produced by and for tourists, and their expressions in the park’s policies and ecology. Cronin uses a range of historic and contemporary photographs, postcards, and advertisements to show a cycle of consumption and production that reifies what she calls “National Park Nature”: culturally constructed spaces of supposedly pristine wilderness in which visitors leave their urban lives behind to recreate in harmony with the nonhuman world. In the first chapter, Cronin introduces an ecocritical approach to photography in shaping National Park Nature as part of Canadian national identity, the international environmental movement, and the physical environments of protected areas. In chapter 2, she shows that government agencies, tourism operators, and environmental activists have used photo imagery as “proof ” of wilderness in ways that reinforce, tame, and commodify a nature-culture dichotomy for tourists, while ignoring visitors’ own environmental tensions. Chapter 3 examines why, despite large-scale environmental impacts, leisure activities such as golf, sport fishing, skiing, and photography have been portrayed as existing harmoniously with parks. Cronin also notes that environmental advocacy by enthusiasts and clubs such as the Alpine Club of Canada further reinforce and complicate dominant environmental ideologies by assuming their activities are authentic ways of engaging nature. In chapter 4, Cronin traces ideological shifts within wildlife photography from a zoological gaze, through juxtapositions of civilization and wildlife in close encounters, to recent education and conservation efforts. Photography, Cronin shows, has real consequences for the ways animals and landscapes are treated. She characterizes National Park Nature as emphasizing the simultaneous sepa48
ration and coexistence of nature and culture in the park. These paradoxical themes “play up” the value of wilderness while enabling guilt-free amenities and visitation for tourists. In the fifth chapter, Cronin compares JNP to “fake nature” attractions such as Sea World and museum dioramas. Cronin’s analysis ultimately shows that representations of JNP fail to acknowledge human mediation and environmental degradation, and forestall the recognition of diverse human-nature relationships. Cronin argues that tourists’ mode of (dis) engaging with landscapes of JNP have been predominantly visual, although recognition of multisensory mode engagement might further extend (or complicate) her argument. The central problem, as Cronin describes it, is not national parks per se, but accounts of National Park Nature that ignore multiple realities and histories of landscapes, human uses, and ecolo-
gies. Focusing on notions of purity, she ultimately concludes, National Park Nature “will not yield adequate ways of reframing human relationships with nature and non-human animals” (p. 150). Cronin encourages agencies, industries, and consumers to visualize the park in ways that “recognize that our presence in it is inextricably linked with the ecological conditions of the region” (p. 144). Manufacturing National Park Nature is highly recommended to scholars and students of environmental studies and history, recreation and tourism, as well as those of media and marketing. It is an accessible way of challenging taken-for-granted conceptions of both wilderness landscapes and photography. Reviewed by PHILIP M. MULLINS, Ecosystem Science and Management Program, University of Northern BC, Prince George, BC, Canada; email: mullins@unbc.ca.
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dispatched when an alarm goes out that biologically rich wild areas are being threatened. Composed of a dozen or more scientific specialists, the teams descend on threatened wildlands and spend three weeks cataloging every wild plant and animal species they encounter. With the inventory results in hand, the scientists alert government officials to what would be lost if human development is allowed to continue. According to Field Museum staff, the evidence collected in 24 rapid inventories conducted since 1999 has been compelling enough to convince governments in Bolivia, China, Cuba, Ecuador, and Peru to declare the areas as protected preserves. John McCarter, president of the Field Museum, says, “It’s unique, what we do. Conservation is not the sort of mission that natural history
International Journal of Wilderness
April 2012 • Volume 18, Number 1
museums normally take on. People keep telling us that we are crazy, that conservation is not our business.” Using film, photos, and specimens brought back from expeditions, Restoring Earth shows how this work fits into the museum’s more conventional mission of cataloging and preserving the raw materials of life on Earth, and making them available for scientific study. “Conservation is not just gloom and doom and guilt trips,” according to Anna Huntley, the museum’s exhibition project manager. “Our scientists are real people who are passionate about their work, and we want our visitors to see that, and to see that they can be a positive, active part in this work right here, right where we live.” (Source: Chicago Tribune, November 4, 2011)