The Power of Scenery
Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of National Parks
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Featured in the Wall Street Journal’s 2021 Holiday Gift Books Guide
Finalist of the 2021 Marfield Prize
Wallace Stegner called national parks “the best idea we ever had.” But where did the idea originate? Before Yellowstone, with nothing to put up against Europe’s cultural pearls—its cathedrals, castles, and museums—Americans came to realize that their plenitude of natural wonders might compensate for the dearth of manmade attractions. That insight guided the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted as he organized his thoughts on how to manage the wilderness park centered on Yosemite Valley, at first a state-owned precursor to the national park model of Yellowstone. Haunting his thoughts were the cluttered and carnival-like banks of Niagara Falls, which served as an oft-cited example of what should not happen to a spectacular natural phenomenon.
Olmsted saw city parks as vital to the pursuit of happiness and wanted them to be established for all to enjoy. When he wrote down his philosophy for managing Yosemite, a new and different kind of park, he had no idea that he was creating a visionary blueprint for national parks to come. Dennis Drabelle provides a history of the national park concept, adding to our understanding of American environmental thought and linking Olmsted with three of the country’s national treasures. The Power of Scenery tells the fascinating story of how the national park movement arose, evolved, and has spread around the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drabelle, an editor at the Washington Post Book World unpacks the founding of the national parks in this fascinating history (after Mile-High Fever). The idea that the state had a duty to safeguard untamed expanses of wilderness was created and driven, Drabelle writes, by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Things began with a report Olmsted wrote in 1865 for the newly created Yosemite Valley state park. In it, Olmsted expounded a democratic vision for the preservation and enjoyment of natural landscapes that were then being "discovered" (by non-native people). Americans, Olmsted thought, needed "to disarm their calculating and scheming powers" in the "nonutilitarian enjoyment of wild nature." He presented this paper to commissioners, junketeers, and politicians, and, after years of advocacy, in 1872, Yellowstone became the first national park. This was followed by Mackinac National Park in Michigan three years later (since reclassified as a state park) and Banff in Canada in 1885. Drabelle's careful attention to the wider political and cultural currents of the time makes for an astute history that colorfully traces the development of the laws, agencies, and departments that made the National Park Service what it is. It's a great look at the early underpinnings of the American conservation movement.
