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The title of this talk is not the most umm poetic title
but it explains my purpose. It's called, "The Challenges of National Parks
Across Time and Space:
The Purpose of Crown Jewels" This is a behind the scenes tour of the exhibit
and of the book that accompanies it. Crown Jewels has four parts: A free exhibit of over
40 panels in 103 Montgomery Street, the Presidio Trust Headquarters.
Accompanied by docents who will guide you through the exhibit and help with questions.
A six part speaker series of which this is the first installment. Which
will bring the experts who wrote about the five great parks, or
most of the parks, to our audience. And we will have question and answer
so you can ask them about questions that you may have once you've looked
at the exhibit and hopefully read the book. An educational program for grades 8-12
created by Mary Maya of the Presidio Trust Heritage Programs Department
to bring schools students to the exhibit. And a full colored book published by the American
Alliance of Museums in Washington, which we have for sale tonight.
Now the book is a rather umm unusual. It is actually two books in one. It's a sandwich.
The first part is a brief overview of the global situation of national parks.
And that took me about a year and a half to pull together, even though it is very short.
Sometimes short, condensed information is the hardest thing to find.
And a history of protected areas that goes beyond national parks in the United States,
which we will look at in a moment. Then there are five great parks, one per continent.
Then there is a brief conclusion on the changes in the scientific understand of nature and
the new park goal of ecological integrity, and what
that means. So, I'm going to start with the global situation and U.S. protected areas
to give us a frame of reference. Most of these will
be charts and maps, but I will explain what they mean. And then I will quickly go through
the different experts that we brought together to create this exhibit and just
quickly look at some of their images without explaining too much about it
because I don't want to take the thunder away from the exhibit itself, or from the catalog.
But I want you to know a little bit about the process of making the exhibit.
So here are our parks. They are in Amazonia, two parks actually - one in Southern Venezuela
and one in Northern Brazil but abut and create one area and have a particular purpose, an
unusual purpose, which we will talk about. In Africa, the Serengeti national park one
of the great wildlife parks of the world and Ngorongoro
conservation area where the Maasai people live with their herds and where palaeoarchaeologist
have been studying the very beginnings of human evolution. Then there's
Pompeii in Italy, the oldest and real first large archaeological park. A park
that has been exposed to the elements for 250 years and which has its own problems
in Southern Italy. Then the Chang Tang reserve in Tibet, the second largest protected area
in the world. Second only to Greenland, which is the largest. And last, the Great Barrier
Reef in Australia. Umm some people call this the largest living thing on earth. It
stretches from what would be London to Moscow. That's the scale of Queensland, Australia.
So those are our parks. As you can see it's a nice pattern of distribution,
somewhat accidental, but it turned out nice and we mapped it. Well it is hard to find
summary information on national parks around the world.
Uhh, most people assume that national parks are unchanging and stable. But the purpose
of this exhibit and this book, is to explain how dynamic they are as protected
areas, both in concept and in management. And
especially future management with global warming. Most books on parks are celebratory
They're travel logs. This book and exhibit are critical. They're looking at the challenges.
We want to see what the issues are. What is really important about the future of these
places. So... we look at parks here from a political
point of view in the large meaning of the word "political," which is how people look
at areas, look at issues, look at missions, look
at concepts. There are six sections in the exhibit. The first one is an introduction
by myself, that looks at the global situation and then
looks to some degree at the United States and its particular history of protected areas.
The Chang Tang reserve as I mentioned, the Serengeti, Pompeii, two parks in Amazonia,
and the Great Barrier Reef. Why these parks? A question that I have been
asked quite a few times. Basically, to show variety. I wanted a variety of protected areas
to open up the concept of national parks so we would think of it in a wider way. We
tend to look only at our situation, this is to look bigger than that. I wanted natural
and cultural. Pompeii is not a natural site, it's a cultural site. I wanted old and recent.
The Great Barrier Reef is a relatively recent park, Serengeti is an older park. Terrestrial
and aquatic, because water and the oceans are a critical element in the future of parks.
And I wanted one per continent. But further, why these particular parks? Because
I was able to find books written by experts that intrigued me and seemed to take these
issues in a direction that I thought the public would want to know more about.
Again, to look at the global situation - this is a very interesting umm... map with pie
charts. The dark sections of the pie charts represent the percentage of already converted
land. That is land turned to settlements, agriculture, mining and industry. The light
colored wedges are protected areas. Reserves, national parks, scientific areas
of study, other parts that are protected from outside influences. You will see that the
story around the world is quite varied. North America, which is wealthy, which was
late settled by white people, which has had strong governments both in Canada and the
United States, which had large areas of, if you will, undeveloped, mostly aboriginal
land, which was preserved by both federal and central governments,
has managed to preserve the most in terms of percentage of its territory. About 11-13%
is is protected in protected areas. That would
include marine reserves, which are a new frontier in protected areas.
The least protection is in North Africa and the Middle East. Only about 2% of that territory
is in protected areas and the rest of the world sort of falls in between. So, it's an
uneven story. Just like economic development, just like
literacy, just like democracy, just like efficient government,
it is not evenly spread around the world. So that is the situation in its largest frame.
Why did these places become parks? Umm, this is a very early and important piece of propaganda
for parks. It is a painting by Thomas Moran from 1893, it is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.
It was commissioned by congress as a way, before photography, to understand the riches
of the far west by the legislatures in Washington. Yellowstone and the National Park Service
considers this the first national park. It was established in 1872. Yosemite is
something of a special case, it was actually set aside in 1864, but was a California
State Park and not well managed. So Yellowstone is considered our first park. There were
14 national parks and 21 national monuments, which are the equivalent of national parks,
before there was a park service to manage them. Very interesting. We assembled these
parks or acquired these parks in a rather haphazard way. Umm, and didn't have a way
to manage them. They all fell under the Department of the
Interior, they all had their own superintendents, they each followed their own policies. They
were woefully underfunded and understaffed. National parks have not been static, they
have not been one thing. They have basically gone through three phases. First was the protection
of dramatic landscapes. So, the Yellowstone was one of the most dramatic landscapes in
North America. Things that non-scientists, especially the legislature in Washington could
see were extraordinarily grand and scenic and
dramatic landscapes. So they start really that way, with scenic landscapes. Then after
they have been reserved, these very early parks,
the managers of the parks notice that the animals that
inhabit the parks migrate and many of the animals migrate outside the boundaries of
the park, where they are fair game for hunters. Parks
then turn to the management and protection of wildlife, in one way or another. So we
go from land to the wildlife. And then in our own day, probably not so long ago, probably
since the 1960's, they have a new mandate. They
seek to protect all ecosystems. Not just grand landscapes, not just what we call "charismatic
fauna," you know what charismatic fauna is - they're elephants and tigers and you know,
spectacular animals. Now the concern is with the entire
spectrum of life. From, you know, microorganisms to elephants. Parks are managed for the entire
spectrum and they have a wider and deeper view of their function and purpose.
National parks in the United States have always been put aside for two reasons. To protect
the resources- basically the land and its animals
and its plants, its trees. And for public use
and enjoyment and that's in the legislation continually. Is to protect the resources and
public use and enjoyment. This has set up an eternal tension, trying to define what
public use and enjoyment should be. For example, you may enjoy jet skis, noisy pesky things
that they are. Other people go to Yosemite to get
away from things like engines and motors and noises like jet skis. Whose idea of public
use and enjoyment will prevail? It is a continual, constant, uhh, contest. When does the public
use and enjoyment infringe upon the characteristics of the natural qualities of
the place that made it be put aside in the first place?
Parks are a balancing act between these two missions, which are often in conflict.
Which brings us to a key point: Parks are political creations. Most people tend to
look at parks as nature, as wildlife, as birds, as beauty, as environment, as ecology,
kind of scientific categories, but fundamentally they are political creations. They're like
banks - the law creates them. They don't exist without the law creating them.
And parks have been engaged always in shifts and changes in national politics and
regional politics in the United States. It reminds me what Stendhal, the French novelist
wrote, "Politics is the art of bringing others
to do what pleases ourselves in
cases where neither force nor bribery can be employed."
Which is a rather cynical way of saying that politics is about persuasion. It is
persuading people. It is a mental effort. It is never ending. There are many points
of view, but they eventually resolve themselves
in specific decisions and that's the managing and preserving of protected areas.
Politics is persuasion. Well now this notion of protected areas in the United States is
not quite as simple as it sounds. We, I created this graph using websites from all
the federal departments because I couldn't find any place
where this was reduced to one place... of all the protected areas in what is the United
States. We start at the top with the BLM - the Bureau
of Land Management That's most of what you drive through as you
go through the West, mostly the desert areas of the West and the forest
areas. The U.S. Forest Service, also as you can see, very large, extensive.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, these are more protected areas,
wildlife areas, really. Then the national parks, you'll notice that they're smaller
than fish and wildlife in total acreage. Then we have Native American reservations under
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, that which can be
considered protected areas of a special sort. Uhh, the Navajo park for example, the Navajo
reservation has its own Park Police force. Uhh, so very well organized, other tribes
not so. Private Land Trusts, you see 47 million acres in Private Land Trust. This is a recent
development. It's an old thing based from the 1890's. But it's taken off in our Neoliberal
era of laissez faire, which is let the private, uhh, sphere make public decisions.
And there are people that own lands, corporations too that own land. They put them in private
trusts to preserve them at a very high level. And there are standards for Private Land Trusts
and there is a trade association in Washington for Private Land Trusts and they're very important.
And they're helping to preserve agricultural areas in particular, which don't fit under
the categories of national parks and don't want to
be returned to the Bureau of Land Management, but deserve protection. The Department
of Defense has a lot of land. This Presidio was one of it, one of its holdings. And much
of this Department of Defense land is now responding
to natural resource conservation compliance programs.
So they're not free to do anything they want. And uhh, if you're familiar with uhh, the
Marine camp Pendleton, between San Diego and Los
Angeles, here's a very large area of essentially protected land that is a military facility,
and has its own protection plan, and its own ecologist and biologists. State parks, 13
million, uh, square, uh, 13 million acres in all 50 states is rather pathetic. California
has been the leader in state parks until the last, I would say 20 years and now
is in serious crisis. About one-third of our coastline is California State Parks. And if
you know this state, you love the coast and a lot of it is not protected. Only a third.
Umm, state parks are in serious crisis. They have shrinking budgets for probably the
last fifteen-twenty years. The money stays the
same in the state budgets, but what it will buy degrades, recedes, so the issues in state
parks are particularly challenging. We've had a governor here in California who wanted
to close virtually all of them. And we're constantly arguing what we should do with
California State Parks. And this is an estate that's rich and that has a very strong
state park tradition. And last the Bureau of Reclamation, this is mostly dam and irrigation
installations affiliated with uh, water works, mostly in the far west.
While all of these places are not the same - there is a constant struggle in
American history between two types of conservation. There is utilitarian conservation, that
is the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service, where the resources can be exploited. On
BLM land you can run cattle, on U.S. Forest Service property you can cut down trees.
And then there is preservation conservation. That's the National Park Service, U.S. Fish
and Wildlife, where essentially the idea is to attempt to preserve the resources
as the park service has said for many years, unimpaired, but for public use and enjoyment.
The pendulum, and here it's very well explained, umm, in the first section of this book...
of American history, of the struggle between utilitarian conservation, which is also called
"wise use" - which is a PR term. And preservationist conservation is continuous.
Every administration that comes into office in Washington and every congress that convenes
faces issues of siding in different cases with the either utilitarian or preservation
conservation. The key agency really, in this whole history
is the U.S. Forest Service. Uhh, in 1891, a house senate committee met to uhh redraw,
or rewrite, U.S. land law for the west. And they passed a piece of legislation with
the snooze of a title: General Land Law Revision Act. And buried in that act, between
two commas, was a clause that said - the president could, with his authority, set aside
parts of the public domain that is federally owned property, that had not been sold yet,
could set aside portions of the public domain in forest reserves. Now the trees could still
be cut down, but there was a reserve. In other words, it would not be sold. Well
the U.S. Forest Service became the agency of a very important figure in our history,
Gifford Pinchot. And in 1898, Pinchot, as head
of the U.S. Forest Service, which by the way, is in the Department of Agriculture.
Trees are a crop. Pinchot is famous for the quote, " wilderness is waste." In other words
- use it! In 1906 and '07, Pinchot attempts
a bureaucratic coo. He gets his allies in the congress to write a bill that
would take the existing national parks, remember there's no park service at
this point, that doesn't happen until 1916, ten years later. He gets the congress,
or his allies, to float a bill that would take all of the National
Park Service and put them in the forest department, the U.S. Forest Service.
It's such an egregious, bureaucratic, overextension, of one agency
basically taking over other elements in the federal system. It creates
a backlash. And John F. Lacey, the Republican governor of Iowa, decides that
what the national parks need is their own agency. Their own home within
the federal government, within the Department of the Interior, that
will advocate and protect national parks. Rather than a conglomeration of independently
managed, badly funded places here and there. It is John F. Lacey
who is critically important in the history of national parks. Because in
1916, his bill is passed and Pinchot's plan is scudded and a U.S. National
Park Service is created, with a professional staff to manage the parks that
exist and to expand the system over time. Now it's very interesting over
our history to watch the sway of the two parties. We don't have much imagination,
we only have two. Most countries have many more. But there's
a quiet dance that takes about 100 years as parties shift position.
Lacey was a republican Theodore Roosevelt was a republican, a progressive
republican. Over time we've seen a shift towards more democratic
support of parks. Republican support for utilitarian conservation - that's
called "opening up the parks." We see this shift, it takes about a century.
Uhh, it's slow, it's steady. It's essential in our history. And much of
it has to do with these battles over public resources. Because under this
land is coal, oil, gas, minerals, iron. Tremendous wealth, tremendous wealth.
The most mismanaged has probably been the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Which has
basically been... mmm... I don't want to use an impolite word, but, it's been
used and royalties have not gone back to the technical owners of the land.
Well the result of the creation of the National Park Service in 1916
and it will be celebrating its centenary very soon, 2016, oh there it goes
again. The result of this bureaucratic structure is really rather fascinating.
We want to go back to this one. This is a map of the National Park
Service properties. It's in a kind of crude way because it's such a simplified
map. About 28% of the United States in public property. And about
two-thirds of that is in Alaska. So, it's a lot of property we're talking about.
But the National Park Service has evolved into more than the manager and
protector of lands and wildlife and waters. It has emerged as a cultural agency.
Two-thirds of National Park Service sites are not scenic sites, they're
historic sites. Things like Independence Hall in Philadelphia, or
the Washington Monument in Washington, or the Statue of Liberty in New
York Harbor. Two-thirds of the NPS sites are cultural, not natural. The NPS
also has and manages the only national system of geological, historical,
and natural history museums. Often associated with individual
parks across the country. Because in our federal system, except for
the Smithsonian in Washington, we don't have a national system of museums.
The NPS serves that function. The National Register of Historic Places,
which is our architectural registry of buildings of high quality and cultural
significance is something managed by the National Park Service. So, it has many
responsibilities, many missions. At the time that the National Park Service
was created, it was a rather limited group of managers. Over time it has diversified
to have women, to have minorities, uhh to have Latinos, to have African
Americans, to have a variety of people in its service. Probably
one of the agencies that has done the best job in reflecting the American
people as they are. It has evolved over 100 years. Also, those historic
sites that I mentioned - in the last twenty to thirty years, they have
diversified to include sites that go beyond presidents uhh and famous artists,
which is basically what it used to be. So, these parks have had a
dynamic history. They continue to change. As a generalization, and this is
rather counterintuitive, political support for parks has been strongest where
there are fewest parks. Which is to say the East Coast. The most populous
area with relatively the fewest of the large parks has been the consistent supporter,
specifically in the House of Representative of parks. Attacks
on parks, opening them up, have generally come from the far west, often in
the Senate, which as you know is an undemocratic body. California has two,
but so does Rhode Island. So, there's no balance there in the Senate. It
does not represent population at all and has a completely different trajectory.
So even within our system of government, you see different traditions.
Now that doesn't mean that on every single issue having to do with parks, this
is the way it breaks, but this is the way it tends to go. That the parks
are supported by populous areas, generally without parks. Franklin Roosevelt
was the first to see that the national park system was not national.
It was western. What he did in the reorganization of the federal government
in 1933-1934, was to take all of the historical sites and war department
sites, which are mostly in the east because that's "where most of our history
has happened" from a point of view. Put them within the park service,
took the park service about thirty years to assimilate this new mission.
Uhh, but it changed the park service. Proposals to open up the parks will never
die. Every time an infernal machine is invented, someone will want to run it in
a park. You can bet on it. So the political struggle will be the preservationists
who see that as an incursion. That is not the best use for the
public recreation. This is a very difficult chart to read - it's
in the exhibit and it's in the book, but it is extremely rich and very
important. It was created by the National Park System Advisory Board in 2001.
The top part, the brown colors, are basically units of land incorporated into
the park system over time. Reading from the left, which is 1872, and
that's 2000. So looking at that span of time, you can see a very important
thing. This is national parks. This is national monuments. There's really
no different between national parks and national monuments, it's how they're
created, but in levels of protection, they're the same. Some of national
monuments have been turned into parks. The Grand Canyon is an example.
And what you see here is the plateauing, that we have stopped expanding.
There has been a history of expansion, and then with the budgetary crunch
of the last hmmm... fifteen years maybe...about. The result has been stagnation.
No more park creation. The bottom of this chart is National Park
System programming. You will see that programming has continued to
expand. These are services for the public in basically interpreting these places.
And the park service has managed to expand those offerings to make them relate
to more communities. To make them truly national. And you see also that
the key moment was the 1960's. This is the environmental revolution. This
is when most of our protective laws for environmental water quality and uhh sewage
disposal and the beginnings of air pollution control and all the rest of
it comes in this one period from '63 to about '76. A lot of it under Richard
Nixon. Umm, and after that a kind of attempt to continue these programs,
but political opposition building against it. The key issue for us
is going to be global warming. To really deal with global warming is an economic
and political revolution. People don't know how serious it will be to
try to cap the use of carbon. It will change the way we live. That is what
the conservative or anti-environmental movement perceives. They see how deep this
is. Fuzzy minded liberals tend to see it as birds and bees. It isn't. It
really strikes at the heart of modern industrial society. And it will be
the challenge of the subsequent generations to manage this issue of global
warming and of its economic and political changes that will have to be made
to cope with it. I won't live to see it, but it will happen. Now let's
try this again. Okay. That's the global situation in a nut shell.
And what I did in this exhibit is try to find places where some of these
issues were really acute and where they were, where there were intelligent
voices that could explain to a general audience, not scientists, but to
a general audience what's at stake. I started with Tibet and some marvelous books
that I found, written by George Schaller, and I want to tell you a
little bit about him if the machine will just slow down for a second.
I think of him as Mr. Tibet, but he's Mr. Much More. He's a field biologist
and senior conservation for the wildlife conservation society and what used
to be known as the Bronx Zoo, but is much larger in its scope today. He's the
Vice President of Panthera, an organization devoted to the conservation of
the world's wild cats. And he's an adjunct professor, with a center of nature
and society at Peking University in China. He was born in Berlin in 1933, moved
to Missouri as a teenager. He's a graduate of the University of Alaska and
the University of Wisconsin. Has spent more than half a century helping
protect some of the planet's most endangered and iconic animals. From mountain
gorillas in the Congo, to tigers in India. Lions in Tanzania, jaguars in Brazil.
Giant pandas in China, snow leopards and wild sheep in the Himalayas. He's the
author of 16 books, including, "Tibet Wild: A Naturalist's Journey on the Roof of
the World." He has conducted conservation projects in twenty-three countries,
including Laos, Myanma, Mongolia, Iran, and Tajikistan. He has helped
establish about a dozen protected areas in various countries, including
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Dr. Schaller will come and
speak to us and he will talk to us about this reserve, the Chang Tang, second
largest in the world. In Tibet, managed by I believe the Department
of Forestry. A magnificent landscape of wide open vistas and amazing
wildlife. The Chiru being one of the charismatic animals of this area. Much
under attack by poachers, who use the fur to make very fine scarves that
are sold in India. And then the conflict with the herders. There are people
who live on the Tibet highland as well. They have herds, they want to put
up fences. There is a conflict between the wildlife. This is a dead wild
***, who has come up against the fence. And also, keystone species like the
Pika. Small little rodent-like animal that makes burrows that the people
have been poisoning for as many years as they can. But, a lot of the
environment depends on these small creatures and what they do in the soil.
So in Tibet what we'll see under Schaller is this kind of conflict. Between
the idea of preserving the land, the needs of the pastoralists, educating
the people. And what you will see in the exhibit. I think one of the
reasons Dr. Schaller has been so successful is he does not impose these
western categories on the people in Tibet. He is trying to use traditions of
Buddhism, the respect for all living creatures. And translating that into
a way that the populous of the place can understand so that they appreciate
the wildlife and don't fear it. Very interesting, subtle approach.
Another park we look at with a conflict between wildlife and pastoralists
is in Tanzania. The Serengeti, one of the great wildlife parks
- which you see here. And an adjoining pastoralist conservation area.
The Serengeti is perhaps the most spectacular of all wildlife environments.
I've talked to several people who have been there and they have never forgotten
it. But it also has important palaeoarchaeological, very early
human evidence. Footprints, remains, archaeological elements. And it also has an
issue with the pastoralists, the Maasai people have cattle, the cattle need
water. They often dig to find that water. Many of the sites that are exploited for the water also happen to be
the archaeological sites. So our experts here are John F. Bower, who is
with us tonight, and Audax Mabulla, who is in Tanzania. And their work has
been really been both to explore the archaeological riches and to educate the
people, the Maasai people as well as the tourism industry, which is strong
and necessary in Tanzania. It brings in foreign exchange. How they can manage
resources and not do things like damage archaeological sites in the hunt
for gravel - for roads and cement and larger hotels. For cultural sites, uhh,
Judith Harris wrote a marvelous book called: Pompeii Awakened. It's not
about old Pompeii, which of course was destroyed by the eruption of Mt.Vesuvius.
It's about what has happened to Pompeii since it was excavated. It's been
excavated now for about 250 years. These are plaster casts in the foreground.
So we have this large, open area of very fragile remains. Without roofs,
which are subject to the elements - to rain, wind, and which decay. We
consume our ruins, as an English archaeologist has said. Now Judith is
particularly interested in the fate of Pompeii. An interesting fact about
Pompeii is about one-third of it remains unexcavated on purpose. So
we don't know everything about Pompeii. We do know that Pompeii gets about
two million visitors a year. An important site in Southern Italy. And
that the human wear and tear - this is a mosaic pavement in Pompeii -
is being destroyed by public use and enjoyment. Pompeii was in the news recently
when the house of the Gladiator collapsed. This is a picture of it.
So Judith has a very good take on the issues around Pompeii. They're
very complex. They have to do with technical issues of conservation.
They have to do with political issues of management. They have to do with financial issues.
They have to do with the Camorra - the crime syndicates in Southern Italy.
Which make it very difficult to manage a site as fragile as Pompeii.
So I think we'll get a very interesting story from Judith, umm, on what
the future of Pompeii is. One of the things that's true about Pompeii that
most people realize - less sites are open now than the 1960's because they've
cut back so drastically on their staff they have to lock most of the sites,
which focuses the human impact, tourist impact, on a few sites and therefore
is ever more damaging to them. So, big issues. Then a park, which I did not
read about, but which I discovered in exploring on the web. This is in
Venezuela and Brazil - two separate parks - one of them the size of Portugal.
Uhh, which are not open to tourism. Which are in Venezuela and Brazil.
Which are reserves for the preservation of the native people, the Yanomami,
who have lived there... I don't know... Since time immemorial I suppose.
Once of the very last groups to be contacted. They were not contacted by
the modern world until the 1940's. They have preserved much of their culture.
Although there have been missionaries and incursions in their land.
They have increasingly suffered from development, the building of roads
through their territory. The extraction of gold and the pollution of their
streams with mercury and other poisonous substances. The introduction of
diseases to which they are not immune. Umm AIDS for example is one, but not
the only one. So, Fiona Watson and her associate Joanna Eede, will talk to
us about the struggles of the Yanomami and their solution, or what the
Yanomami want as their solution, which is communal ownership of their land.
They believe that their future is totally dependent on having communal
ownership of their land and not being at the sufferance of corrupt
governments and incursions, gold miners, or poachers, or tree thieves, or
all the other issues that they face. It's a really interesting question
that shows the shift in modern, western consciousness. Away from a sort of
blanket obliteration of native cultures and the appreciation of native
cultures where they survive. Then Celmara Pocock will come from Queensland.
Celmara will be the best explainer of her particular take. I met Celmara in
Australia. Her particular interest is the Great Barrier Reef, the largest
living thing in the world according to some. It suffers many issues of climate
change, agricultural runoff pollution, Crown Thorn Starfish that are
destroying the coral. But, Celmara's interest is in perception. And
she has a theory, which I found intriguing, and worthy presenting to the public ,
that the indigenous landscape of a place like, umm, the Great Barrier Reef,
has been changed from human perception into something that isn't the
Great Barrier Reef. These are painted shells, this is an underwater laboratory
observation post for tourists. And finally, the imposition of Tahiti - planting
palm trees, creating a tropical paradise where there never was such a thing.
Totally alien to the native landscape of the Great Barrier Reef, but catering
to the perceptions of the tourist business and what they need, or what they
thing they need from these environments. Losing what is authentic about the
environment to a very standard, romantic view of this tropical south seas.
It's a question of education, it's a question of perceptions. Celmara is
particularly interested in the question of technology. The title of her
talk will be, "Is Technology Getting in the Way of the Great Barrier
Reef Experience." I thought here in the shadow of Silicon Valley, we
really needed to hear this talk. So I hope that you will come and
hear her. Our last talk will be about the future of national parks.
The title of the talk is, "What Now: The Uncertain Future of National Parks."
And all of the lectures, as most of you know, are listed in the brochure.
Please be sure to take one this evening. So we'll go through this process
of seeing these issues and then we'll kind of come bring it back home
and we'll look at what, or we'll listen to what William Tweed has to say.
Tweed was the Chief Park Naturalists at Sequoia Kings Canyon. And he's
written a wonderful book called, "Uncertain Path." It's something of a memoir.
and it's something of a...uhh... analysis. What Tweed is seeing is
a shift in the younger generation in their attitudes towards the great
national parks, in the Sierra, in this case. With things for example like
speed hiking. Speed hiking is going to a trail head and seeing how fast you
can get to the end of the trail. Ignoring everything you see in between and
not interacting with any of the hikers. And Sierra hikers are a kind of... society.
Kind of a social thing. You talk with the other hikers, you have coffee with
them, you walk together, you talk together. There is a new trend that is
looking at the parks as an extreme sport. We see it on Mount Tam, with
the downhill mountain bike racers, going I don't know, what, thirty-two miles
an hour or something down these gravel paths where other people are just
trying to walk around, looking at the birds or whatever they're enjoying.
A clash, it's a generational clash. There is something going on in the new
definition of use and enjoyment among the people in their 20's and 30's.
Which Tweed has observed and which he will talk to us about. Because it's
really fundamental - if people change - the parks will change. It's inevitable.
You've seen it in the Olympics, the new level of injury that is accepted
among women athletes. It's really off the scale, it's off the charts.
It's a new thing. And so, it will affect the future of the parks and we
will conclude our series with William Tweed. Well, it's been quite a long
trip. uhh, I'd be happy to take a few questions. It is 8 o'clock... Uhh,
the Power Point has gone away. We can be happy. [Audience laughter followed by applause]