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Show 66 to its preservation and perpetuate the demand for national parks. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, John Muir, a founder and the first president of the Sierra Club, promoted this approach by urging the government to "render accessible" public lands. After Muir's death in 1914, the Sierra Club carried on that legacy in conjunction with the National Park Service, promoting development that, in theory, would allow more tourists to enjoy nature. National park historian Richard West Sellars wrote that tourism in the early national park system was more aligned with development than with prcscrvation. 176 The idea flourished in its early years primarily because of its utilitarian nature as it related to tourism, recreation, and conservation. Tourism was a politically viable rationale for the national park movement. Some historians have argued that Mather took Muir and the Sierrn Club's push to "render accessible" as a push to render comfortable. 177 The result was a surge of tourists, construction, and environmental disruption in the national parks, bu1 also an increase in the number of parks. Although environmental concerns did not receive focused attention in the press accounts examined, they were a part of the national park debate at the time. Albright wrote that in 1918, the biggest struggle confronting the parks wa,; the tension between commercialization and the preservation of nature. Albright wrote: ''The foremos1 problem facing the Park Service ... was a concerted effort by certain interests to make adverse use of the parks, excusing it as patriotism but, in reality, attempting to open them once and 116 Scllan., Pre.serving N(J/ure in the National Porks, 4 . Michael P. Cohen, The P(Jthless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madiwn, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press), 306. 117 |
