Experiences, Encounters, and Activities Parks Provide
Historically, tourism has been an integral part of national parks. While there weren’t nearly as many visitors to the parks as there are today, they engaged in many of the same types of activities, albeit on a smaller and less modern scale. Vacations, then and now, are centered around park adventures, which include all that the “wilderness” has to offer. Mountain-climbing, backpacking, fishing, hunting, and often just walking in a natural setting, are some of the most common park activities. Today’s tourists have more encounters with modernity in park areas since technology reaches virtually all aspects of our lives. Many parks have facilities and services such as restaurants, speciality shops, entertainment, car and boat rentals, hotels and other conveniences that tend to blur the boundary between park (natural) and modern (man-influenced) experiences. Further, the reverberations of commercialism includes litter, congestion, technological dependency, and other conditions that can have a negative impact on the park experience and the environment. The inevitability of conflict emerges when the two realms of ideologies collide. The principles and policies of national parks have been a source of contention, especially between the proponents of preservation and the advocates of tourism. There is often considerable controversy over the issue of hunting and its effects on both the environment and the park experience. The aims of this lesson are to explore the park by using field-based strategies and to sensitive visitors to the ‘meaningfulness’ of park experiences. Primary sources are used to give the reader a feel for the park setting. Juliette Huxley’s chronicle of wildlife in a Kenyan national park gives the reader insight into the uniqueness of big game life, which unfortunately is no longer abundant in most U.S. parks. Poetry, further sensitizes the learner to the animal conditions. An excursion to a park is the basis for the developmental exercises.
The objectives of lesson three are:
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1. To
prepare
for an excursion to a park
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2. To
observe
the inherent conflicts in nature
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3. To
identify
features of a park
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4. To
acquire
positive values from park experiences
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5. To be
inspired
to actively participate in park related activities
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6. To
increase
reading capacity on national parks.
Tourism and recreation are very important aspects of national parks in the U.S. and abroad. Park administrations are very sensitive to the diverse needs of visitors and provide extensive services and activities to accommodate the varying expectations and experiences. There are sites, activities, and provisions that each individual park offers. To this end, the U.S. national park service publishes a guide that lists every U.S. park and its amenities.
In Kenya public agencies and private clubs advertise about the virtues of their national parks in order to attract foreign visitors. The following excerpt from a Newsweek advertisement describes a Kenyan park’s assets.
“Photographic safaris and mountain-climbing excursions are readily mounted from the club. Many visitors opt for land-cruiser drives to higher elevations where scenic canyons, bamboo forests and tempting trout streams abound, along with a broad variety of faund and flord—all within the protected and of Mt. Kenya national park.”
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Recreation, according to the
U.S. National Park Policy Statement
:
The Meaning of National Parks Today
, are a part of the national ethos.
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1. The parks are places where recreation reflects the aspirations of a free and independent people.
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2. The parks are an object lesson for a world of limited resources.
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3. The parks are great laboraties of successful natural communities.
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4. The parks are living memorials of human history on the American continent.
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Further, under the description of recreation in the policy statement, an explanation of the unique options that parks provide is detailed.
“They are places where no one else prepares entertainment for the visitor, predetermines his responses, or tells him what to do. In a national park the visitor is on his own, setting an agenda for himself, discovering what is interesting, going at his own pace. The parks provide a contrast to the familiar situation in which we are bored unless someone tells us how to fill out time.”
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Even though recreation was not a driving force at the inception of the national park movement in the U.S. the recreational role has increased over time for various reasons. Chief among them is that recreational activities refresh and rejuvenate both the mind and body. The values that reflective recreation can stimulate can have a positive impact on the individual and society. The preservationist Aldo Leopold observed that “ . . . there are cultural values in the sports, customs and experiences that renew contacts with wild things.” Ortega describes the power and value in hunting.
“For hunting is not simply casting blows right and left in order to kill animals or to catch them. The hunt is a series of technical operations, and for an activity to become technical it has to matter that it works in one particular way and not in another . . . It involves a complete set of ethics of the most distinguished design.”
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The recreational needs of urban dwellers, whether from poverty stricken urban centers or affluent suburbs has featured in the planning and development of the urban park concept. It was felt that the virtues of nature and all that it represented should be accessible to a greater number of people, especially those who lived in the metropolitan areas. Gateway National Recreation Area was designed to allow the people to experience a park in close proximity to their communities.
“To forge an effective link between the urban values systems that characterize communities in New York and New Jersey and the natural systems of Gateway . . . to dramatize for the public the gains which can accrue if swimming and shellfishing are enlarged.”
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The educational opportunities which a national park offers are varied. Learning, whether acquired from informal excursions or structured classroom laboratories will occur. There are so many lessons to be learned in park environs. The study of specific disciplines such as art, science, poetry, for instance, can be greatly enrich in the context of a park. What better way to study the symbiontic and conflicting ecological relationships than in their natural settings. Also, the aesthetic experiences of peace and tranquility can assist in placing life and its many facets in perspective.
Perhaps the ultimate value is life itself, and the study of national parks affords an excellent opportunity to observe, study, appreciate and preserve life. The commitment to the appreciation of animal and plant life was underscored in the establishment of Everglade National Park in 1934.
“For the first time a major national park would lack great waterfalls, preservationists accepted the protection of its native plants and animals alone as justification for Everglades National Parks.”
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The quality of human life can be enhanced by an appreciation of other life forms. To value the “richness” and power of life’s full compliments helps gives meaning to man’s existence.
Ecology, conservation, preservation, and environmentalism emerge from any serious discussion of national parks. In fact, not far from the surface of the rationale and debate for the creation of parks, is the notion that the land or space has some redeeming value that is worthy of sustaining. Even in the ‘worthless’ land position, that held that there was very little economic potential in the lands in question, thus they were worthless, one still observes that worthlessness did not mean valueless. John Conness argued cogently in the 1864 congressional debates on the Yosemite bill that there indeed was value in ‘so-called’ worthless land.
“ . . . This bill proposes to make a grant of certain premises located in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in the state of California, that are for all public purposes worthless, but which constitute, perhaps, some of the greatest wonders of the world”
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The concept of wilderness is associated with most parks. America’s wilderness heritage represents those areas that have been
designated as wilderness
such as Monomoy in Massachusetts,
proposed
wilderness
,
preserved
wilderness as is the case of Allagash River in Maine,
wilderness to be
which is the classification of the glaciers in Olympic National Park, and wilderness
battleground
as reflected in areas that are claimed by ranchers, timbermen, tourists, and lovers of wilderness. Much of America’s wilderness has vanished and it is imperative that both the public and private sectors undertake efforts to preserve and maintain the remaining areas.
Webster defines wilderness as, “an uncultivated, uninhabited region.” To ensure that such areas remain as part of the permanent American landscape. Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964. According to Congress, wilderness is “where the earth and its community of life are untrampled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. Standards of surveying and protecting the surviving pockets of an undeveloped America.”
Aldo Leopold in his essay “Wild life in American Culture,” made the following observation about the values that can be derived from the wilderness experience.
“Suffice it to say that by common consent of thinking people, there are cultural values in the sports, customs and experiences that renew contacts with wild things . . . for example, a boy scout has tanned a coon skin cap, and goes Daniel-Booning in the willow thicket bellow the tracks. He is reenacting American history . . . Again a farmer boy arrives in the school room reeking of muskrat; he has tended his traps before breakfast. He is reenacting the romance of the fur trade”
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Even though Connecticut does not yet have a national park with an abundance of wildlife, a student can still experience the feeling of wilderness in the state parks and in areas throughout Connecticut. The following description of the Connecticut Scenery.
“The lower reaches of the river are nearly as wild as the upper. Here its marshlands and salt flats hold the soup of life, where unnumbered species spawn and feed. Here, event at the height of day, when the 20th century American elsewhere hears the clangor of his changing country, there is no louder sound than bird song or the wind. These were the harmonies heard by the first humans to know Connecticut, and the Indians matched the poetry of nature when they called the river “The smile of God”
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Questions
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1. What specific observations led the Indians to name the Connecticut River, “The Smile of God”?
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2. What is meant by these metaphoric expressions?
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“Soup of Life”
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“Clangor of his Changing Country”
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“Harmonies heard by the first humans?”
Julliette Huxley visited many national parks in Africa. Below are excerpts from her experiences in one of Kenya’s National Parks, Amboseli. Her book entitled,
Wild Lives of Africa
allows the reader to vividly experience the parks in Africa.
A part of Amboseli has been touched by an Act of God: in 1958, after some tremors of Kilimanjaro, but with no other warning and no apparent reason, a spring of clear water rose out of the parched desert, and spilled itself upon the surprised soil. There was enough to overflow into a dry ravine, to fill its wide shallows and still to ripple on, to the delight of man and beast. We saw it that afternoon, with all its green rejoicings, its tall reeds and lush grasses. It had been adopted at once by small migrant birds and a multitude of waterbirds and waders and looked indeed as if it had been there for ever; so did that huge elephant, just across the running water.
There are many rhinos at Amboseli, for they flourish in its arid expanse varied with swamp and thorny bush. One is likely to meet them, single or in pairs, in odd places of the reserve. The males outline their territory with a trail of urine, and the females promenade their young actively, I imagine in order to educate them. Knowing themselves protected and safe in the Park, they have even grown accustomed to the public. Some, like Gladys and Gertie, became famous for their tolerance and their magnificent horns—until they fought a royal battle and Gertie’s was snapped off its pedestal. The rangers picked it up later, and showed it to us: it was thirty-nine inches long, compacted of bristly hairs with a subtle upward tilt at the end of its almost horizontal thrust. When we saw her, Gertie had begun to grow a new horn looking like an up-turned comma, as well as producing a son curiously born without external ears. We heard lately that poachers had killed her for that bit of horn.
Looking back on our voyage through all these varied and wonderful Parks and Wild Life Reserves, I see it as a pilgrimage to a former aspect of our world. It took us back a million years to a surviving pleistocene community, once the dominant climax of life before man—the splendid product of that miraculous process of existing and becoming, in and by which we live to-day.
It was an interdependent community organized to make the fullest use of its assets, balancing the risks with uncanny precision, fitting each species of plant and animal into its appropriate niche: all their separate patterns of behaviour directed towards common survival. And if, inevitably, individuals perished, the species and the communities to which they belonged continued to thrive and to survive.
Modern man, evolving slowly out of this stream of life, carries evolution’s most precious (and dangerous) gift of all: the gift of flexibility and invention. Emerging within this wild economy of nature, at first terrified by its forces and dangers, he soon learnt how to use his cunning and intelligence to master it, and too often, to destroy it. Looking at the magnificent wild creatures of Africa, I realised how easily these iron-clads, these pachyderms and these carnivores had become the victims of man the tool-maker.
Activities
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A.
Vocabulary
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1. expanse
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6. pilgrimage
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11. niche
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2. promenade
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7. pleistocene
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12. pachyderms
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3. pedestal
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8. climax
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4. subtle
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9. interdependent
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5. external
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10. uncanny
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B.
Questions on Juliette Huxley in Africa
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1. Why do rhinos flourish in Amboseli National Park?
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2. Why do you think national parks have on animals?
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3. What influence do you think national parks have on animals?
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4. How was the community interdependent?
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5. How are flexibility and invention dangerous to the park’s environment?
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6. In what ways are rhinos similar to human beings?
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7. How are the poachers killing off the rhinos population?
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8. How do you think Ms. Huxley felt when she returned to the national parks?
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9. Why is man undermining the wildlife in Africa?
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10. If the animals are destroyed, what will happen to the ecosystem?
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11. Why is man revolving around the term “invention”?
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12. What can the world community do to protect Africa’s wildlife?
The poems below communicate many of the thoughts on animals. Read each poem and reflect on the poets interpretations on hunting and animals.
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Animals
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I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained;
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I stand and look at them long and long.
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They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
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They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
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They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
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Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
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Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
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Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.
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Walt Whitman
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From Meeting
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Over the grass a hedgehog came
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Questing the air for scents of food
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And the cracked twig of danger.
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He shuffled near in the gloom. Then stopped.
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He was aware of me. I went up,
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Bent low to look at him, and saw
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His coat of lances pointing to my hand.
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What could I do
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To show I was no enemy?
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I turned him over, inspected his small clenched paws,
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His eyes expressionless as glass,
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And did not know how I could speak,
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By tongue or touch the language of a friend.
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Clifford Dyment
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Sport
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Hunters, hunters
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Follow the Chase.
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I saw the Fox’s eyes,
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Not in his face
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But on it, big with fright -
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Haste, hunters, hasted!
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Say, hunters, say
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Is it a noble sport?
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As rats that bite
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Babies in cradles, so,
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Such rats and men
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Take their delight.
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W. H. Davies
Poets Reflections
Walt Whitman “Animals”
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1. Why do you think animals are described as placid and self-contained?
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2. What can be learned from prolonged observations of animals?
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3. How can “man” be certain that animals do not complain about their condition?
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4. Do you think that animals have possessive traits like man?
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5. What do you think Whitman means in saying that animals are not respectable or industrious?
Clifford Dyment “From Meeting”
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1. Why is a cracked twig associated with danger?
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2. Do animals have a better sensory perception than man?
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3. How can man demonstrate friendship towards animals?
W. H. Davies “Sport”
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1. What is the relationship between rats and men?
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2. Why is both man and animals the predator?
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3. Is hunting a noble sport?