Guarding nature’s crown jewels

HUMANS have changed the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and all of its oceans. We impact on 83% of the world’s land and have permanently altered a third of it.

Another third will be changed within a century. To date, 911 World Heritage Sites and 580 Biosphere Reserves have been designated worldwide. About 13% of the land and 0.5% of the oceans are officially protected.

There are 7,000 national parks in 140 countries. In Crown Jewels; five great national parks around the world and the challenges they face, Randolph Delehanty, of the Presidio Trust San Francisco, has asked experts to write about six of them and the problems they face.

In 1872, Ulysses S. Grant established the world’s first national park at Yellowstone, Wyoming. Protection of scenic vistas, not wildlife, was the focus. Yellowstone’s million hectares includes half the world’s geothermal features and two-thirds of its geysers. Local people, whose ancestors had lived in Yellowstone for millennia, were moved to distant reservations. Wolves, mountain lions and coyotes were exterminated. Without hunters and animal predators, the elk population exploded and culling had to be introduced to protect the landscape. What appeared to be a pristine wilderness was, in many respects, a human creation, an eco-system moulded by people who used its plants and animals for food and clothing while living in equilibrium with the environment. It took decades for the national park concept to mature; wolves were not reintroduced to Yellowstone until 1995.

Tibet’s Chang Tang Nature Reserve is the size of Italy. George Schaller, who writes about it, drove for 1,500km across this high-altitude plateau without seeing another soul.

“We are children of the land, we are children of the forest” declared Davi Kopenawa, a shaman of the Yanomami people who live in the Orinoco-Casiquiare Biosphere Reserve.

Straddling the Venezuela-Brazil border, it’s the largest protected area in the southern hemisphere. Some tribal groups there have never encountered outsiders. The Yanomami, who may have arrived there soon after the Americas were colonised around 16,000 years ago, believe in equality and have no chiefs.

“Noble savage” sentiments don’t feature in the description of Italy’s Vesuvius National Park, the only European one featured in Crown Jewels. The great archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum are its main attractions. Mass tourism presents chronic problems. According to Delehanty, 2.4 million visitors “tramp through the fragile ruins” every year. These cultural islands, “within territories dominated by the Neapolitan crime syndicates”, are subject to political interference and commercial exploitation. Digging for artefacts to sell on the black market is an intractable problem. Archaeological sites are being damaged by quarrying operations and road construction in the Serengeti National Park, the cradle of mankind. Early hominid footprints, 3.6 million years old, were obliterated at one location. Anthropologist Celmara Pocock has an unusual take on the Great Barrier Reef, “the largest living thing on Earth”; her chapter is sub-titled National Parks, changes in perception and hyper-reality. In the past, she claims, visitors encountered the reef through sight, smell, taste and touch. Nowadays, experience of the reef is “shaped by media and technology, distancing visitors from unique Reef environments”. Enhanced and brilliant images “create a hyperreality in which the copies appear more wondrous then the real thing”.

In a concluding review, Delehanty quotes ecologist Frank Egler’s remark that “ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, they are more complex than we can think”. Preserving resources “unimpaired”, Delehanty argues, is no longer possible. We must select species to save and let others go the wall. A stimulating and thought-provoking book.

nCrown Jewels; five great national parks around the world and the challenges they face. Randolph Delehanty (editor). American Alliance of Museums Press. £35.