The world's first national park
An idea America exported — with a flaw built in
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A national park is an area the state protects from development and keeps open to everyone, and the idea did not exist before Yellowstone. The wilderness concept written into the model presumed a landscape without people, and that was a historical error: North America's ecosystems were shaped by management, especially controlled burning, over millennia. The absence of that burning is a contributing cause of today's wildfire regime in the western United States. The model was exported to Africa and Asia with the same assumption built in, and displacements followed there too. Park management has since the 1990s gradually brought Indigenous fire practices back into use.
For children
The United States protected Yellowstone in 1872, the first area in the world set aside as a national park. The idea spread worldwide. But the park was created as "untouched wilderness", and the peoples who had used the area for thousands of years were driven out.
Sources
- Yellowstone National Park Protection Act (1872)
- Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness (1999)
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