The National Parks have been called “America’s best idea.” Millions of people visit each year. Many associate the parks with “untrammeled wilderness.” This idea is not accurate as Indigenous Americans lived in and utilized the resources in what are now National Parks for millennia. Author Mark Spence argues that “uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved, and this type of landscape became reified in the first national parks.” What does he mean by this? How did the federal government, through the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service “create” uninhabited wilderness? Your response should include examples from all three parks he studies.
