The US, nonetheless, certainly deserves some responsibility for the system of parks that now dot North America and most of the globe. But these parks have a history, one largely neglected by Burns. The first dream of public wilderness, sometimes attributed to George Catlin, the genteel chronicler of the Plains Indians, who in 1832 proposed a park “containing man and beast,” meaning indians and buffalo, goes back at least as far as William Wordsworth, who in 1810 described the Lake District as a “sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.” Thus, like almost every other nature movement of the nineteenth century, the parks, with their background in Wordsworth and the Revolution, trace their history to romanticism, a politically radical aesthetic, in some ways democratic, but largely an aesthetic of the exceptional, where only those with “an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy” can claim ownership.
It’s no surprise that Burns would ignore this prehistory of the parks: wilderness, the designation of an area as exclusively natural, where people visit but do not belong, owes its existence to the erasure of history. But in the long shadow of romanticism, the alpenglow rhetoric of the parks takes on a different shade. Dayton Duncan, Burns’ primary collaborator, breaks out the parks’ earliest metaphor to describe his experience: “Here, in what [was once] called the ‘Crown of the Continent,’ the diadems were freshly polished.” Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier—these, we are told again and again, are the “crown jewels” of America. But if the parks constitute a crown, then it is a crown that can be soiled.
When John Muir returned to his beloved Yosemite in 1889, after eight years spent popularizing the park, he found it overrun with plebeians snapping pictures. “His cathedral,” Burns tells us, “had been turned into a carnival.” Muir’s disgust is best elaborated by Clay Jenkinson, a favorite of Burns, whose credentials include a popular radio show, “The Thomas Jefferson Hour,” where he impersonates the founding father: “American nature is the guarantor of American constitutional freedom. That if you don’t have a genuine link to nature in a serious, even profound way, you can’t be an American.” This is not the language of the man who declared all men equal. It is, however, the language of a country where some public lands have been declared more equal than others.
When not busy passing off his favorite impersonators as historical experts, Burns shows a special talent for making real scholars say dumb things. Thus we have William Cronon, perhaps the best environmental historian working today, tell us: “What emerges in the middle of the nineteenth century is this idea that going back to wild nature is restorative.” It’s a very useful slip for Cronon to make—the romantic worship of nature, of course, originated a century earlier, with Goethe and Rousseau—because dropping a century allows Burns to elevate his favorite American romantics: Emerson, Thoreau, and, most importantly, Muir. Viewed in the grand tradition of romanticism, Muir appears as a farcical final stage. But if the worship of nature dates to Emerson and Thoreau, then Muir can assume the position of a culminating figure, riding the crest of Manifest Destiny—the man who took romanticism from the backwoods of New England to the peaks of the Sierras. Both high priest of American nature and personal founder of several parks, Muir easily becomes the avatar for Burns’ entire project.