Author: Jerry J. Frank
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2013-09-03
Total Pages: 270
ISBN-13: 0700619321
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →On September 4, 1915, hundreds of people gathered in Estes Park, Colorado, to celebrate the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park. This new nature preserve held the promise of peace, solitude, and rapture that many city dwellers craved. As Jerry Frank demonstrates, however, the park is much more than a lovely place. Rocky Mountain National Park was a keystone in broader efforts to create the National Park Service, and its history tells us a great deal about Colorado, tourism, and ecology in the American West. To Frank, the tensions between tourism and ecology have played out across a natural stage that is anything but passive. At nearly every turn the National Park Service found itself face-to-face with an environment that was difficult to anticipate—and impossible to control. Frank first takes readers back to the late nineteenth century, when Colorado boosters—already touting the Rocky Mountains’ restorative power for lung patients—set out to attract more tourists and generate revenue for the state. He then describes how an ecological perspective came to Rocky in fits and starts, offering a new way of imagining the park that did not sit comfortably with an entrenched management paradigm devoted to visitor recreation and comfort. Frank examines a wide range of popular activities including driving, hiking, skiing, fishing, and wildlife viewing to consider how they have impacted the park’s flora and fauna, often leaving widespread transformation in their wake. He subjects the decisions of park officials to close but evenhanded scrutiny, showing how in their zeal to return the park to what they understood as its natural state, they have tinkered with its features—sometimes with less than desirable results. Today’s Rocky Mountain National Park serves both competing visions, maintaining accessible roads and vistas for the convenience of tourists while guarding its backcountry to preserve ecological values. As the park prepares to celebrate its centennial, Frank’s book advances our understanding of its past while also providing an important touchstone for addressing its problems in the present and future.
Author: Sarah Allaback
Publisher: National Park Service Division of Publications
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Describes 6 national park visitor centers built from 1956-1966 during the National Park Service's Mission 66 park development program. Includes a brief history of the Mission 66 program.
Author: Thomas G. Andrews
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-10-05
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 0674088573
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Thomas Andrews drills deep into the many pressures that have reshaped a small stretch of North America, from the ice age to the advent of the Anthropocene and controversies over climate change. He brings to the surface lessons about the critical relationships to land, climate, and species that only seemingly unimportant places on Earth can teach.
Author: R. Gerald Wright
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780252018244
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Should the wolf be reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park? Should hunting of "overabundant" deer and elk be permitted in some parks? How should grizzly bears be managed in frequently visited areas? Are mountain goats to be eliminated from Olympic National Park? R. Gerald Wright probes these and other issues of public interest in this exploration of the unique role national parks have played in the protection, study, and management of animal life. Controversy has often surrounded wildlife management, primarily when societal attitudes toward specific animals do not mesh with Park Service practices. Those practices are influenced by the public as well as by the evolution of a program of scientific study in the national parks. As park environments are increasingly threatened by growing numbers of visitors, outside land-use changes, and pollution, it is more important than ever that scientific knowledge, administrative willingness, and public support combine to help create the policies necessary for appropriate management and protection of park resources. Wright traces the history of wildlife management in the U.S. national parks, bringing together a diversity of literature and previously unpublished information that will be of concern to wildlife and land-management specialists, conservationists, and all those interested in our national parks.