Day 6: Zion National Park

The American wilderness?

A trip to Zion National Park illuminates the issues America faces in its attempts to preserve the wilderness. On the one hand, the reality that prior to its designation as a National Park, Zion had been the home to many, from the Ancestral Puebloans to the Mormon Pioneers, suggests that William Cronon’s assertion that the wilderness is a “cultural construct” is not entirely unfounded. Indeed, his assertion that the true wilderness is one in which humans belonged as one part among many (Cronon, 1996:22), seems to suggest that by removing them, and restricting them to the role of visitors, National Parks are disinventing the true wilderness, and fabricating an image in its place, that is one “shaped by natural forces and not by human modification” (Gray, 2008:ii). Yet whilst these efforts may be taken as evidence of an attempt to keep the area “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations” (National Park Service), the sheer number of visitors, and the need to create “public recreation” in the form of hiking trails and bus tours etc., entails vast amounts of human modification in the form of paved roads, whilst the presence of people means that damage is unavoidable. Thus, there is an inherent contradiction in the goals set out by the National Parks Act of 1916, and it is hard to envisage a wilderness “shaped [purely] by natural forces”. Yet because people come to National parks expecting to escape civilization and with this image in mind, they are unsurprisingly left with the impression that Zion is not reflective of the wilderness. That said, encounters with animals such as deer, and views of at least partly unspoiled landscape do reveal an “wild” aspect to America, that one cannot encounter in places such as Las Vegas. 

Cronon, W. (1996) The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. Environmental History, 1, (1) 7-28. Available at: http://faculty.washington.edu/timbillo/Readings%20and%20documents/Wilderness/Cronon%20The%20trouble%20with%20Wilderness.pdf [Accessed 14 May, 2016]

Gray, M.A. (2008) The Traditional Wilderness Conception, Postmodern Cultural Constructionism and The Importance of Physical Environments, unpublished MA thesis, The University of Montana. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=0D00C87CD663B2E24F67E2EF542F4A5E?doi=10.1.1.501.4146&rep=rep1&type=pdf [Accessed 14 May, 2016]

National Park Service (n.d.) Organic Act of 1916. Available at: https://www.nps.gov/grba/learn/management/organic-act-of-1916.htm [Accessed 14 May, 2016]