Lecture 29 Wednesday April 6, 2005

Olmsted and Environmental Restoration, continued

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Announcements:

(1)           Exams handed back Monday

(2)          No extra reading likely in Week 12 of the syllabus

 

I. Olmsted and Niagara, continued

From last time: Annie Edson Taylor and other dare devils

e.g., Dave Munday

 

II. Olmsted and the Niagara Reservation

Olmsted’s 1879 report

Olmsted writes in the Report of the State Survey in 1879: “I have myself been an occasional visitor at Niagara for forty-five years. My attention was first called to the rapidly approaching ruin of its characteristic survey by Mr. F. E. Church, about ten years ago. Shortly afterwards, several gentlemen, frequenters of the Falls, met at my request, to consider this danger, one of them being the member of the Commission now reporting on the subject” (quoted in Charles Dow, The State Reservation at Niagara: A History, p. 12).

State reservation created in 1885, the same year as the creation of the Adirondack Forest Preserve.

Olmsted’s 1887 design report

 

III. Power development versus scenic preservation at Niagara Falls

Creation of the International Joint Commission through the signing of the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909.

Anne Whiston Spirn’s discussion of the 1926 and 1967 Niagara board activities.

 

IV. The study of 1967

American Falls

The International Joint Commission conclusion: “man should not interfere with the natural process” because the falls “are a reminder of man’s relationship with his environment. Indeed, this is the very essence of their attractiveness.”

To alter the falls “would be to create, on a grand scale, an artificial waterfall in a formal park. It would interfere with the geologic process and would be contrary to the recent emphasis on environmental values.”

 

[SLIDES FROM 1967, 1969, 1971]

 

Summary:

Spirn says to note the differences over time and summarizes thechanges: “Olmsted was working at a time when sublime landscapes like those of Niagara or Yosemite were seen as creations of God or nature; they could be framed but not constructed. The board of 1926 was working when such [huge] projects as the Grand Coulee Dam were being conceived as a progressive union of nature and culture, . . . a ‘manufactured sublime.’ By the 1960s people had the failed promise of Grand Coulee and all those other dams in the backs of their minds, along with the connections they represented to the development of technology and the atomic bomb and DDT as described by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring.”

 

V. Biltmore Estate, North Carolina

100,000 acres owned by George Vanderbilt, now part of Pisgah National Forest.

Pisgah National Forest is now 500,000 acres

Olmsted and Gifford Pinchot

 

Gifford Pinchot, (1893). Biltmore Forest (New York: Arno Press, 1970).