Appreciate and cherish your national parks
They didn't exist all that long ago
National parks are my happy place. Not in so much as I’m always in one, or even that I try to explore them all that often (though I am particularly fond of Crater Lake in Oregon). They’re my happy place just because I’m happy to know that they exist. This is one of those things that I think, globally, we take for granted. But it really wasn’t all that long ago that the very idea of a national park was a fever dream of conservationists. In fact, the idea of land being open and available for public use whatsoever was almost a treasonous thought at one point (monarchs didn’t really prefer to share their land). So, it’s with this thought, that I opted to write this article.
Also, I just happened to have spent a bit of time in one of Thailand’s most beautiful national parks. Which you can watch if you so choose right here or over on the GeoLex Substack:
But let’s get back to national parks more broadly!
The idea of a national park (a preserved area of natural beauty, protected from development and exploitation) might seem obvious today, but it’s actually a relatively recent concept in human history. For most of civilization, land was either owned, farmed, hunted, or developed. The notion that some landscapes should be set aside not for resource extraction or agriculture, but simply because they were beautiful, sacred, or ecologically important, represents a fundamental shift in how people interact with nature. Now, of course, there have been religiously-oriented lands set aside, but those lands were not often available for public use or enjoyment. So, fundamentally, they were a different kind of thing.
Now all that said, long before national parks were formalized, some ancient cultures had a form of proto-conservation that could kinda-sorta resemble a national park. For example, in Sri Lanka, royal decrees as early as the third century BCE protected forests and wildlife. In Mongolia, Genghis Khan restricted hunting in certain areas to allow animal populations to recover. Sacred groves in India and parts of Africa were also examples of landscapes being protected due to religious or cultural reverence. But none of these were public parks, and they certainly were never intended for as a form of recreation. At least not by the people! They were either reserved for elites as private hunting grounds or for spiritual reasons. So let’s jump ahead to when the modern iteration of national parks became a thing.
The modern national park system really stems from the 1800s in the United States. As westward expansion rapidly consumed Indigenous land and transformed natural landscapes into farmland, towns, and mines, a few conservationists began to see the need to preserve some areas from this tide of development. The spark came with the Yosemite Grant in 1864, when President Abraham Lincoln signed a law granting the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to California for preservation. This wasn’t a national park in the modern sense, but it set a precedent. Unfortunately for Yosemite, this early effort actually failed. California, for as progressive as it is today around the environment, didn’t really want to shoulder the burden and, as such didn’t really take up the mantle to preserve a place as wonderful as Yosemite.
So it would ultimately take until 1872 for the first national park to be created: Yellowstone! It wasn’t only the first national park in the U.S., it was the first national park in the world! Which is to say it was the first large body of wild lands that would be owned by the federal government and preserved for the benefit and enjoyment of the people (key point there).
The reasoning behind Yellowstone becoming a national park was novel. It wasn’t created for spiritual reasons or reserved for a king to hunt on, rather it was created to protect stunning natural landscapes and unique geothermal features from private development. This new logic, that government had a role in protecting nature for the public good, was the seed that grew into national park systems around the world.
The idea caught on slowly. More U.S. parks followed: Sequoia and Yosemite were both designated in 1890 (nationally, not under California’s auspices), followed by Mount Rainier in 1899 and Crater Lake (woo!) in 1902. But in the early years, these parks were still poorly managed, and really well regarded to the local populations of the western states. And, more to that point, there was little oversight or coordination between the states and the federal government. Seeing this, the National Park Service was officially created in 1916, which established federal management of these protected areas. This also formalized the parks’ dual mission: conservation of natural resources and enjoyment by the public, a balance that remains central and yet surprisingly controversial to this day.
But this wasn’t just a U.S. effort. Other countries also spearheaded their own national parks in the same period. Canada established its first national park in 1885 in Banff, Alberta, just 13 years after Yellowstone. Australia followed in 1879 with the Royal National Park near Sydney, though it initially served more as a public recreation area than a conservation preserve. New Zealand, influenced by both British ideas and American precedents, established Tongariro National Park in 1887, gifted to the crown by the Māori in order to protect sacred land from the encroachment of settlers.
Throughout the 1900s, national parks spread across the globe. In the post-colonial world, newly independent countries often created parks as a way to celebrate their landscapes, heritage, and biodiversity. African countries established some of the world’s largest parks in the mid-1900s, including Kruger in South Africa and Serengeti in Tanzania. In many places, these parks were originally designed with a tourism and preservation mindset shaped by colonial powers, and that legacy still complicates the relationship between parks and local communities today. For example, elephants in countries like Tanzania, are often seen as nuisances to farmers who live nearby the national park because, naturally, elephants don’t really abide by human made borders. Those elephants will often leave the national park in search of water or food and, in the process, trample over or eat nearby crops.
Today, the number and scope of national parks continues to grow, and their purpose expanded. What started as a movement to protect spectacular scenery now also encompasses biodiversity, cultural landscapes, marine ecosystems, and even urban green spaces (though I’m not really sure why the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis is a national park, but whatever). National parks exist in nearly every country in the world and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates there are over 6,000 national parks globally, covering millions of square kilometers. An impressive feat considering they didn’t really exist until about 150 years ago.
So, with all that said, national parks remain, in my opinion, one of humanity’s most powerful inventions for preserving nature. They’re refuges for wildlife, carbon sinks for the planet, and reminders that some places are valuable simply because they exist (not because of what can be extracted from them). So here’s to the next national park, and the one after that, and the one after that. Because we should create more of them!
Do you have a favorite national park? Or do you have an idea of where the next national park should be established?
From NPs to gaming reserves, Bodla was my favourite. Tiny, and situated within reachable distance from Goa, and the only one to have limited animals in cages.
But when I was walking along the King Cobra, he raised his hood and stood five feet high. Have me a fright of my life, at his size, and that violent hiss.