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  "description": "Starting national park histories",
  "path": "/writing-in-the-moment/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-03T19:00:32.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.adamsowards.net",
  "tags": [
    "Our National Park Policy: A Critical History",
    "The National Parks: America’s Best Idea",
    "National Parks Portfolio (1925)Reading promotional literature to understand the parksAdam M. Sowards — Taking BearingsAdam M. Sowards",
    "Reckoning with History: The parks have been fixed before - High Country NewsHow the government tackled the post-war threats of national park ‘disfigurement’ and ‘destruction.’High Country NewsAdam M. Sowards",
    "donations"
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  "textContent": "_How do you begin a history of the national parks?_\n\nThat’s not a rhetorical question; it’s eminently practical to me. This is the week my summer begins, and that means I’m digging back into the research and writing of my national parks history book. Although I’m not ready to commit to my opening yet, at some point soon, I know I will have to decide how to begin. So I consulted two histories to see how other authors have opened their books.\n\n## **“Turning Our Fair Land Into a Madhouse”**\n\nIn 1961, John Ise published Our National Park Policy: A Critical History, and his short introduction told a clear, powerful story. Most American land policies were not progressive, Ise concluded, but the national parks furnished one exception. (The Tennessee Valley Authority was the only other progressive land policy he could identify.) Ise credited many people with making national parks successful, from presidents to park rangers’ wives. Their work over decades produced a legacy. The park idea, Ise believed, was worth protecting.\n\nIse did not rest contented.\n\nWithout constant work and vigilance, the park system and its distinct sites would deteriorate. The older threat concerned private owners monopolizing important places. “Private monopoly of such unique scenic wonders would be repugnant to all sense of justice and propriety,” Ise wrote. When they built the park system, Americans avoided such monopolies and the destruction of great sites with the national parks, “one of the finest and most democratic of American institutions.”\n\nBut Ise wondered if the future was secure. Poised in 1961 halfway through Mission 66, a massive development and upgrade program, Ise recognized a new threat already stalking the parks.\n\nThe National Park Service was popular. This popularity, though, might not save parks if the growing American population and its appetites required more natural resources, Ise feared. Although it was clear to Ise that “the natural forest is more satisfying, more inspiring, than the cutover forest,” he knew utilitarians believed you could always take a little bit without causing much harm. Such actions accumulated and threatened the parks.\n\nAnd more than worrying about extracting resources inside parks, Ise feared tourists and their impacts. The most scenic sites attracted enough people to produce congestion. It was becoming so bad that “the main points of interest . . . [might] not offer much primeval quiet and serenity to the lover of nature.” This was not the fault of the NPS, Ise thought, but a result of factors including an exploding population and ubiquitous automobiles that “are turning our fair land into a madhouse.”\n\nCrowds gathering while waiting for Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park, October 2019. (author photo)\n\nThe specter of this madhouse compelled Ise to write _Our National Park Policy_. He framed the book by establishing an ideal that was being threatened by changing conditions. In some ways that made it a conservative book, one upholding an old national park ideal as good and worthy against the social forces that seemed stacked to undermine it. Cherishing an ideal—real or imagined—has long been central to national park writing, and an imminent threat heightens the importance of its history.\n\n## **“Our Best Selves”**\n\nDocumentary filmmaker Ken Burns is perhaps the person who has had the greatest influence over Americans’ interpretations of national parks this century with his 2009 series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. Burns enlisted the writer Dayton Duncan to write a companion volume, _The National Parks: America’s Best Idea: An Illustrated History_. Burns contributed a short preface that set the tone.\n\nBurns firmly placed parks within his broader project of illuminating American history. What had driven him, Burns wrote, was the question, “Who are we?” Race had dominated his explanations, but he realized that space mattered too. And nothing told that story better than national parks, Burns believed.\n\nThe story of the national parks affirmed the history’s exceptional nature, an embodiment of freedom. He leaned into the idea of parks being the nation’s “Best Idea.” Simply, Burns wrote, the national park story is “a reminder of our best selves, a connection to the most primitive impulses we human beings have, and an appreciation of the value of commonwealth that these parks represent on both a spiritual as well as material level.”\n\nThe national parks not only captured the best essence of American political ideals—democracy, commonwealth, public good—but also something that transcended nationality to a fundamental human connection to the natural world. This connection, in Burns’s view, had been lost and is hard to recapture given the distractions of regular life: “The siren call of civilization is nearly impossible to resist; its enervating rhythms discordant yet seductive; the promise of wealth or position too engrained a reward for most of us to ignore.” To a great degree, then, Burns moved from American to universal—at least his concept of universal. In this vision, the Best Idea trope extends beyond the nation.\n\nAnd then, switching scales from the universal to the intensely personal, Burns moved to stories—stories of a childhood trip with his father to the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, a rare respite in their relationship. Those long-ago moments came to mind as he visited Yosemite at the start of his project and found himself transformed. Seeing the valley for the first time changed him “like the loss of one’s virginity or the fresh intimacy of parenthood” (perhaps the oddest simile I’ve ever read associated with seeing nature in its grandest form).\n\nMy first view of Yosemite Valley, albeit from a different angle, did not produce quite the same reaction as Ken Burns's, October 2025. (author photo)\n\nThe personal memories and recollections Burns included offered a final lesson. The story of the parks is majestic and as old as the earth; it is also as personal as the hand you hold when you first gaze into the Grand Canyon.\n\nBurns’s history seeks to inspire in ways common to paeans to national parks. What’s missing in Burns’s preface, though, is conflict or threats. Such things melt away amid beauty and potential. Written in the lead up to the NPS’ centennial in 2016, Burns promoted “our best selves,” our best places, inherently worthy. It may be inspiring, but this is not a historian’s story.\n\n## **Lessons?**\n\nThe books share a commitment to the national park ideal. One seeks to defend it against an emergent threat; the other applauds its transformative potential. Each one also reflects the moment when they appeared—a time of growing threats, a moment to commemorate. What will the moment I’m writing in demand?\n\n(How would you begin a history of the national parks—comment below?)\n\n# Cross-Words\n\nReminder: I am experimenting with this section, used mainly for cross-referencing other sources. I expect to include two types of sources: related essays I’ve written and sources I consulted for a given week’s topic.\n\nComplementary pieces for this week's essay include:\n\nNational Parks Portfolio (1925)Reading promotional literature to understand the parksAdam M. Sowards — Taking BearingsAdam M. SowardsReckoning with History: The parks have been fixed before - High Country NewsHow the government tackled the post-war threats of national park ‘disfigurement’ and ‘destruction.’High Country NewsAdam M. Sowards\n\nThis week I relied mainly on the books described above.\n\n# In Other Words\n\nI use this section when there is something I've recently published or presented.\n\nLast week, I participated in a webinar with the Sierra Club about protecting forests. My contribution about the history of public forests begins around 7:30.\n\n* * *\n\n💡\n\nRather than relying on subscriptions,  __Taking Bearings__ depends on readers' generosity. Posts are offered freely; however, donations to support my efforts are always welcomed and appreciated. Other valuable ways to engage with  __Taking Bearings__ include liking and sharing posts, leaving comments, or replying by email to let me know what you think. Thank you for reading!",
  "title": "Writing in the Moment",
  "updatedAt": "2026-06-03T19:00:31.763Z"
}