regard themselves as a pioneering people with an overabundance of wild
country"; this image is changing only slowly (Nelson, 1973). It is
true that the 1911 Dominion Forest Reserves and Parks Act was due partly to the growth of a pale version of the American Progressive Movement in Canada around the turn of the century, "influenced to an unknown degree" by the utilitarianism of Roosevelt and Pinchot (Brown, 1968; Nelson,
1973, 74-5). Furthermore a National Parks Association struggled for a
while in Calgary in 1923 (Nash, 1968). But the absence of a sustained
debate which did so much to stimulate the national parks movement in the
U.S.A. In the absence of a public movement, the government and tourist
interests were able to pursue their utilitarian policies of promoting the national parks as tourist attractions and health resorts unopposed, despite the injunction in the 1930 Act to leave the parks "unimpaired"
(Nicol, 1968). The 1930 legislation was largely a result of diffusion
of the American experience through official government-level contacts, rather than a response to indigenous public pressure.
In New Zealand a case can be made for the influence of public
pressure in the early history of national parks. Nevertheless, it was
not co-ordinated from one park to another and there was a complete absence of a coherent government policy for national parks, even a so
development-oriented one as existed in Canada. The Taranaki forest
conservation lobby, whose representations were largely responsible for the declaration of Egmont National Park in 1900 (Figure 3.3), were apparently without even informal ties with the Tongariro supporters; no parks "movement" emerged as such until after World War Two (Bardwell,
1974). Until at least the late 1920s, when the Public Reserves, Domains,
and National Parks Act (1928) was passed, both the New Zealand public 37 and Government paid far more attention to the country's scenic reserves
than to national parks. In his First World War review of the Scenery
Preservation Board, Under-Secretary of Lands James Mackenzie made a plea on behalf of scenic reserves that in North America (or New South Wales) would doubtless have been made on behalf of national parks when he wrote:
I would like to impress upon all concerned the necessity, wherever opportunity occurs, of securing while they exist as many as possible of the few remaining beauty spots of the Dominion, if for nothing else than preserving for the generations who follow, a few samples of the primeval scenery that existed in the country in the advent of European occupation (quoted in McCaskill, 1972b, 4). Although there was a pronounced aesthetic basis to this desire to
protect New Zealand scenery, it was mingled with more utilitarian moves to slow down the rate of alienation of Crown Land, and save some of what
remained for public recreation. Such a move was not only of utility in
promoting the health of the domestic population - demonstrating a
basis for the promotion of both domestic and international tourism - 38
parallelling the tourist promotions in North America (McCaskill, 1972b;
Bardwell, 1974, 90-1, 106).
Since 1945 both Canada and New Zealand have been overtaken by the growth in car ownership and income which has brought the once remote national parks within the range of the supposedly increasingly leisured
and mobile denizens of the expanding cities. These changes have
stimulated the public awareness of the relative scarcity of accessible open space and have also encouraged some public opinion leaders to form
the nucleus of national parks movements. However, these do not appear
to be as vociferous as their equivalents in the U.S.A., Britain, or even
Australia. At the same time, like so many other countries, Canada and
New Zealand have been encouraged to upgrade their national park policies by the increasing "internationalization" of the national parks movement at government level, fostered by agencies such as I.U.C.N., and the generally increased concern with the environment during the "ecological crisis".
In New Zealand increased concern with national parks was part of
plans for post-war reconstruction, as it was in Britain, though in this
case with a far greater concern with their tourist potential. Despite
this utilitarian, recreation oriented origin, the representations of preservationist pressure groups led to priority being afforded to nature
protection in the wording of the eventual Act. In 1945 the Tourist
Development Committee of the Organization for National Development appointed a sub-committee to report on the control and development of
national parks. Largely on the basis of a comprehensive report from
the Federated Mountain Clubs of New Zealand this sub-committee
recommended that New Zealand follow the U.S.A. and Canadian example of establishing a national agency to be responsible for the administration of national parks, whilst district boards could be responsible for day- to-day management of each park: more or less the administrative
framework which still exists. No action was taken on this report until
the Federated Mountain Clubs and the Forest and Bird Protection Society, supported by the Royal Society and a Wild Life Committee, made similar
government began preparation of the National Parks Bill, which became
the National Parks Act of 1952. In recognition of their interests the
Federated Mountain Clubs, Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society and the Royal Society were each allowed to have a nominee sit on the
National Parks Authority and, in appropriate parks, the F.M.C. and Ski-
Council have representatives on the individual park boards. Thus the
recreation pressure groups have been able to continue to exercise some 39
influence over national parks policy (Lucas, n.d. a; New Zealand,
Working Party On National Parks Administration, 1966).
Post-war change was slower to develop in Canada, largely because
of the continued lack of interest by the Canadian public. This pattern
began to change in the early 1960s, marked not only by developments in government administration, discussed below, but also by the emergence of a small national parks movement, led by the National and Provincial Parks
Association, formed in 1963. As recently as 1973, Nelson observed the
changing appreciation of nature in Canada, and described the origins of the intrinsic evaluation of nature which Muir and Leopold had articulated in the U.S.A. decades earlier:
The call for the protection and preservation of nature is ... growing stronger, emanating chiefly from a vocal literate minority ... [and] increasingly is based on scientific and economic considerations [an ecological image] ... [although] aesthetic and romantic arguments for wilderness protection have certainly not disappeared. There are many people ... who argue for nature protection on the grounds that animals and other life simply have the right to exist independent of man (Nelson, 1973, 83-4). This new anti-development (of national parks) lobby had its first success with its 1972 defeat of the extravagant re-development proposals for Village Lake Louise in Banff National Park, which had been designed with the intention of attracting the 1968 or 1972 Winter Olympics (Nash, 1968,
84; Nelson, 1973, 80-1; Sadler, 1974; Simmons, 1974). Whilst this
victory doubtless signified a "watershed" in the history of the Canadian national parks movement Nash's (1968, 75) observation that "The Canadian public's sensitivity to and enthusiasm for wilderness lags at least two generations behind opinion in the United States" probably retains much of its validity.
policy in the U.S.A. and Britain, and have not been without influence in
New Zealand and Canada. But in all these countries the management of the
parks has long been the responsibility of a specialist bureaucracy, either at national or local government levels, often as a result of specific insistence from the pressure groups that such guardian agencies be created. (Canada is the only example of the bureaucracy preceding any
strident public demand for it.) It is not surprizing, therefore, that
these bureaucracies have played their own part in shaping national park policy. While it is possible to separate the concepts (goals) of national parks from the mechanics of their administration in theory, it is much less
easy to do so in practice: in one way or another the mechanics have
invariably influenced the concepts. The bureaucracies, and particularly
the personalities who have led them, have played influential roles in shaping modern national parks, particularly in North America, and to a lesser extent in England and Wales.