The Rocky Mountain Wonderland — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Rocky Mountain Wonderland
John Stuart Mill · en
"It is a beneficial use to the weary that they, ailing and feeble, can
have the wild beauties of Nature placed at their convenient disposal.
Is a piece of canvas valuable only for a tentfly, but worthless as a
painting? Is a block of stone beneficially used when put into the
walls of a dam, and not beneficially used when carved into a piece of
statuary? Is the test dollars, or has beauty of scenery, rest,
recreation, health and enjoyment something to do with it? Is there no
beneficial use except that which is purely commercial?" This decision
is epoch-marking.
Taken as a whole, our National Parks and Monuments and our unreserved
scenic places may be described as an undeveloped scenic resource of
enormous potential value. These places should be developed as parks
and their resources used exclusively for recreation purposes. Thus
used, they would help all interests and reach all people. South
America, Switzerland, Canada, and other countries are making
intensified and splendid use of their parks by reserving that wild
scenic beauty which appeals to all the world.
Parks are dedicated to the highest uses. They are worthy of our
greatest attentions. It is of utmost importance that the management of
Forest Reserves and the National Parks be separate. In 1897 the
National Academy of Sciences in submitting a plan for the management
of the Forest Reserves recommended that places specially scenic be
separated from the Forest Reserves and set aside as Parks and given
the separate and special administration which parks need. If scenery
is to be saved, it must be saved for its own sake, on its own merits;
it cannot be saved as something incidental.
Multitudes will annually visit these places, provided they be
developed as parks and used for people and for nothing else. Grazing,
lumbering, shooting, and other commercial, conflicting, and
disfiguring uses should be rigidly prohibited. Scenery, like beauty,
has superior merit, and its supreme use is by people for rest and
recreation purposes.
Switzerland after long experience is establishing National Parks and
giving these a separate and distinct management from her forest
reserves. For a time Canadian National Parks were managed by the
Forest Service. Recently, however, the parks were withdrawn from the
Forest Service and placed in a Park Department. This was a most
beneficial change. Forestry is commercial, radically utilitarian. The
forester is a man with an axe. Trees to the forester mean what cattle
do to the butcher. Lumber is his product and to recite "Woodman, Spare
that Tree!" to a forester would be like asking the butcher to spare
the ox. The forester is a scientific slaughterer of the forest; he
must keep trees falling in order to supply lumber. A forester is not
concerned with the conservation of scenery. Then, too, a forester
builds his roads to facilitate logging and lumbering. The Park man
builds roads that are scenic highways, places for people.