We as a people have a deep love and maybe an even deeper fear of the wild.  As soon as we could we built houses and insulated them against the cold and the predators. We fought the wild back with guns, bulldozers and fire.  Never has any war been more decisive and completely victorious than our war on the wild.  There is so little of it left.

Then at some point in the last two centuries we realized that we had pushed perhaps a little too hard. Some few of us, enough it would seem, felt the fear of loss creep in and made a desperate gamble to protect the few wild places that were left. So the National Parks were born. This birth was the product of many, many people. No one person can claim their creation. That indeed is the glorious truth of the National Parks. They belong to everyone.

They have been called America’s best idea.  And whether or not that is true, they are maybe the clearest manifestation of democracy we have.  Happily, they don’t care what we call them.  They don’t care who is in office as long as they are allowed to continue their glorious existence.  Now the government agency the is in charge of these treasures (The National Park Service) turns 100 years old this year.  We mean to celebrate.  We mean to get others to celebrate with us.  In the end we mean to help people fall in love with the parks again so that they will live forever.

Because the truth of the fight for any wild place or thing is that you can win 10, 100 , 1,000 times and then if you lose once, it’s over.  None of it mattered.