Beyond Wilderness: The Changing Politics of National Park Creation, 1960 - 1990

Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States national park system underwent a dramatic transformation. Between 1960 and 1990, dozens of sites in or near the nation’s cities came under National Park Service (NPS) administration, upending the agency’s longstanding reputation as an entity primarily dedicated to overseeing public lands in the rural West. In a number of these locations, residents, workers, and others with enduring connections to the landscape retained the ability to live, labor, and own property within park boundaries. This was a remarkable change given the longstanding commitment of the NPS to prioritizing the experiences of tourists and other short-term visitors in its park planning and management. This dissertation details the evolution of NPS conservation practice by examining the politics of park designation in multiple locations across a thirty-year period. It begins shortly after World War II, highlighting the growing significance of outdoor recreation in federal policy. It then addresses the creation of several new types of parks situated near metropolitan areas, including national seashores and lakeshores and national reserves. It also examines controversies over various NPS urban initiatives before concluding with an assessment of public / private partnerships during the early years of the Reagan administration, in particular state and national heritage areas. The central argument of this work is that after 1960 the National Park Service, to a great extent, lost the authority it had once enjoyed over management of its sites and programs. It was this diminution in control that, in turn, allowed for an unprecedented innovation in approaches to park formation. Beginning in the 1960s, a wide variety of stakeholders, ranging from members of Congress to national nonprofit organizations, local community groups, and even individuals, began to regularly question NPS decision-making. New laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, gave those outside the agency greater opportunity to affect park creation and management. I analyze the actions taken by these diverse actors in the context of urban, suburban, and exurban park sites, highlighting the contribution to conservation history of these understudied sources. A key finding of the dissertation is that economic change played a pivotal role in determining the trajectory of NPS action in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Shifts in modes of production and in the distribution of capital directly affected the scale, scope, and purpose of national park development, whether in regions devastated by the loss of industrial jobs or in once rural areas remade by unrestrained growth.