In recent years, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most important voices in arguing for the transnationalization of US history, and his wonderful (and to my mind underappreciated) book, True Gardens of the Gods, is a model transnational environmental history.Footnote ¹ So it seems only appropriate that Tyrrell should tackle the necessary task of nesting the early history of the US national parks in a transnational context. As Tyrrell rightly points out, early historical scholarship on the US national parks was often an insular and Whiggish affair beholden to a notion of the United States as “nature's nation.” More recently, the American public has had to confront the continuing narrative power of national parks exceptionalism in Ken Burns's lengthy documentary film, The National Parks: America's Best Idea.Footnote ² Burns's subtitle, adapted from a Wallace Stegner quote, states the central claim of the documentary as well as Tyrrell's central target in his essay: that the national park idea was born fully formed in the United States and then packaged neatly for export. If one of the most compelling achievements of transnational US historiography has been to challenge narratives of American exceptionalism, then the US national parks, as an exceptionalist redoubt, certainly deserve the transnational treatment that Tyrrell has given them.

Tyrrell's essay makes several important arguments. First, he demonstrates that early efforts to construct and enact the national park ideal in the US were more confused and multivalent than the “America's best idea” narrative has allowed. We learn that Yellowstone was a “national” park by accident, and that “the United States provided no model for global diffusion of the idea.” Indeed, Tyrrell rightly asks why, if the national parks were such a great national idea, it took several decades to build support for a US National Park Service that could lend some policy coherence to the US system. Moreover, Tyrrell observes that while the US park effort struggled to hang together in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several other nations – Australia, Canada, and Sweden most notably – developed national parks, national park systems, and national park administrations of their own, and often in ways that reflected little, if any, US influence. Indeed, sometimes, as in the case of Canada, some of the influence flowed into the US. Finally, to put the nail in the coffin of the US invention-and-dissemination model, at least for this early period, Tyrrell presents the curious case of Bailey Willis, a US consultant who worked with Argentina on a mixed-use model for national park preservation quite different from the national park “idea” as Americans commonly understand it. Tyrrell's point in his essay is not to claim intellectual primacy for some other nation, thus replacing one chauvinistic history with another; rather, it is to suggest that there was no single or central national park idea during this period, that national park concepts developed incrementally as part of a larger transnational circulation of ideas and expertise, and that these transnational discussions about nature preservation were important to national park developments in many places, even if the results were distinctively national – and nationalist – institutions.

Having established this context, Tyrrell then devotes the last two-thirds of his essay to a case study of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (ASHPS) to demonstrate that some important dimensions of American national park advocacy emerged in the context of transatlantic exchange. Several things strike Tyrrell as notable about the ASHPS. First, its combined advocacy for scenic and historic preservation mimicked European models of preservation. Second, the ASHPS worked directly with British groups such as the National Trust on projects of transatlantic importance, and they were keenly aware of, and sometimes in dialogue with, other preservationist efforts around the globe. Finally, while the ASHPS came to support national parks in the US, they did not do so because they recognized them as uniquely American manifestations of the highest form of nature preservation. Rather, they saw American national parks as one variant in a global field, and they worked for their protection as one part of a diverse conservation agenda. The ASHPS, in short, practiced a cosmopolitan conservation that valued what Tyrrell calls “the complementarity of nature and culture.” And while he never quite says it, one implication of Tyrrell's focus on this group, which has received little attention in US national parks scholarship, is that the traditional exceptionalist narrative has had a hard time making sense of them. Thinking about the creation of the US national parks in a transnational context, then, allows Tyrrell to highlight ignored strands of environmental advocacy in the US that complicate narratives of national parks exceptionalism.

In all of the above ways, Tyrrell has provided readers with a thoughtful corrective, and a blueprint for what I hope will be a larger project on the transnational history of national parks. His essay convincingly suggests that such a narrative is needed.

But in my several readings of Tyrrell's essay, I have been troubled by his historiographical framing of the problem, which is dated, and by unexamined assumptions about wilderness that he brings to his analysis of the US narrative. Tyrrell begins his essay by invoking Roderick Nash and Alfred Runte, two eminent historians of US national parks and wilderness whose scholarship is nonetheless decades old, and he then jumps to Ken Burns and Douglas Brinkley, two recent popularizers whose work does not reflect the scholarly state of the art in the US. Tyrrell is correct that many Americans still entertain the exceptionalist narrative that national parks were America's gift to the world, and he is also correct that we do not have a recent scholarly synthesis of US national parks history that takes on that exceptionalist narrative (though he might have given more attention to Richard West Sellars's Preserving Nature in the National Parks, which, to my mind, has supplanted Runte's book as the best comprehensive history of the US national parks).Footnote ³ To the degree that both of those contentions are true, Tyrrell can defend his assertion that the old “narrative remains largely intact.” But Tyrrell reaches this conclusion through something of a bait and switch, for by initially focussing on Nash and Runte, and then Brinkley and Burns, he sidesteps the important question of how US academic environmental historians today think about the history of the national parks. The quick answer to that question is that they have, respectfully, left Nash and Runte in the dust. Indeed, they have been quite critical of the US national parks and wilderness in ways that often challenge the exceptionalist narrative that is Tyrrell's target – they have recognized the parks as institutions that have dispossessed Native Americans; as places where the needs of urban elites displaced and even criminalized those of rural subsistence users; and as spaces of tourism, consumption, and cultural construction. While Tyrrell does briefly recognize some of this scholarship, it comes only as a quick exception to the supposedly still-reigning narrative. To me, it seems more like the rule.

Tyrrell is closer to the mark in his critique of US national parks scholarship as still contained by the nation, but even here it is worth recognizing the transnational influences that have shunted scholarship on US conservation in more critical directions – influences from scholars of imperial conservation efforts, for instance, and even from those like Tyrrell himself, who have pointed out that conservation was a global impulse in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It is true that this transnational scholarship has focussed more on utilitarian conservation efforts such forestry, soil conservation, and water development than on national parks, but the transnational impulse has been quite strong in the US conservation historiography in recent years. Harkening back to Nash and Runte obscures much of that scholarship. Moreover, the relative absence of synthetic historical treatments of the US national parks in the last couple of decades ought not to be read as evidence that US environmental historians still agree with Nash and Runte, as Tyrrell's essay implies. Rather, it is a result of US environmental historians wanting to get away from national parks- and wilderness-centered scholarship, and to move their analytical attention into the landscapes where we live.Footnote ⁴ Relying on Nash and Runte as his traditional narrative touchstones, then, caricatures the current state of thought among US environmental historians.

US environmental historians also have recognized the kind of complexity and contingency that Tyrrell finds in the advocacy of groups such as the ASHPS, even if we have been less successful than Tyrrell is here at putting it in a transnational context. We now realize that the stark dividing lines elicited by the Hetch Hetchy conflict were far too simplistic, and that most environmental thinkers of the era easily held to multiple conservation ideals.Footnote ⁵ And we also know that these conservationists traveled and learned from other peoples and places – we know that Gifford Pinchot was trained in European forestry methods that were heavily influenced by imperial practice, and that John Muir was a Scottish immigrant who was inspired by Humboldt, yearned to see the tropics, and practiced horticulture for most of his adult life.Footnote ⁶ To the extent, then, that Tyrrell uses the ASHPS to demonstrate that preservationist sentiment in the US during the Progressive era went well beyond the wilderness purism that allegedly came to embody US national parks exceptionalism, I think he is telling US environmental historians something we already well know.

I also wonder whether the creation of the National Park Service was a watershed moment that “institutionalized” this exceptionalist wilderness national park narrative, as Tyrrell intimates. Certainly there were American ideologues associated with the National Park Service who celebrated the wilderness qualities of the large western parks, who deployed a “See America First” logic that was decidedly nationalistic, and who gave intellectual coherence to the national park idea as never before.Footnote ⁷ As such, this moment stood in marked contrast to the first several decades of US national park history. But the national parks were still evolving, and they were still more defined by their scenery than by wilderness in the half-century after the creation of the National Park Service – here Runte's notion of “monumentalism” as a defining quality of the US national parks still seems on the mark. To the extent that Tyrrell assumes a wilderness park ideal after 1916, he misses all of the ways in which emergent wilderness advocacy in the US was hostile to the national parks as places too beholden to tourist development and consumerist recreation. Indeed, wilderness was an ideal much more at home in the US national forests, and most of the early and important wilderness advocates were foresters who saw wilderness protection and utilitarian conservation as complementary.Footnote ⁸ More than that, the US National Park Service has, since the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, often been outright hostile to wilderness designation on its lands. So when Tyrrell refers to a “wilderness ethic” and “wilderness national parks” in his descriptions of the essence of American national park exceptionalism, he glosses over the complex history of the wilderness idea and wilderness policy in the US setting – and particularly within and in relation to the national parks.Footnote ⁹ Wilderness has itself been a changing ideal, it has never nested cleanly or simply within the national parks, and many of its most avid proponents have been complicated thinkers willing to advocate for and countenance all kinds of conservation and preservation.Footnote ¹⁰

Another point worth noting here is that the interwar years saw the National Park Service take control of historic and civic monuments in ways that also complicated “the primacy of wilderness in American motives,” to use Tyrrell's phrasing. There were some who saw these additions as tarnishing the crown jewels of the system, but others were fine with the combination – a combination that the ASHPS would have been quite at home with. In other words, the national park idea in the US continued to be a complex and contingent one for the half-century after the creation of the National Park Service, with an ambiguous relationship to wilderness. Indeed, I am not sure, despite the seeming dominance of what Tyrrell assumes to be a traditional wilderness narrative, that the national park idea in the US has ever been particularly stable, even if Americans have sometimes celebrated it as if it was. Today the system is incredibly diverse in its holdings.

All of this begs a question that falls outside the purview of Tyrrell's essay but is nonetheless critical to it: just when did this narrative of “wilderness national parks as America's gift to the world” come into being, and how long did it hold sway among academics? This is a complicated question to answer. Certainly the impulse had deep roots, but my inclination would be to focus on the era between the 1950s and the 1970s. Several factors contributed to this period of what we might call exceptionalist consensus. First, federal utilitarian conservation agencies, emboldened by Cold War producerism, began to run amok, spurring several conservation–preservation battles that seemed a lot like Hetch Hetchy and the solidification of a preservationist movement increasingly dedicated to wilderness values. Indeed, it was in this postwar context that Hetch Hetchy came to seem so iconic, and that John Muir became a true national environmental hero. Second, a major managerial reappraisal of the national parks in the midst of Mission 66 modernization redefined them as spaces that ought to resemble “vignettes of primitive America,” to quote from the Leopold Report of 1963. It was at this moment, just as the Wilderness Act was coming to fruition, that the wilderness national park ideal was strongest – even if the Park Service itself was hostile to wilderness designation within its bounds. Third, this period saw the growth of development as a US internationalist imperative, and the national park ideal was often part of that export package – albeit a complicated and thus far understudied part.Footnote ¹¹ Finally, within the academy, consensus history and traditional American studies scholarship welded wild nature and American exceptionalism together in a narrative particularly befitting a moment of national environmental awakening. It is no mistake that Roderick Nash and his student, Alfred Runte – early environmental historians and scions of this older American-studies tradition – produced the national park and wilderness histories that they did when they did. This was still a moment when historians could talk about a singular “American mind,” a moment just before what Daniel Rodgers has recently dubbed the “age of fracture.”Footnote ¹² In that sense, we might best see the work of Nash and Runte not as reflections of the current state of US national parks historiography, but as primary sources of a sort. By the 1980s, this moment was quietly falling apart in a confluence of events with critical implications for this national park narrative – the end of the Cold War and the impetus it had given federal resource agencies to produce resources at all costs; the rise of environmental justice concerns, at home and abroad, and growing critiques of an environmentalism overly focussed on national parks and wilderness; the conservative backlash against environmental policies that had, only a decade or so earlier, passed through Congress with remarkable bipartisan consensus; and the insights of island biogeography, conservation biology, and a new ecology of stochasticity that, along with the Yellowstone fires of 1988 and the critical attention that came with the Columbian quincentennial, conspired to muddle the Leopold Report's presumption of a pre-Columbian ecological benchmark. So while in some quarters the “America's best idea” narrative still enjoys substantial popularity, in others it has been under serious and sustained challenge for decades. Here again, going back to Runte and Nash skips over all of these developments.

Ian Tyrrell's argument that the early American national park experience was “a variant on the transnational story of park creation” is an important and necessary intervention in US environmental historiography, and I applaud it. My concern, then, is not with what I take to be Tyrrell's major argument. Rather, his heavy reliance on dated foils – straw men, really – allows him to speak past a richer and more recent body of national parks and conservation scholarship in the US. In making his important argument about the “transnational creation of national space in the Progressive Era,” Tyrrell has gone back to the wrong historiography.