Conservation
"While the concept of Wilderness can be traced back to eighteenth-century European Romanticism, the concept came to the fore during the late nineteenth century, where preserving nature in its so-called wild and ‘natural’ state became the cornerstone of American environmental approaches. Leading advocates and architects of wilderness preservation and the Wilderness Movement in America were the writers and activists John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, as well as Emerson and Leopold. In particular, the power of Muir’s emotive and sentimental prose, along with other writers of the time, cannot be underestimated. John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892, whose manifesto was built on the call to ‘Save the Wilderness’ from the increasing encroachment of infrastructure and industrial tourism. Paradoxically, tourism and the availability of ‘wild nature’ for the masses to enjoy was a driving factor in the political development of the preservationist movement in America."[1]
Western Colonial Origins
The Romantic notions of Wilderness Muir inspired, as pristine and uninhabited spaces, assumes a virgin land before European conquest as well as unacknowledging the thousands of years of impact that pre-Columbian cultures had on the American landscape. This has the effect of valorising a mythical ‘pristine’ Wilderness and removes ownership and agency over the land from indigenous peoples. The Yellowstone model – inscribed with particular cultural politics and moralities that have the potential to violently erase the history of indigenous people from the land, both materially and culturally – was subsequently rolled out on the colonial map. Kruger National Park, the oldest National Park in Africa, was designated in 1898 as part of the broader appropriation of land and natural resources and named after Paul Kruger, an important military figure and statesman in Afrikaner history. Indigenous people living within the boundaries of Kruger National Park were dispossessed and dislocated from their homeland under colonial conservation laws, such as the criminalisation of traditional hunting, wood collection, and cattle grazing on National Park land as part of a wider move to secure the land for tourist and recreational activities. Not only did the expansion of the National Park movement into South Africa dramatically restructure property relations, but it also alienated indigenous people from the historically available resources to support their livelihoods as well as the gradual erosion of traditional knowledge (regarding hunting and grazing). More recently within and beyond academia, indigenous efforts to reclaim territories and rights have been both highly visible and controversial, especially when they come into conflict with state/corporate interests (see Standing Rock). As Neumann (1998) notes, ‘[r]epresentations of a harmonious, untouched space of nature, [which] mask the colonial dislocations and obliterate the history of these dislocations, along with the history of those spaces that existed previously’.[2]
Yellowstone
"Yellowstone, and what became known as the ‘Yellowstone Model’, was characterised by an exclusionary nature emanating from Euro-American ideas on property rights, colonialism, and Nature. Rather than a move purely to protect an undisturbed wilderness, scholars note that Yellowstone was established with a political concern for establishing federally owned lands in a protectivist move from the private exploitation of land seen under America’s Gilded Age (Germic, 2001). This move was underlined by a profit motive, to create a ‘wilderness experience’ to be enjoyed by American society through tourism and the beginnings of private–federal partnerships that fostered nature-based tourism based on romantic Wilderness imaginaries."[3]
One of the central features of Yellowstone National Park at the time of inception was erasure of the indigenous cultural landscapes, as well as now infamous instances of removal of indigenous Americans themselves . Spence (1999) details the political backdrop of the Park Act, situated among heightened concerns that land be protected against potentially violent indigenous claims of ‘ownership’, which, in Yellowstone’s case, would impact upon and frighten tourists. Consequently, in a move to prevent indigenous Americans entering the Park, a military post was installed at Yellowstone’s western boundary in 1879. In this sense the Wilderness sold to tourists through the imagery of Yellowstone as a pristine and uninhabited space of nature is a politicised imaginary that erases the historical presence of indigenous people on such land for centuries prior to European colonisation. Consequently, wilderness preservation narratives within the National Park Model have the potential to negate the association of (indigenous) people from the landscape. Indeed, beyond Yellowstone, attempts to own, protect, and preserve wilderness have often been accompanied by historical exclusion and dispossession from the land of indigenous people and accompanied by the profit motivation for nature-based tourism, recreation, and resource management.[4]
Sources
- ↑ Ward, K. (2019). For wilderness or wildness? Decolonising rewilding. Rewilding, 34–54. doi:10.1017/9781108560962.003
- ↑ Ward, K. (2019). For wilderness or wildness? Decolonising rewilding. Rewilding, 34–54. doi:10.1017/9781108560962.003
- ↑ Ward, K. (2019). For wilderness or wildness? Decolonising rewilding. Rewilding, 34–54. doi:10.1017/9781108560962.003
- ↑ Ward, K. (2019). For wilderness or wildness? Decolonising rewilding. Rewilding, 34–54. doi:10.1017/9781108560962.003