BOOK MARK : A National Park as Profitable Resort: Exploiting Nature for Economic Gain : Yosemite: A new book takes a critical look at the age-old and continuing fight between preservationists and developers in a magnificent Sierra setting.

Any resource open to everyone is eventually destroyed. So in 1968 Garrett Hardin, a professor of human ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, addressed thefutility of pleading for voluntary self-restraint to protect the environment. Such appeals, he noted, impress those individuals with a real sense of social responsibility but fail to sway anyone intent on maximizing personal gain. The result is the tragedy of the commons, the inevitable overexploitation of collectively held resources in the relentless pursuit of economic self-interest.

Extending that thesis to Yosemite, Hardin argued that perhaps access should be denied to anyone unwilling to walk the prerequisite distance for ensuring that the park would not be overused or overdeveloped. Although labeled as elitist, the idea did have broad appeal, especially among preservationists, who considered resource conservation to be the only legitimate purpose of national parks.

Development in any form was therefore illegitimate, if only for the reason that structures, roads and everyday services were commonplace throughout America, whereas Yosemite was one of a kind. There had evolved, in either case, the unwritten standard that whatever Americans could do elsewhere in the country should not become common practice in national parks.

Once more the issue hinged on the fundamental duality in park legislation, legal sanctions that provided, in effect, that Yosemite be managed for both private profit and resource conservation. Self-interest and the public interest (however defined) went hand in hand. But was coexistence realistic?

Historically, the behavior of park concessionaires especially had suggested the many possibilities for serious contradictions. Regulated or not, concessionaires as a group had put profit ahead of preservation. As businessmen, they sought expansion, not only of facilities but also of saleable visitor services. Amusements were labeled “needs” and not merely luxuries. More often than not the subterfuge worked, allowing concessionaires to distance themselves from their own intensive campaigns for increased park development.

The hostility of preservationists was all the more reason not to label the profit motive for what it was but instead, feigning concern for the environment, to plead again that meeting the demands of expansion was done only with considerable reluctance and, to re-emphasize, at the insistence of the public.

If any single commodity ever sold in Yosemite cast doubt on the sincerity of that argument, most certainly that commodity was alcohol. Hardly had the first tourists begun arriving in the valley when tent saloons started popping up alongside popular overlooks and trails.

National Prohibition, imposed in 1919 by the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, effectively sealed the debate for the next decade and a half. With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, there was an opportunity to review, at the very least, the advisability of resuming the sale of alcoholic beverages in public parks and refuges. Yet the question had hardly been asked when the ban on sales was lifted. Although obviously pleased, concessionaires once more found it expedient to hide their support behind the standard words of subterfuge, insisting again that public demand was the chief source of persuasion.

It remained for Donald B. Tresidder, the president of Yosemite Park & Curry Co., to lift that legerdemain to new heights in a lengthy memorandum dated June 20, 1934. “We wish to state emphatically,” he began, “that this company is not going into the liquor business with the intention of developing a trade that will be as profitable as possible.” The remainder of his two-page document continually underscored that promise, indicating that although Prohibition in national parks had just been repealed, his company intended to forbid anything suggestive of promoting alcohol consumption. To the contrary, the sale of alcoholic beverages would be kept strictly low-key and tastefully conservative.

As of 1988 there were 35 outlets in Yosemite National Park selling beer, wine or liquor, 23 of those outlets on the valley floor alone. Yosemite Park & Curry Co. further promoted sales through modern bars, expansive shelf displays and various types of advertising, including using company-operated buses and tours to point out the location of lounge facilities. Quite obviously, sometime in the 50 years following Tresidder’s memo, his promise had been completely scuttled.

For those in the postwar era who considered visitation itself a threat to Yosemite’s scenic and biological resources, the park’s first moment of truth came on Dec. 31, 1954, when total visitation for the preceding calendar year stood at 1,008,031 people. It was but a few months short of a century since James Mason Hutchings had brought the first party of tourists to Yosemite Valley in 1855. Yet just 13 years later, in 1967, the figure stood at 2 million and was rapidly climbing. Only 20 more years were needed to top 3 million visitors annually; the estimate in 1987 was more than 3.2 million.

The lingering reaction among preservationists was one of vindication mixed with deep regret. Protection’s first outspoken prophet, Frederick Law Olmsted, had predicted, in 1865, precisely the future that Yosemite was now experiencing. Ansel Adams added to Olmsted’s interpretation. “When there was a vast reservoir of wilderness,” he wrote to David Brower, “when areas such as Yosemite were difficult of access, there was a different kind of visitor; he came primarily for the experience of the place” and, even more significant, “was willing to sacrifice certain comforts and undergo considerable difficulties to gain this experience.”

Suddenly development in Yosemite National Park attracted every kind of individual, not just people resigned to discomfort in the best interest of preservation. So-called services had also become “more general” as the character of visitors had changed. Among those “services” were more and more “entertainments” intended by park operators “to cover a wide and often unjustified range” of public whims and desires. The result, Adams concluded, was “a ‘resort’ enterprise to which people are attracted for other reasons than the simple experience of the natural scene.”

What 1 million visitors foretold for Yosemite was the difficulty of substituting logic for historical self-interest. To be sure, Ansel Adams himself was part of the complex entanglement that affected every rationale for resisting decisive changes in the park’s management or infrastructure. Simply, tradition was not that easy to erase.

“I may be guilty of a contradiction of my own principles,” he finally confessed, “in continuing to support the Christmas Bracebridge Dinner at the Ahwahnee Hotel.” Writing years later in his autobiography, he still had no illusions that the event had not originated in pursuit of the profit motive.

“The winter season was always slow for the concessionaires; tourists were almost non-existent. To increase visitation Don Tresidder . . . began a program of winter sports.” In 1927 Tresidder further “suggested a theatrical Christmas dinner at the Ahwahnee as a key focus for family winter vacations.” Two years later he asked Adams to direct the entire affair, with the help of an architect, Jeannette Spencer. Adams agreed, “provided we could make it professional in concept and performance.” The result was a Yuletide pageant, “an account of an English squire’s Christmas entertainment,” modeled after Washington Irving’s “Christmas at Bracebridge Hall.”

Clearly, no importation into Yosemite Valley could have been more foreign or artificial. The point was that this particular display of artificiality was Ansel Adams’ own. “I plead guilty to this,” he further confessed to David Brower. He nonetheless still excused himself. “Elements of art can be logically associated with the elements of the Natural experience--both concern the spirit and the emotions.”

Here was the critic himself making a case for his opponents, arguing that not all development was necessarily intrusive or inappropriate. “As long as the Ahwahnee exists,” he wrote, further conceding that point, “it offers the opportunity to express certain events of a definite spiritual character.” Put another way, without the Ahwahnee there would be no special meaning to the Bracebridge Dinner, no grand stage on which Adams’ proud creation could be played out to the fullest. The Ahwahnee “also, unfortunately, supports evidences of advanced urbanism which create a dichotomy in the Yosemite scene,” Adams immediately added, still obviously wrestling with his original concern.

In microcosm, the emotional tug-of-war of such a dedicated and outspoken preservationist was very telling evidence of the power of inconsistency. Faced with the thought of losing a Yosemite tradition so dear to his heart, Ansel Adams too was forced into rationalizing why he had diminished his lifetime scale of values. That very lapse in fortitude was precisely what Frederick Law Olmsted had had in mind when he wrote in 1865 of the need to adopt strict rules of conduct that would, without compromise, govern every park visitor. Ever since Olmsted, the search for those proper rules of conduct had been Yosemite’s historic and endlessly debated challenge. Finally affected by the presence of Olmsted’s predicted “millions,” that search had indeed become all the more difficult. Ansel Adams was just another example of the futility of asking for commitment without effective coercion.

Olsmsted’s admonishment was to treat everything as impositions, unless something had originally been part of the natural scene. Otherwise the danger arose of accepting development itself as natural, further imposing layer upon layer of artificiality over the landscape.

Garrett Hardin said it differently, but his conclusion was much the same. The acceptance of change need not be total; it need simply be present. The only way out of the tragedy of the commons was universal coercion. Everyone must accept the same standard, or the standard would fall.

Excerpted with permission of

University of Nebraska Press. 1990.

BOOK REVIEW: “Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness,” is reviewed on Page 1 of today’s Book Review.