Viewpoints Creating national parks - ‘a grand, good thing?’ Peter Donnelly of McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, discusses some unintended consequences of creating national and countryside parks. The poor representation of the general public in decision making and determination of appropriate use of parks, coupled with the distinction between publicly-owned and privately-owned land, means that untrammelled countryside recreation becomes the prerogative of the wealthy.

During an attempt to determine if recent theoretical advances regarding the origins of urban parks and play- grounds could be applied to increase our understanding of national and countryside parks, it became apparent that there were a number of parallels, and some similar unintended consequ- ences.

Hardy and Ingham have recently shown that, rather than an attempt by moral reformers to improve the lot of the urban poor, or a more cynical attempt at social control with the effect of co-opting the urban poor into the capitalist system of labour, the reasons for the formation of urban parks and playgrounds are rather more complicated.’ While both of these views have a great deal of validity and are well supported by the historical record, both also deny any voice to the urban poor themselves. Recent evidence from Canada, the USA, and the UK indicates that there was a demand for recreational space in urban environments during the latter half of the 19th century, and that this demand was often led by the urban poor. Thus, recreational space in the inner cities was not given to the poor, but rather struggled and fought for in cooperation with some middle class reforming interests, and against a coalition of middle and upper class interests who were, for a variety of reasons, against the provision of play space. But the space was won at the price of incorporation into a super- vised system of recreation where the forms of leisure practice were strictly determined.

When these theses are applied to the formation of the national/ provincial/state/countryside parks in the same countries, they appear to have little relevance, particularly in North America. American national parks appear to have resulted, in part, from ideas concerning ‘monumental- ism’ and cultural inferiority, while the first Canadian national parks were developed for the commercial ex- ploitation of tourism.’ Only in Eng- land is there any evidence of popular demand and popular protest resulting in the eventual formation of the En- glish and Welsh national parks.3 However, with the development of these parks in the 19.50s and the rapidly growing popularity of the American and Canadian parks since World War II, the parallels with urban parks and the unintended consequ- ences of their formation are apparent.

As with urban parks, national parks may be likened to a double-edged sword. The presence of both is by far preferable to their absence, but both involve costs in terms of the accept- ance of controls. Parks are, by their very nature, spatially restricted areas within the boundaries of which there are fairly precise definitions as to what is appropriate behaviour, and the means to ensure that those behaviou- ral parameters are maintained. Since Bourdieu has suggested that ‘sporting (and leisure) practice is the site of struggles in which what is at stake, inter alia, is the monopolistic capacity to impose the legitimate definition of sporting practice’, it becomes reason- able to ask who defines appropriate

behaviour in national parks, and in whose interests are these definitions made?4

The situation in national parks in Canada, England and Wales, and the USA becomes similar at this point. All three systems:

impose restrictions on access; act to control and limit the be- haviour of park users; exist under constant threat from business interests and the govern- ments that established them; and have the added burden of attempt- ing to combine conservation/ preservation with recreation (and, in the case of parks in England and Wales, with the continuing practice of farming).

Access restrictions The amount of policing in order to restrict access may vary from country to country, and sometimes from park to park. But whether the individuals involved are called rangers or war- dens, their principle functions involve the restriction of access and the con- trol and limitation of behaviour. Pri- marily, access is restricted to various types of motorized ‘off-road’ vehicles such as motorcycles, dune buggies, jeeps and trucks, and snow-mobiles. Also access may be limited to partici- pants in various adventure sports, whether it be to require a permit or enforce a sign-in/sign-out policy for rock and mountain climbing in various parks in the USA, or outright bans on such things as hang gliding and para- chuting off cliffs. Access may be li- mited to certain sensitive natural areas, eg caves, nesting sites, or the location of rare botanical specimens, or to certain campsites, heavily used trails, and scenic spots, and to vehicu- lar traffic on certain roads. Park offi- cials tend to use societal stereotypes in making their social definitions about appropriate park users, eg a motorcy-

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de gang will tend to receive much closer scrutiny than a school party even if both are engaging in exactly the same types of behaviour.

Controls and limits In terms of controls and limits on the behaviour of park users, middle class norms prevail by rules that often constrain working class users. By for- bidding the cutting of wood, picking flowers, the use of trail bikes and snowmobiles, beer drinking and noisy parties with loud music, the social definitions of appropriate use may be seen in terms of class. Parks are areas for environmental conservation in which the norms of behaviour are quiet, non-intrusive, recreational (within limits), and educational.5 In addition, the source of these defini- tions is often precisely the type of individual for whom alternative forms of countryside recreation are readily available. In other words, the rules are not created by the mass of working and middle-class park users, for whom national and countryside parks repre- sent the only form of access to natural areas, but usually by the middle and upper classes and landowners who are readily able to avoid the rules in other settings on privately held land and at country houses or cottages, etc. For example, one may use a motor boat on a private lake, hunt on private land (or have access to hunting rights on public land), cut wood and pick flowers in private woodland, and engage in a whole variety of behaviour that may be precluded in national parks. Such individuals may also be the principle benefactors of the noisy, intrusive and commercial exploitation of the large tracts of land that they have not defined as parks (clear-cut logging, strip mining, and the new agri- business type of rationalized farming). This situation is exacerbated by the internal conflict created by the attempts to impose dual use on parks, namely, recreation and conservation.

Although the original parks created in the USA and Canada benefited from their remoteness and the fact that the land was considered to be worthless, subsequent discoveries and greater access have brought the water,

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forests and geological deposits in the parks under threat. The popularity of the parks has resulted in similar threats from the tourist industry and governments. For example, President Reagan’s original Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, was so con- troversial in his schemes to make public lands more profitable in the USA that environmental lobbies were somewhat instrumental in engineering his departure. Similarly, on 5 June 198.5, Mme BlC-Grenier, then Minis- ter of State for the Environment in Brian Mulroney’s Conservative gov- ernment in Canada, announced that Canada’s national parks were not im- mune to the possibility of develop- ment with mining and forestry (she has also since resigned). This followed a number of suggestions for such things as water slides in Banff, and other strange and wonderful schemes in order to render the parks profit- able. Even the relatively tiny national parks in England and Wales have been reduced further by various schemes such as Trawsfynedd, Milford Haven, Fylingdales, and most recently, the Okehampton bypass. Even within parks, such things as the reclamation of moorland by farmers has drastically reduced the amount of natural coun- tryside available to visitors.

Contradictory objectives The parks run into constant problems of attempting to meet their two, often contradictory, objectives - recreation and conservation (and agricultural practice in the case of England and Wales). Recreation lobbyists want to increase park use, while conservation- ists would be most happy if park use was restricted to only a few of their number. And even among recreation- al users there is constant concern about the over-use of parks destroying ‘the wilderness experience’ (the idea of queueing up for rock climbs in Snowdonia, the Peak District and the Lakes would have been unthinkable in the 1950s but is all too common now). While there has normally been a somewhat tentative balance between the two interests, the commercial pressures noted previously are result- ing in the noisy, smelly and intrusive

use of the wilderness by the wealthy for such recreational pursuits as heli- skiing, heli-hunting and fishing, and the latest abomination, heli-hiking.

‘A grand, good thing?’ There is a two-fold paradox involved in the creation of national and coun- tryside parks. First, the parks have protected some wonderful stretches of scenic country from exploitation and development and preserved them for public pleasure, but, they have also constrained and limited the forms of that pleasure, partly for reasons of conservation (the ‘museumification’ of countryside) but also because the de- finitions of appropriate use are being made for, and not by the users. Second, the original intent of the popular protest in England during the 1930s was to challenge some aspects of the ownership of private property in order to regain access to the country- side. But the creation of parks has, in each of the countries under considera- tion, served to confirm the rights of private ownership of large areas of uncultivated mountains, moorland and forest. Certain freedoms of access and movement exist within the parks, but parks, by implication, have boundaries at which those freedoms cease to exist. Thus parks, by provid- ing some relatively free space, con- firmed the right of similar private space to exist. And there is still a situation in the UK whereby a re- latively few individuals are able to consolidate large tracts of non- agricultural or rough grazing land, and to determine that the appropriate leisure use of that land is for a short period of game hunting each year.

In current thinking, the idea of parks appears to make complete com- mon sense both to those who benefit most by retaining their exclusive prop- erty rights, and those whose freedom is curtailed by the creation and regula- tion of parks. The success of the hegemony is such that no alternatives have been allowed to enter the agen- da. The divisive debate between re- creational groups, and between them and conservationists, smacks of elitism (ie whose claim to park use is more legitimate - the long-term rambler or

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Viewpoints

tion and Health; Glasgow, Scotland, 18-23 July, 1986.

‘S. Hardy and A.G. Ingham, ‘Games, structure and agency: historians and the American play movement’. Journal of So- cial History, Vol 17, 1983, pp 285-301. The critical view of parks was a response to the philanthropic view, which still has a great many adherents. 2Among the many sources on the founding of national parks in the USA and Canada, the following are useful and readable: S. Marty, A Grand and Fabulous Notion: The First Century of Canada’s Parks, NC Press, Toronto, Canada, 1984; and J.L. Sax, Mountains Without Handrails, Reflec- tions on the National Parks, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1980. 3P. Donnelly, ‘The paradox of parks: poli- tics of recreational land use before and after the mass trespasses’, Leisure Stu- dies, Vol 5, 1986, pp 211-231. 4P. Bourdieu, ‘Sport and social class’, Social Science Information, Vol 17, 1978, 819-840. 5Dower created this type of social defini- tion as early as 1945: ‘One restriction on the type and volume of visitors is indeed desirable . namely, that those who come to national parks should be such as wish to enjoy and cherish the beauty and quiet of unspoilt country and to take their recrea- tion, active or passive, in ways that do not impair the beauty or quietude, nor spoil the enjoyment of them by others For all who want to spend their holidays gregar- iously . national parks are not the place.’ J. Dower, National Parks in England and Wales, Cmnd. 6628, HMSO, UK, 1945. 6M. Shoard, ‘Recreation: the people’s countryside’. New Statesman, 23 April 1982, pp 6-8. ‘F.L. Olmstead, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, USA, 1967.

the school trip, the fisherman or the ecologist?), but accepts parks as a fait accompli and does not consider alternatives.

The first Access to Mountains Bill introduced before the British Parlia- ment in 1884 contained a key clause that became the nucleus of protest for the next 50 years: ‘. . . no owner or occupier of uncultivated mountains or moorland shall be entitled to exclude any person from walking or being on such land for the purpose of recreation or artistic study, or to molest him in so walking or being’. Access to Moun- tains Bills containing similar clauses were defeated 10 times in the years between 1884 and 1934 - clearly the premise was unacceptable to the land- owning lobby. By the time that the access movement culminated in the mass trespasses of the 193Os, working- class protesters and even conservative and middle-class rambling clubs were lobbying for free access to all land above 1000 feet. But there is an even more radical alternative:

‘Allemansriitten’, or ‘Everyman’s Right’, gives all Swedish citizens the right to walk freely in the countryside. Fields, woods, lakes and private roads and paths are open to all unless damage might result (for instance to crops or growing trees) or privacy might be infringed (for instance on land around a house). To prevent any disturbance to game, dogs have to be kept on a lead. Penalties, for leaving litter range up to six months imprisonment.”

When Frederick Law Olmstead, the American who designed Central Park in New York, USA, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Canada, and par- tially rescued Niagara Falls from com- mercial despoliation, first saw Birken- head Park in Birkenhead, UK in 1850 he wrote that the park was: ‘entirely, unreservedly, and for ever, the peo- ple’s own. The poorest British peasant is as free to enjoy it in all its parts as the British queen . . . Is it not a grand, good thing?‘7 But is the creation of parks a grand, good thing?

Given the alternative between parks and no parks/no access, it clearly is. It is important to preserve grand scenery from exploitation and make it available to all, and it is important to practice conservation and good en- vironmental procedures - but not just

in the parks. Parks cease to be a grand, good thing when:

they are used to constrain the leisure practices of users; they practice regulation without widespread education; conservation in the parks is an apparent justification for the lack of it outside of the park bound- aries; and they serve to confirm the rights of private property beyond concerns of privacy and possible damage.

is not a historical coincidence that strong access movements appear to coincide with periods of mass unem- ployment, and it is a truism that strong movements meet with strong resist- ance, as evidenced in the UK by the extension of the trespass law and the continuing disappearance of foot- paths. It is an appropriate time to consider alternative forms of access.

Peter Donnelly Associate Professor School of

Physical Education and Department of Sociology

McMaster University 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton,

Ontario L8S 4K1, Canada

Notes: This is a shortened and revised version of a paper presented at the Vllth Common- wealth and International Conference on Sport, Physical Education, Dance, Recrea-

Enlightened management technique Chris Cooper, of Surrey University’s Department of Management Studies for Tourism and Hotel Industries, describes the uses and significance of the technique of interpretation in providing an interface between the tourist destination and the visitor. Interpretation can enhance the visitor experience by making the attributes of the resort more comprehensible.

Tourist destinations must make the tive display of information in the form visitor aware of their importance, of trails, signboards, visitor centres, significance, and major features by and audio-visual media to enhance effective presentation. Interpretation and shape visitors’ experiences and provides this service by the imagina- bring the destination to life. Inter-

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