Article ID: CBB149416703

The Most Perfect Natural Laboratory in the World: Making and Knowing Hawaii National Park (2019)

unapi

This article reimagines the meanings of U.S. national parks and so-called ‘natural’ places in our environmental histories and histories of science. Environmental historians have created a compelling narrative about the creation and use of U.S. national parks as places for recreation and natural resource conservation. Although these motivations were undoubtedly significant, I argue that some of the early parks were created and used for a third, often overlooked, reason: to preserve a permanent, state-sanctioned space for scientific knowledge production. Deconstructing the concept of the “natural laboratory,” I show how scientists helped justify and then benefited from the creation of national parks.Hawaii National Park serves as my case study. Advocates of the national park aimed to give settler colonial scientists in the Hawaiian archipelago a permanent place for their research, while tying Hawai‘i’s exotic landscape into the sublime nature of the American West. The park was framed as a perfect laboratory for U.S. experts to study “curious” flora, fauna, and geological processes, becoming a major site of knowledge production in volcanology.Reimagining the parks in this way has ramifications for how we think about issues of access and justice. Environmental historians who have explored the ‘dark side’ of the conservation movement have yet to consider the other half of the story: the parks not only barred certain peoples and their ways of life, but also provided access to scientists – a set of actors whose work was deemed more complementary to conservationist goals than the activities of the Native Hawaiians – and marginalized local and indigenous epistemologies. Thus, the question so often asked in environmental history, “Who is nature for?” might be supplemented by the question, “Who has the power to know nature?”

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Authors & Contributors
Casado de Otaola, Santos
Alessandra Landi
Giovanni Carrosio
Lai, Franco
Ashanti Ke Ming Shih
Butler, Christina Rae
Concepts
Environmental history
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Science and society
Nature
Environmental sciences
Natural resource management
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
18th century
20th century, late
20th century, early
Places
United States
Hawaii (U.S.)
Spain
South Carolina (U.S.)
Western states (U.S.)
Sardinia
Institutions
United States. National Park Service
University of Melbourne
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