“What is a park? For most of us, a park is a place apart – a reserve of nature in a world increasingly dominated by human activities and arranged to fulfill human needs and desires. But a park is also for people – a place of refuge for the human soul, which tends to wither when long separated from green and growing things.
John Muir, the great naturalist, captured this dual purpose at the dawn of the national parks movement. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity,” Muir wrote in 1901. Our concept of parks, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia, has remained largely unchanged since.
Daniel Raven-Ellison, a self-described “guerrilla geographer” and National Geographic explorer, would like to change it.”
Continue reading this article by Emma Marris on National Geographic.
Photo: Luke Massey