George Wright Melendez Essay

One of the topics of which I found interesting was in regards to the building of human happiness in America. In this topic of the fifth episode of The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, it is based around the effects of the great depression in the United States and what the government did to help the nation. Franklin Delanor Roosevelt was a man who loved the outdoors, especially the national parks. His love for the parks was a reason for the future development of jobs in the U.S. When the great depression struck it caused every one out of four men to be without a job. To save money young men would leave their home, so that their families had money to survive, they became travelers across the U.S. The Great Depression caused plethora of issues

George Wright Melendez has a significant historical importance in American National Parks. He had the ideology of “realization coming that perhaps our greatest national heritage is nature itself, with all its complexity and its abundance of life.” His ideology was that everything in nature is important especially the life that lives in the parks. The animals in the park were important to him since he was a zoologist. He was naturalist at Yosemite National Park. Melendez thought that the national parks did half of their job. He believed that the parks were only aiming to bring in visitors and they overlooked the preservation of wildlife in its natural state. What Melendez liked was the unique charm of animals in the national parks and in their wildness. The work he did was revolutionary of how parks worked in the conservation of wildlife. The interesting part of this topic was how it became more about the wildlife and the animals no matter predator or prey versus the ideology of a tour business. He wrote two different reports on surveys which he conducted on the wildlife in the national parks. He did an 11,000 mile tour of the western parks to survey on the wildlife, he was able to complete it in four years. During his voyage Melendez kept a journal with information of all the wildlife he encountered on his journeys in the parks. With these surveys he was able to inform people of the