Ruining The Grand Places
“… It is apparent, then, that we cannot decide the question of development versus preservation by a simple referral to holy writ or an attempt to guess the intention of the founding fathers; we must make up our own minds and decide for ourselves what the national parks should be and what purpose they should serve.”-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
“… The difference between the present reservoir, with its silent sterile shores and debris-choked side canyons, and the original Glen Canyon, is the difference between death and life. Glen Canyon was alive. Lake Powell is a graveyard.” – Edward Abbey, “The Damnation of a Canyon”, Beyond the Wall
When you love the Desert Southwest, sometime, somewhere, you will stumble into the writings of Ed Abbey. Like me, Ed was not born there; he discovered his love of the place while riding a boxcar through it on a trip across the US; I discovered mine on a trip through myself. His writings helped lead me home, for that is what the desert southwest is to me: home. I don’t live there for one simple reason, i.e., I have not yet been able to put myself in the financial situation I need to be in. For now, I visit when I can, mostly during my long vacations at Christmas.
A couple of years ago during one of those, on a whim after spending a few days in Arches National Park, my wife and I detoured to the snowy, icy south rim of the Grand Canyon. We journeyed toward it from the east side but got turned back at the National Parks’ gate; the road was snowed under from there on up. After retracing our steps, we traveled down to Flagstaff and spent the night, driving in my four by four truck up to the South Rim the next day. It was an eerie experience to stand on the edge of the South Rim and see only cloud; fog shrouded the canyon’s great gap, leaving us with visual doubts that anything was really there. Defeated, we hit the Visitor’s Center and gathered information so we could go back sometime in the spring or fall with weather more to our liking.
We haven’t done that, yet.
This year we had planned to take a guided river run down the great Grand Canyon. Right now, that probably is not going to happen, either, due to other family obligations that eat vacation and other financial priorities.
Many people know ‘Lake’ Powell as a fact of life. Since its creation in 1963, the reservoir, known as Lake Powell, is just there. Few people that are alive today have had the opportunity to see the true beauty of Glen Canyon, which rivals the Grand Canyon. Glen Canyon, equivalent to one hundred eighty river miles with dozens of side canyons, was flooded for the purpose of power and water resources. ‘Lake’ Powell also generates an enormous cash flow due to the tourism it receives. Although the ‘lake’ has a few reasons to remain in existence, there are many more reasons to drain it.
Everyone’s experience is not all the same similarly to the Grand Canyon situation that is mentioned by Percy. The individual needs to be taken into consideration. Like with me, I went to many tourists spots, such as the Valley of Ten Peaks, that are talked among many people that and have been influenced by the media, but when I got their I was left speechless by the sight of the of the Peaks. This experience is a counter point Percy’s idea, that prejudges of situations can skew the perspective of people. Percy states “[a tourist] Does not one see the same sight from the Bright Angel Lodge that Cardenas saw” (Percy 464). This quote explains how people cannot see the true beauty of a sight with these expectations that block it for us. Most of the time I have had my expectations of a sight given to me by media or other people lessen my experiences in life. This occurs because how much someone is willing to let so...
Last Fall my family visited Shenandoah National Park. It is located in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. It is only 75 miles outside of the nation’s capitol, Washington D.C. The first traces of humans on the land that would later become the park are estimated to be almost nine thousand years ago. Native Americans visited these Appalachian Mountains seasonally to hunt, collect nuts and berries, and to gather stone to construct tools. Europeans did not start to settle the land prior to three hundred years ago. First came hunters and trappers, then people began to settle in the lower valleys close to rivers that run through the park. In the early 20th century congress called for more national parks in the east, but Shenandoah wouldn’t be established
Born in Home, Pennsylvania in 1927, Abbey worked as a forest ranger and fire look-out for the National Forest Service after graduating from the University of New Mexico. An author of numerous essays and novels, he died in 1989 leaving behind a legacy of popular environmental literature. His credibility as a forest ranger, fire look- out, and graduate of the University of New Mexico lend credibility to his knowledge of America’s wilderness and deserts. Readers develop the sense that Abbey has invested both time and emotion in the vast deserts of America.
Monroy, Douglas. Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California . 1990.
I am definitely against the federal regime's decision not to make Providence Canyon a national park. I believe that the Providence Canyon should become a national park for a variety of reasons in which I will discuss in this essay. The reasons I believe that it should become a national park are it is an immensely colossal tourist magnetization in the state of Georgia, the way it was made is very ingenious, and that people are in love with views in the canyon. In this essay I will tell you why Providence Canyon should be a national park.
Throughout the century, the ideal image of a woman has changed drastically, which can be directly attributed to the powerful persuasion of media. This ideal image has transformed from a voluptuous, size 14, 1950’s Marilyn Monroe to a 5’9, 100 pound, 1990’s Kate Moss. The most shocking aspect is specifically what young girls are now doing to achieve this “Kate Moss” image. Through the utilization of advertisements and stars on the big screen, this female portrayal directly targets the physical and mental well-being of females in cultures across the globe.
... continue to demonstrate Pinchot’s belief in multiple use utilitarian land management. However, the National Park Service serves as a foil to this, promoting tracts of land that have a preservation mandate. The National Wildlife Refuge system maintains an even more Muirist environmental standpoint, in that it allows for some human use, but gives first priority to flora and fauna.
The best trip I have ever been on is when my mother, stepdad and I went ice fishing last year.the lake we was poinsett lake which is here in South Dakota up north and east of estelline. It was a very fun and successful trip. It was especially fun because we had just bought an new Polaris four wheeler that we took on the trip.
Serder, Kasey. (2005). Female body image and the Mass Media. Perspectives on How Women Internalize the Ideal Beauty Standard. Retrieved from https://www.westminstercollege.edu/myriad/index.cfm?parent=2514&detail=4475&content=4795
This anthropocentric theme continues throughout his narrative but is personified on a societal level. This matter is first introduced in the chapter “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and The National Parks.” In this chapter Abbey notes the expansionist nature of the industrial economy and how it is affecting the national parks. Abbey critiques arguments for uni...
Media as a tool that is worldwide can easily influence how one is seen in the modern society. It can help women improve their representation and stop the creation of strong stereotypes. The motivation that drives stereotyping of women is the image of an ideal woman. According to Stephanie Nicholl Berberick, who established a work in The New York Sociologist, the media exploit women into portraying characters that do not reflect the true image of women, which leads to a wrong message being expressed to the society. Women portrayed as skinny and sexy would create stereotypes that can influence other women that are not related to media (Berberick). When women portrayed such roles, they tend to affect the society into thinking that all women are similar. However that is not the case, as all women have different personalities and attributes that make them different from other women. Women should not bother about men’s ideal thinking of how women should look and behave as women have the same rights as men and they are no different from each other. However, the issue is that media chooses to only display the ideal image of women rather than the true self. Even so, this issue can be fixed if women choose to gain a better and less exposed representation in the media, it is possible that stereotyping women can be reduced to a small
What remains similar between the bodies flaunted across the media, is that they all possess popular standards of some kind of objective beauty. Women have an aptness to fall prey to advertisers and somehow unknowingly accept the creation of such standards for a woman’s body that is unrealistic for the majority of society. Slender, good-looking models are so prominent in today’s culture that chronic exposure to them reinforces a discrepancy for women between their actual body and the ideal body. Media fuels this unrealistic image and convinces women that in order to be accepted and considered beautiful, you better be fat-less, have silky hair and a flawless complexion. Unrealistic media images of women are so prevalent that it seems that females who fulfill such a standard are more the norm than the exception. The Cultivation theory argues that images that portray women who match the sociocultural ideal of beauty are extremely prevalent in pop...
I went to the Fairfield Osborn Preserve where I am a naturalist. I went to where the waterfall was, which was functioning for the first time in a while because of the recent rains. The whole area was alive with water. The creek was rushing past with a harsh noise, quite different than the quiet dribble of water that was there the week before. I stood in front of the waterfall, rather than sit, with sticks and leaves crunching under my muddy boots and my head and shoulders wet from the rain despite my best efforts to bundle up.
Our parents had arranged for a cruise from Houston, Texas with stops at Cancun and Cozumel, Mexico. Then a one-day stop in Honduras and back to the U.S.A.