Carolyn Finney Quotes

A tree in the woods can signify shade and spiritual oneness, and the end of a life so brutally taken.

Wealthy white suburbs continued the trend of actively excluding black families in implicit and explicit ways, sometimes by using existing natural landmarks. Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., the largest urban park in the National Park system separates Chevy Chase, a wealthy white enclave “from the increasingly black neighborhoods” proliferating on the nearby landscape of Maryland (Loewen 2005, 124).

One interviewee spoke of the resistance of another major magazine, National Geographic, to publishing his story. From 1971 until 1993, John Francis walked across the United States to raise environmental awareness. For seventeen of these years he did it without talking. Francis, a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) goodwill ambassador, with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and one of the architects of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, was initially approached by a member of the National Geographic staff to have his story featured in their magazine. In his words, the board decided they would not let a “crazy black person” write a story for National Geographic.17 While his story was eventually published in an abbreviated fashion in the “Almanac” section at the back of the magazine, he also received an apology from another National Geographic fellow for the board’s behavior. For John Francis, the underlying message was not that he was “crazy,” but that he was black.

1899, the 24th Mounted Infantry, an African American army regiment, was entrusted with the protection of Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks in California. For a long time people forgot their presence in the parks’ history, until Shelton Johnson found a picture.

Whether we leave out the removal of American Indians from their land, or the refusal to give ex-slaves their forty acres and a mule, the effort to airbrush the definition of an American collective identity on the national landscape has stymied our ability to fully comprehend who Americans are collectively and individually.

Mistrust of outsiders often causes rejection of those African Americans who are seen as “gatekeepers.” This includes people who work for organizations or institutions not considered “grassroots” who come into a community where they are not members. They may be seen as representatives of those in power as opposed to potential work mates/collaborators.

While Pinchot and Muir explored, articulated, and disseminated conservation and preservation ideologies, legislation was being enacted to limit both movement and accessibility for African Americans, as well as American Indians, Chinese, and other nonwhite peoples in the United States. This included the California Land Claims Act of 1851, the Black Codes (1861–65), the Dawes Act (1887), and the Curtis Act (1898). During the same period, there were numerous race-related massacres of African Americans: two hundred in Louisiana in 1868; nine in North Carolina in 1898; and seventy in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873 (Myers 2005).