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Book Review
| Preserving the Living Past: John C. Merriam's Legacy in the State and National Parks. By Stephen R. Mark. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2005. xvi + 204 pp. Illustrations, notes, further reading, index. $39.95.
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| The first generation of American conservationists—Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, Horace Albright, et al.—were a colorful bunch. Next to them, less flamboyant figures like John C. Merriam tend to disappear into the shadows. |
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Creation of parks to save unique natural features, and the interpretation of the scientific meaning of those features for the public in a challenging and engaging manner were Merriam's passions as a scientist and his most lasting contributions to the American environmental movement. In an era when automobiles brought large numbers of new visitors to parks, Merriam and a few others became afraid that commercialized recreation would swamp educational and "inspirational" uses of the parks. To Merriam, visitors to the parks would profit most from their visits if they understood how the things they were looking at illustrated the evolution of the landscape over time, all the way back to the creator. |
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As Mark points out, Merriam's concept of "directional evolution" through which the "primitive" progressed toward the modern is outdated today, yet many problems Merriam propounded are no less urgent now than they were in his period. What are the justifications for preserving natural areas? What are the "highest uses" of resources? How should people understand and relate to their environment? What is the place of what Merriam called "primitive" (wilderness) areas in the United States? What are the proper missions of the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the state park systems, and private environmental organizations? Mark argues persuasively that Merriam's answers to these and other questions were thoughtful, intelligent, and remain relevant today. |
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Unlike most other early leaders of the conservation movement in the United States, John Merriam started as a pure scientist (a paleontologist) and a teacher who hoped that visitors to natural areas could become students experiencing the excitement of understanding how the things they were looking at had come to be. That was a process Merriam referred to as "inspiration," and it is one that practically all good teachers try to provide for their students. Just as Merriam encouraged his own students to understand the evolutionary record through exploration of the John Day fossil beds in Oregon, so he believed that even ordinary tourists, guided by park naturalists, could experience the same process when they visited the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, or the coastal redwood groves. Saving those natural classrooms and providing teachers to help visitors understand what they were seeing became the central objects of Merriam's public career. |
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Although well known among conservationists and environmentalists in his day, Merriam was not a colorful leader of public campaigns. That makes him a somewhat difficult subject for a biographer as well. Mark, a historian with the National Park Service, has made good use of the Merriam Papers in the Library of Congress and other collections, and has located further family papers from Merriam's grandson, as well as a revealing set of family photographs. The only weakness in his telling of the story is that he focuses so completely on events on the West Coast, even during the years when Merriam was working at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, that it sometimes seems as if this is a book about the Save the Redwoods League and the creation of state parks in California and Oregon rather than about Merriam. Merriam took the position as president of the Carnegie Institution because he believed that through it he could advance scientific study of the natural world and provide funding for programs he favored, but Mark gives us little institutional history of the Carnegie Institution that would enable us to see how that worked out. Aside from that quibble, however, this is a valuable book about a too-little-known major figure in the early conservation movement. |
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Kendrick Clements is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and author of the book, Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life (Kansas, 2000). He is currently working on a study of Hoover as secretary of commerce. |
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