Reflections on environmental history with a human face: Experiences from a new national park

Environmental History, Oct 2003 by Diamant, Rolf

Building on this excellent work, a more contextual research agenda was developed. Three major essays were completed on conservation history: "A People of Progress: The Origins of Conservation in America, 1850-1930" by Robert Dorman of the University of New Mexico (1997); "Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park: Landscapes Of Stewardship" by Mark Madison, historian, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, National Conservation Training Center (1999); and "Frederick Billings: the Intellectual and Practical Influences on Forest Planting, 1823-1890," by Daniel Nadenicek of Clemson University (2003). In 2002, Robert L. McGrath of Dartmouth College completed a research study on "Art and the American Conservation Movement." McGrath's report provides an integrating context for tours of the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller Mansion and its nineteenth-century landscape art collection, by focusing on the influence of art and photography in the development of an American conservation ethic.

During my years at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, I learned the value of cultural landscape reports (which identify the landscape characteristics and related features, values, and associations that make a landscape historically significant) as an effective integrator of cultural and natural site information in an historical context-a useful management tool. The Conservation Study Institute and the University of Vermont completed a Cultural Landscape Report for the Forest at Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park (2000). The Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation, with support from the Woodstock Foundation, prepared a Cultural Landscape Report for the Mansion Grounds (2003). A Historic American Engineering Record team came to the park in 2001 to document the carriage road system for the Library of Congress. The following year the park was selected for the first Historic American Landscape Survey in the National Park Service. An international team of young landscape architects prepared eighteen sheets of measured drawings and supporting photographs documenting the park's gardens and forests.

In the spirit of George Perkins Marsh's global perspective, the research program has crossed the Atlantic. Gil Latz, professor of geography at Portland State University, is directing a Fulbright research project (facilitated by Forest History Society President Steve Anderson), making a comparative study of the land-use history and sustainable forest management of two places with strong common interests, MBRNHP and the estate of Spannocchia, part of the Italian park system's Riserva Naturale Alto Merse. This is a component of a larger program of international cooperation between the National Park Service and the national and regional parks of Italy-focusing on sustainable tourism, education, and stewardship. Building on this exchange of information and experiences between the United States and Italy, Parco Regionale dei Monti Simbruini recently has begun work on an Italian Conservation Study Institute.