book out last year, which is about the seashore here in california, part of the National Park system. Because it is on a coastal area, it is called national the short but it is owned and managed by the national by the same agency the national bsea shore. It has been owned and managed since 1952 by the National Park service and if you look at the promotional material, they will tell you that was created to protect otherness and national , a protective chunk of undeveloped california coastline. ,ou get the little park map here you are, and this is the world california coast, that this place is supposed to be protecting. But what you do not see very much information is what was the park before it became a part . Yosemite, just before it became a park. Somethingas made else. This book was made into a park in the 19 50s. Was of them have a native history, and because i am not archaeologist at 11 have a lot of research in the area. But as a historian, i am more interested in the most recent history of the place. Late 1850s, it was scape. Arian land it had Dairy Ranches and it was originally a mexican land grants in the 1930s. As what happened in california after we became part of the u. S. , there were a lot of legal disagreements about who owns which piece of land. For those who went to court, in many instances, including here, is set up either of the two parties fighting over the land, because of the high legal fees, the land ended up in the hands of the lawyers. Which is what happened here. Two brothers, i kid you not, their last name is shafter, which is sort of appropriate, and one of them had done in law, one of them on part of the land, and the other, two, all three of them cope owned the entire peninsula had created a system of tenantrun ranches. Take aim up with very creative rance, c ranch d ranch. The ultimate comes down the peninsula and eventually they run of the letters. Then he finally have wrench names which are more natural. South bend, and so on. The 1920s and 1930s, each ranch was run by a tenant family. There were three different waves of immigrants who came to the area and had its running dairy so they were chosen often as people to run the wrenches. A group from the area that lived mostly of here, there is a group who were there in the north, and inland you have more italian hyphens became wiss people tong s read it get names that resemble that. Landscapers on this from 1858 until the 1920s or eirs of thee h original owners started selling off chunks and they sold it mostly to the tenant families. It is one of the most classic and not made up, sort of American Dream stories. You emigrate to the u. S. , you work hard as they tenant and eventually become a landowner. It is very much that story. The families that owned the wrenches when the park was created had been there and among them were still there were five or six generations. For california, that was pretty darn old. For back east, or or in europe, hundred 50 years is not that much. From the shafter family owning the land to the tenant families owning it, most of the dairy is converted to producing butter and cheese which was mostly shipped by truck. Rhodes got improved around the same time and refrigeration as well and selling liquid milk is much more possible. Dairies are pretty expensive places. Ance out on the peninsula, and this is the other ulus. Ut on tom point this is not the wilderness, is the point i am trying to make here. Was a dairy, cause it need to be milk twice a day every day, day in day out, they do not take vacations or have weekends. The cards are coming to the barnes twice a day, a lot of impact environmentally around the barn. Not a pristine space, not a wilderness. And yet this was seen as a great place to put a National Seashore in the 1960s. This was a. Of time when there was a big sort of parks for the People Movement and the National Parks service was looking for places to grade arcs that were close to urban areas they were looking for places to create parks that were close to urban areas. Places like cape cod, all of these lake shores, and seashores s. Cluding point reyesp the way the park was set up was to accommodate the wrenches and at that time there were 25 peninsula, and trying to keep them in place was both a political necessity, the locals never wouldve gone with if it wasparks idea, going to change their local economy as much as taking a 25 ranches, i wouldve had a big impact but also, if you read through the hearings and discussion going on about the parks, there is a real appreciation of the scenic quality of the pastoral landscape. For some and driving off from san francisco, seeing cows and these beautiful pastors, it was part of the aesthetic experience the beautiful pastures. But as you may hopefully are starting to get from this lecture today, the park service, when it comes to preservation, it is not a neutral actor. Dont into the agency from its early history it has a strong sense of what the National Park is supposed to be like. And the National Park was starting to shape that in places like yosemite or the model of how parks were going to be set up and managed. Places like had working landscapes like point reyes do not fit in as well. I am not sure if you can read it, i put a quote from a park Service History and on the slide. He said, given the strength and persistence and ancestral attitudes, the whole ideas about what a park is supposed to be, within the service, its core values are likely to on last one director even one stubbornly directed to change them. These ideas are built into the ways that we manage these spaces and into the landscape themselves. To try and keep them as these on changing natural sceneries, places that have working lands, april in them and livestock moving around them do not fit that very well. One of the things that is important to understand about the work service again, when it was first being set up, it was not focused on natural resources. Ecology as a science did not include yet did not exist yet in 1916. It was really a focus on the scenery and not the science of that followed through actually until very recently in the park service. So, this concert of understand that shaken sort of help us can sort of it help us understand what the park service wants to do and what the actual outcomes of their management on the landscape can be. That is what i found in my research at point reyes. A quick overview of some of the things that have happened there. Through this Risk Management policies and actions, the park service has been slowly editing out a lot of the Human History of this place. Either physically through removing buildings, roughly half of the buildings and other structures that were in place in 1962 are gone now. Again, not necessarily that they were the best things on earth, but they were either removed or torn down or sometimes hurt for Fire Training burnt for Fire Training. The idea that we should make these places look more natural looking. It is not a formal policy of the park service to it is the way that their management actions tend to drive without noticing it almost. I tried to count how many buildings from maps and photographs were there in 1862 and how many are there today and i think the National Park service would be surprised that many have disappeared. It is not that their conscience of these changes that they are causing over time, but these things are happening slowly, through these ideas of what management should be driving for. There are far fewer wrenches in place in operation now, where we went from 25 in 1962, there are currently 11. Six of the dairies insider now beef ranches. Point reyes boundary itself, some of those wrenches are getting taken care of, some of them are still operating and theyre all still lived in. Some other ones that are not lived in are being taken care of such as the pierce ranch which has become a walkthrough exhibit. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on fixing the building, as a Historic Preservation appropriate methodology, using the right kind of nails for the era in which the building was built, the right technology in fixing them. The ranches in the best shape in the park, physically, and you can see the ranch is in the best shape in the park. Visitors can walk around, visit the buildings, p or at them but at that,s there peer but no one lives there. Other branches that have residences where residents have moved out on their own or have been infected, they were not necessarily taken care of. Well. Ce, this is thean other victorian house dating back to the 1880s and a photograph of the same pot in the 1950s, you cannot see it very well from this distance but there were beautiful roses on it , everything was in perfect shape. Many of the neighbors described to me that back in the day, the d ran weather prettiest branchch nch was thera prettiest. It is an area that is incredibly foggy with a lot of salty air and an on lived will deteriorate very quickly. A building that is on lived all deteriorate building that is not lived in will deteriorate very quickly. And this building is crumbling. There are also areas of designated wilderness making this lays into a pristine wild nature, coming complete with wildlife. That had lived in point reyes back in the 1800s and long before. Areahad been hunted out of by the 1850s, even before the were started moving in and gone from the region until they were reintroduced in 1978. ,hey have since proliferated their herds are doing quite well. There is a lack of large predators in what would have been the natural and i mean , in al in air quotes natural landscape he wouldve had the miwak people of the coast birding the land with regularity. You had predators who wouldve , by the population in check hunting them. Right now there is no hunting. There are a couple of mountain lions but there was nothing to control the population and it is booming. It has taken a few dips in recent years because of a few droughts. Now a few they talk about using theraception to manage population, or possibly moving some of them out to another part. It is this place that is already masquerading as being wild and natural yet it is deeply managed. They cannot just leave the elk alone and leave everything untouched. There is a need to keep trying to shape this case, to make it look like sort of the iconic nature that we all asked act when we arrive what we all expect when we arrive at a park. The next time youre out there, check out the visitors center, check out the one in drakes beach. There was very little historical material interpreted for visitors to my and what there is is focused on sir Francis Drake who probably landed about a week when his ship was blown off course in the 1400s. The more recent task in terms of the ranches and the very long task of the coastal miwak, none of them is very well represented in the interpretation of the history of this place. ,hat has been really hiking just really striking, and i will wrap up with this, is the history of the place is not being interpreted by the park service for them and even the park managers, they do not remember or do not have any ideas of what the old history was, what was there before they showed up. The park staff, like any other job has turnover. So someone might work there five years and then move onto another park. To all who come in to do not have a lot of material to read on the history of the place so gradually, the memory of what was there fades away. To do not interrupt very much, the staff do not with the ranchers who still there in the and ever since i have been researching the place since visit90s, when people the shores for the first time there are often a lot of ashes about why there are cows there. The ridges not the wrenches do not look like they belong there. We do not remember seeing cows in yosemite or in yellowstone or in any of the other sort of big, National Iconic parks. So again it becomes a selfreplicating cycle where people question the original residents of the park and why there are still in place. They do not know the story of thenthey got there and they advocate for them to be moved out. To have been a number of lawsuits in recent years trying to actively push some of the last remaining residents out of the park. One of the things i wanted to do in closing is the image of the pastoral landscape in point reyes, remembering that all of landscapes have history. And even places that we think of as a Natural Landscapes have histories, that often is quite invisible to us as a viewer. These places were shift by other peoples lives, whether that be native americans or more recent settlers like the ranchers at point reyes. I think there is a need to have, if not a formal recognition of the relationship with landscape, at least respect for the ways in which their work has made some of these places. To reason that there are grassy fields out at point reyes drove very green at this time of the year at very lush, is because of the miwak burning for hundreds of thousands of years and because cattle ranching has been taken place since then. If you take the cattle and the burning off, just like they use somebody valley, the Yosemite Valley, you would not have green grass anymore. Because these coastal grasslands are not in themselves Natural Landscapes, they are created landscapes through peoples work. Trying to understand both the fact that people were in these places, or if they were, or if they still are, valuing their contribution to that place. That is the end of my lecture today. I wonder if you all had any questions that i can answer . [indiscernible] kenny asked that question again . What got you interested in point reyes in the first place . I got verywatt interested, i come from a background as a biologist as an i got my College Degree in biology from uc berkeley, and i thought my parents were with biologists, but i started really getting interested in the social and cultural aspect of how we think about the natural world. I realized i was not interested in taking the frog apart but interested in how we think about frogs or where we think they are etc. Rent, important, i started thinking about the process of Natural Landscapes and i took a class at uc berkeley in my graduate program from a law professor named joe sachs who was teaching a class on preservation law. What was unusual was he spent half the lecture talking about natural preservation, about National Parks, endangered species, about wildernesses. Lecture, he of the talked about cultural preservation, museums, communities like the amash who are trying to protect their cultural identity, and working landscapes like point reyes. And i started to realize how similar the impulses of reservation are on the sort of natural and cultural side. I got interested in places where they come together and for to me that is what these places are. These natural and cultural constructs that we tend to weekend that the culture is up there and we only see the natural. So point reyes, because it is a lived in National Heart, it is different. There are some, about 50 or 60 that have some kind of landuse or residents living in the park, but out of 400 or so National Park units, that is not many. Was conveniently located nearby, and as i moved from being a graduate student and getting a job here at sonoma state, it was still conveniently nearby. So i also had the measure of natural and cultural, and i found it intriguing, to try and understand how from a fairly corporatized in a way landscape, one that was divided into wrenches and being utilized for economic use to something that is recreated as pristine nature. And understanding that transformation. Was a perfect case study for seeing that change over time. Other questions about preservation or parks . In the chapter we read today, you talk about how those in power in society influence what values and what is preserved. You thinkering what about the current president ial administration and the impact it might have on a place like point reyes and other National Heart . That is anwatt excellent question and i do not have any idea how to end her. I have been asked the question a few times since the end of november. I do not know how to answer it. Say, some people would presume that the new administration is more open to either privatizing public lands the guy he has appointed, i think his name as the secretary of the interior, has been excessively not an advocate of preservation of land. That seems like a monopoly on the table. Re might be more open is openness to the working landscape, recognizing that you can have economic uses of land and Environmental Protection at the same time, that they dont have to be oppositional. That said, the new administration does not seem particularly supportive of Environmental Concerns at all. So, it is kind of a wildcard i think, at this point, in terms of how that will affect management on the ground. The other interesting factor that is unique to the park service and the present day park service, rather than the thatrical park service, is each individual part, they are each created by a separate act of congress. Dear not there is no blanket authority over all of them. There are some guidelines that the park service has as National Policy but each individual superintendent of each park, whether it is yosemite or point reyes, they have a lot of latitude to make their own decisions about how to manage the place. Discretion very wide that they have, a real variation in terms of how parks are managed. I have often used a comparison of point reyes to another part in ohio called cuyahoga valley National Park. It used to be a National Recreation area and it is a place where the current superintendent has been very interested for the last 20 years in bringing agriculture back into the park after he had been pushed out through a bunch of evictions in the 1970s. He has come up with some really interesting model for possibly doing that, creating new longterm leases for agriculturalists who will commit to being organic, having fairly small scaled production, not minding tourists coming by and looking at what theyre doing. There are a bunch of rules, a new model for it encouraging four encouraging agriculture. You would think if that was happening one place, it would be happening in the other. At least, the opposite until recently, has been happening. Emphasismphasis a de initiatives into the National Parks. Administration at the National Level doesnt necessarily change very much at the local level, superintendents have a lot of discretion to do their own thing and go a different direction than the National Level is going. That is a long way of saying, i do not know. [laughter] but time will tell. Anything else . , we will wrap up the lecture for today, let us take a break and well do our discussion of the readings afterward. Thank you so much. Announcer join us every saturday evening at 8 p. M. And midnight eastern as we join students in college to hear lectures on topics ranging from the American Revolution to 9 11. Lectures in history are also available as podcasts. Visit our website, cspan. Org history podcast or download them from itunes. Up next, from American History tv, lisa ocean from Des Moines Area Community college uses photographs to describe the enduring friendship between republican Herbert Hoover and regret, harry truman. This event was part of the Herbert Hoover library and Museum Conference on president iar