Yosemite: Preservation And Conservation

Current consensus on global climate change is not promising. As such, efforts have been mounted to reverse this direction, but it is not clear that the implemented preservation and conservation efforts have been successful. Preservation is used in the sense of keeping something in its original state and free from decay, and conservation is used in the context of the protection of nature and natural resources, so the terms will be used interchangeably. Failures of these efforts can be traced back to the 1864 Yosemite Grant and the 1964 Wilderness Act and the problematic precedents they set. The existing paradigm of preservation in environmental science is rooted in notions of settler colonialism and imperialism, and demarcates certain conceptualizations

Key to this practice was how Yosemite was framed. Photographers, including the highly influential Ansel Adams, framed Yosemite so as to exclude images of people or structures. Until recently this deliberate framing was helped by national parks having signs along trails directing tourists to scenic spots for photographs or having telescopes directed at spectacles from a distance (Solnit 262). This conceptualized nature as a work of art, specifically a painting. Like a painting, then, nature is viewed as something that can be understood by seeing and is itself lifeless and inert. This construction discourages interaction and creates nature as a place humans do not belong. Furthermore, this construction creates the image of Yosemite as a virgin wilderness. Solnit notes that sexual possession was highly evident in the West. The land was viewed as a virgin waiting to be penetrated by the discoverer who will conquer it, set his mark upon it, and possess it by naming it. The fact that “wilderness” came from will and willfulness represented wilderness as “an independent woman who needs to be domesticated” (Solnit 312). Given that Yosemite was the first instance of a national park, the settler colonial nature of preservation achieved through extermination and erasure of the Native people set an example for future parks, and the objectification of wilderness likely led to the 1964 Wilderness Act in which wilderness is seen as something necessary to be preserved.

Ramachandra Guha brings the issue of national parks and wilderness into a global context. His critique is largely of deep ecology, but a central characteristic of deep ecology is “its focus on the preservation of unspoilt wilderness” (Guha 73). Because the Wilderness Act created the first legal definition of wilderness, “deep ecology is uniquely American” (Guha 72) an “the emphasis on wilderness is positively harmful when applied to the Third World” (Guha 75). The