Persuasive Essay On National Park

From the mighty mountains, waterfalls and forests that cover our country, the energy that has gone into preserving these earth-given gifts alive is extensive. The environments created by thousands of years of natural progression have within themselves kept a piece of the world to themselves. Beginning in 1872 with the Yellowstone National Park located in the previously known territories of Montana, people began to protect these places, placing them within national parks boundaries. Since then, national parks have appeared across the country from “sea to shining sea”. With the creation of fifty-nine of national parks to date, people across the country travel to visit these sites where nature has been left alone to be as it was before human

The beginning of the journey towards forming the first national park begins with a battalion in California, charged with the task of bringing the Native Americans onto reservations. During this trek, they came across a valley of immense beauty, and named it in what they believed was the Indian tribe’s name. They named it “Yosemite”, which later on was found to actually translate to “they are killers” (pbs.org, 2009) in the Native’s language. After a period of nine years, a photographer visited the park, accompanied by a land developer by the name of James Mason Hutching’s. His photos slowly made their way around the country, amazing people with the beauty of this piece of land. They called for its protection, even as the nation was slowly being torn apart by the civil war between the Union and Confederacy. With the Natives being pulled off of their land, the movement to save the lands they previously occupied was in danger. Niagara Falls in New York had already been nearly devastated, and Yosemite might be soon to follow in a short period of time, if Hutchings had his way. People gave back to the goal of protecting the land and towards building the national park system, but the man who truly brought this movement forward to create this first park was John Muir a naturalist who had studied “geology and botany at the University of Wisconsin” (pbs.org, 2009),

One of these organizations is the National Parks Conservation Association, based out of Washington D.C. and formed by Stephen Mather, the “first director of the Park Service” (NPCA, 2015) in 1919. This group works for the benefit of the parks as an “independent voice- outside of the political system- to ensure these places remained unimpaired for future generation” (NPCA, 2015). This group has a voice in Washington, though locating other solutions when need be to solve legal problems that may negatively affect the parks, as well as pushing for laws that would support the parks through the years. NPCA also acts as an overseer for the National Park Service. In supporting the parks well-being, this organization has in the past and present resisted people’s attempts to add dams to the parks waterways, forbid mining, logging and hunting within the parks. In the present, NPCA is directing their energies into protecting our air from pollution, which effects nature, animals and people. Moving on, the organization NPCA oversees, the National Park Service, established three years before the NPCA, was the first organization formed for the benefit of the parks. Signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson through the Organic Act, The NPS’s mission was, and is, to “promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as