16 C O N T E X T 9 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5 MANISH CHALANA Cultural landscapes of the USA’s national parks A comprehensive inventory is the cornerstone of the National Park Service’s programme of systematically identifying and documenting significant cultural landscapes. The National Park Service (NPS) is the largest manager of identified cultural properties in the USA. The agency is housed within the Department of the Interior, and is financed through a combination of federal support and user fees. It maintains a total of 388 units, ranging in size from vast stretches of the Alaskan Arctic to individual sites in urban settings. The agency categorises them into around 15 different designations (not including some unique designations) such as national park, national monument and national battlefield, and develops appropriate management strategies to preserve and interpret the cultural and natural resources within them. There are a total of 58 properties with the designation of national park in the US, the majority of which are located west of the Mississippi River. They include parks with worldwide reputation for their natural beauty, including Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon, as well as others of less fame (Great Basin and Theodore Roosevelt, for instance). Unlike many of the national historic sites, national battlefields or similar categories, most national parks were created for their exceptional scenery and natural landscapes, not for the cultural resources they contained.1 Thus in most national parks, natural landscapes remained at the forefront of management and marketing concerns, resulting in the neglect and even outright destruction of cultural resources. This is despite the fact that the Organic Act of 1916, which established the NPS, mandated the agency to ‘conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein…’ (emphasis added). Of all different types of historic resources in the national parks, cultural landscapes were particularly at risk. Such sites hold complex interplays of natural and cultural forces at their core, yet nature and culture had long been understood as dichotomous during the formative years of the NPS. As a result, cultural landscape sites were under-appreciated – even those with a great deal to inform us about the historic interactions of people and place. With the rise of environmental history and cultural landscape studies in the mid-20th century, theorists began to recognise the importance of preserving the human elements of landscapes even in predominantly natural settings. At the federal level, preservation practice has begun to reflect these theoretical advances in recent decades. The NPS began by recognising cultural landscapes as a unique resource, and by implementing the national heritage areas (NHA) programme in the mid-1980s, designating nationally distinct cultural landscapes in which human activities and patterns were prominent in shaping a unique sense of place. However, NHAs are not NPS units as such, since the agency’s role is limited to providing assistance with management to local and regional partners. In the next decade other landscape-oriented programmes, including the Park Cultural Landscapes The orchards in Fruita Rural Historic District, Capitol Reef National Park (photo: author)
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