The Largest Tree on Earth: Economic Success and Ecological Failure in America's National Parks

• In Event: 046 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 13. Environmental Concern and Worldviews

Abstract

Ever since John Muir visited in the 1870's, the giant sequoias of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountain range have been attracting tourists. Sequoia and King's Canyon National Park, home to the Giant Forest, which contains five out of ten of the world's largest trees, attracts more than 1.5 million visitors a year. While it is usually treated as self-evident, the goal of this paper is to understand why so many people are willing to travel so far just to see these particular trees, and how the experience of visiting them generates ways of thinking about environmental issues. Data for this project was gathered on-site, and consisted of both a visual record of the area and its ecosystem, official material produced by the National Park Service, and a series of interviews with visitors and employees of the park. The results suggest that the trees preserved in the parks are seen as uncritically sacred, and that the experience of visiting them reinforces a dualistic understanding of nature and society. The park encourages tourists to treat socially constructed places like the Giant Forest as “natural,” where nature is defined by its separation from human activity. This way of thinking about trees is problematic, because when the tree is worshiped, uncritically, as a balm for all the ills of the modern world, it denies ecological thinking and transforms nature into a commodity and the forest into a place of privilege.

Author

• Neil P. Dryden, Santa Barbara City College