Managing cultural landscapes: Reconciling local preservation and institutional ideology in the National Park Service

The purpose of this dissertation is to ask, what happens to a cultural landscape once the National Park Service (NPS) and its approaches to management and national heritage become involved with preserving it? The historical development of the agency has resulted in national criteria, both for what “counts” as heritage and for how to manage park landscapes, which prevail over both local priorities and uniqueness over time. Drawing on the fields of environmental history and landscape theory, I hypothesize that the processes of NPS preservation and management reshape landscapes, moving them away from the local characteristics that may have caused them to be preserved in the first place, and toward a reflection of NPS institutional ideology: increasingly nationalized, arrested, and natural. I investigate this question on the ground by conducting an in-depth case study of the processes and outcomes of landscape change at Point Reyes National Seashore.; After conducting analysis of historic documents, interviews and field observations, I find that NPS management has reshaped the landscape toward a greater reflection of the agency's values of national significance, unchanging scenery, and natural resources. The primary avenues of landscape change have been policies that result in the reduction in the number of active residents within the park, removal of historic buildings, and management and interpretation that emphasize natural over cultural resources. While not all of these changes have been the direct intentions of NPS staff, their cumulated effect is to overwrite the existing cultural landscape with a new set of meanings, changing the local landscape into a National Park-scape.; This dissertation concludes that the NPS is not the optimal agency to do cultural landscape protection, unless it can acknowledge and/or shift away from its ideological foundations. Evidence from this and previous research suggests that such a shift is unlikely to occur, as the agency has such a strong historical conception of what a national park “ought” to look like, and attempts at challenging this conception in the past have not resulted in much change.