In Public Lands is the Preservation of the Republic

[Bayard]

ON JUNE 30, 1864, Abraham Lincoln sat at his worktable, with its view of the half-finished Washington Monument and the Potomac River, and went through his daily routine of paperwork and correspondence. There were many issues to occupy the president's mind. The Union army had recently been walloped in the Battle of the Wilderness, Congress was debating a sweeping Reconstruction Act, and he had just dismissed his conniving treasury secretary. Among the minor matters on Lincoln's desk was a bill that Congress had just passed with scant debate, the Yosemite Park Act. The law promised to preserve for common enjoyment "the 'Cleft' or 'Gorge' in the Granite Peak of the Sierra Nevada Mountains … known as the Yosemite Valley" along with the "Mariposa Big Tree Grove" of sequoias. Some 38,000 acres would be "held for public use, resort, and recreation … inalienable for all time." The president put his pen to paper and brought into being the first landscape-scale public park in history.

It wasn't until the Civil War was over that anyone understood the significance of what had happened. The first person to figure it out was Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of New York City's Central Park. Olmsted had been appointed the chair of the Yosemite Commission, which Congress had created to manage the new park. In August 1865, Olmsted and the other commissioners met in Yosemite Valley, where, at a campsite close to the base of Yosemite Falls, he read aloud his draft report about how best to steward the place. The report—most of which was a celebration of the benefits of time in nature—included one of the first arguments of the public lands ideal. Olmsted said that the wealthy had always seized for themselves the best places: "The enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes in the country and the means of recreation connected with them is thus a monopoly, in a very peculiar manner, of a very few, very rich people." It was the duty of a republican government, he argued, to safeguard some natural treasures for the benefit of all: "For the same reason that the water of rivers should be guarded against private appropriation . . . portions of natural scenery may therefore properly [be] guarded and cared for by government . . . [to be] laid open to the use of the people." Olmsted marveled that such an accomplishment had occurred "during one of the darkest hours" in the country's history.

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2020-4-july-august/feature/public-lands-preservation-republic?utm_source=insider&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

A long read, but well worth it.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. That first paragraph is beautiful. . . . nt