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Show 338, areas. The notion of a National Park as partly "wilderness" is a more modern public ideal, held in the nineteenth century by only a few extremists who believed that Man's work did not improve the landscape. Frederick Law Olmsted was one of those extremists, and had recognized in 1865 that Yosemite should remain, as near as possible, in its "original" condition. As my quotation marks indicate, this was a problematic issue. If "original" described the processes which had shaped the landscape, then there was good reason to believe that Indians had been burning and removing brush by hand in the Valley long before white men had arrived. Thus men had been a major ecological force in Yosemite for quite a while. Further, a modern geographer points out that the ecological notion of climax implicit in the desire for a permanent, unchanging Park like Yosemite Valley, is at best an ideal. Men had been, all over the earth from before the dawn of written history, a dominant ecological force, a part of the processes of ecological change. Many changes effected under the stewardship of men in Yosemite Valley have had contradictory results. The same men who disapproved of grazing would approve of fire suppression, yet both acts encouraged forest succession on the Valley floor. Muir wanted to describe a pastoral scene without a human component. Thus he left the sheep out of his literary version of "Twenty Hill Hollow." Was it possible to change public tastes in such a radical manner? If he would leave Man's works out of the picture, then he would compensate by describing |
