Nature's Spectacle ─ The World's First National Parks and Protected Places

'This book is the most rounded account of the international development of national parks that I have seen - meticulously researched yet very readable.'-W.M. Adams, Moran Professor of Conservation and Development, University of Cambridge, UK

'This major historical treatment provides a global view of the first century of the national park movement. The very broad coverage of many countries provides the reader with a stimulating account of grand ideas as they developed.'-Paul F.J. Eagles, Professor, Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies, University of Waterloo, Canada

National parks have always been an emotive and iconic symbol, ever since the first parks of the modern era were created in the mid-nineteenth century. This book, based on original research, delves deeply into their character and significance, and the larger context in which they developed.

The book celebrates the deserved attractiveness of the parks as wilderness or 'spectacle' to millions of visitors, but also emphasises how there was nothing inevitable, self-sustaining or without cost in their magnificence and accessibility. Those early parks were a powerful unifying force as national 'playgrounds', especially as motor transport democratised their use. However they also provoked bitter conflict in their dispossession of local communities and perhaps deliberate segregation of people from scenery and wildlife. That first century of national parks, which concluded with the significant break of the Second World War and the subsequent development of more international approaches to conservation, left an uncertain legacy. It was a fragile foundation from which to build what became an integral part of today's conservation movement.

John Sheail is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UK Natural Environment Research Council). This will be his tenth book, his most recent being Au Environmental History of Twentieth Century Britain.