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Over a hundred years ago, Canada and the United States began setting aside large tracts of land as parks. The parks movement was largely inspired by the writings of American transcendentalist conservationists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Particularly in the work of John Muir, the “pristine, untrammelled” wilderness of the Sierra Mountains represented a cathedral of nature. A place where, due to its supposed distance from the effects of fallen humankind, shards of edenic innocence had been preserved. The first national park was created at Yellowstone in 1872. Soon there came to be a philosophical divide in this burgeoning ecological movement. Some believed, as Muir did, that the land set aside in the parks should be “preserved” for their transcendent and aesthetic, as well as their ecological value. Others believed that careful, limited resource management could be attempted within the parks including allowing grazing animals, limited forestry, and in some cases, limited mining oper...