Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness

Runte, Alfred

Among all of the debates affecting America's national parks, the most enduring—and most intense—is where to draw the line between preservation and use. This is an account of that classic confrontation, as told from the perspective of natural resources and environment. The focus is Yosemite, where debating environmental change is now a century and a quarter old. Yosemite, as the oldest park of its kind, has the longest history of modification. Tourists were familiar with Yosemite Valley well over a decade before the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone were even explored. The issues of park development were raised and debated first in Yosemite. Even today, no other national park more dramatically reflects America's alleged failures to reconcile nature protection with the wants and demands of the visiting public. The subject, to be sure, is by no means new or unfamiliar. The record is nonetheless incomplete, especially concerning natural scientists, their opinions, and their attempts to influence resource management. The National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 itself left every methodology for management deliberately vague, calling simply for protection of scenery and wild life "in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." But just what was meant by "unimpaired"? In effect, a definition that imprecise extended protection to park resources only by implication. It remained for each generation of Americans to bring its own perspective to the issue, invariably, if only subtly, imposing another viewpoint on existing philosophies of park management and use. Concessionaires in particular, seeking greater profits from increased visitation, consistently advocated visitor comfort and convenience over resource preservation. That contradiction, among others, forms one basis of this study. I have also examined divergent points of view about what Yosemite ought to be and what it in fact became as each generation of Americans reevaluated the park's purpose and future. The ideal of sanctuary—that Yosemite National Park should represent a vignette of primitive America—has rarely been put to greater test than in Yosemite Valley itself. It is here that the goals of preservation contrast sharply with the expectations of a mobile, affluent society. Nor have preservationists, despite their overriding commitment to the ideal of park sanctuary, been entirely free of responsibility for the effects of human change. Merely by their presence, it stands to reason, preservationists themselves have contributed to a modified environment.