I got a tip from a fellow working at the UBC Botanical Gardens. “Take a look at some of the descriptions the US National Park Service uses,” says he, “and compare the more politicized parks to the others.” Well, we know which park gets the most attention from the creationists—that would be the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon is more than a great chasm carved over millennia through the rocks of the Colorado Plateau. It is more than an awe-inspiring view. It is more than a pleasuring ground for those who explore the roads, hike the trails, or float the currents of the turbulent Colorado River.
This canyon is a gift that transcends what we experience. Its beauty and size humble us. Its timelessness provokes a comparison to our short existence. In its vast spaces we may find solace from our hectic lives. The Grand Canyon we visit today is a gift from past generations.
“Millennia” is a word often used vaguely, so I’m not going to get too cranky over saying it was carved over thousands of years. But that second paragraph…bleh. I don’t even know what most of that means. It’s a gift? From who? Past generations? That makes it sound like my great-grandpa might have labored at carving it out. And that “transcend” bit is trying a little too hard.
So I looked at some of the other parks. Here are the Badlands.
Located in southwestern South Dakota, Badlands National Park consists of 244,000 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires blended with the largest, protected mixed grass prairie in the United States. The Badlands Wilderness Area covers 64,000 acres and is the site of the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret, the most endangered land mammal in North America. The Stronghold Unit is co-managed with the Oglala Sioux Tribe and includes sites of 1890s Ghost Dances. Established as Badlands National Monument in 1939, the area was redesignated “National Park” in 1978. Over 11,000 years of human history pale to the ages old paleontological resources. Badlands National Park contains the world’s richest Oligocene epoch fossil beds, dating 23 to 35 million years old. Scientists can study the evolution of mammal species such as the horse, sheep, rhinoceros and pig in the Badlands formations.
It isn’t exactly poetry, but it gets right to the point, and is unambiguous about the history. I looked up a couple of my favorite places, like Olympic National Park…
Glacier capped mountains, wild Pacific coast and magnificent stands of old-growth forests, including temperate rain forests — at Olympic National Park, you can find all three. About 95% of the park is designated wilderness, which further protects these diverse and spectacular ecosystems.
Olympic is also known for its biological diversity. Isolated for eons by glacial ice, and later the waters of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Olympic Peninsula has developed its own distinct array of plants and animals. Eight kinds of plants and 15 kinds of animals are found on the peninsula but no where else on Earth.
…and the John Day Fossil Beds:
Within the heavily eroded volcanic deposits of the scenic John Day River basin is a well-preserved fossil record of plants and animals. This remarkably complete record, spanning more than 40 of the 65 million years of the Cenozoic Era (the “Age of Mammals and Flowering Plants”) is world-renowned.
So maybe the Grand Canyon had the bad luck of a poor copy writer who wasn’t too focused on the details. “Try googling some of the phrases in the Grand Canyon copy,” my tipster suggests. That turns up something interesting—a combination of quotes from the park service (as expected) and a mix of sermons…
…we have been given a gift that transcends all these experiences. That is the gift of being blessed.
…and religious reflections.
…God’s true gift must be seen through the eyes of faith, as a gift that transcends the here and now…
I suppose one could argue that Christians are a gang of plagiarists pilfering the good copy of the National Park Service, but I think it more likely that the Park Service was using the vague language of scripture, ladling in a few lumpy keywords of faith like big airy dumplings of inoffensive meaninglessness. No harm in avoiding irritating the religious visitors, right?
Except, of course, that they’ve managed to strip all of the information from the description. That’s what we face when we bow to the sensibilities of an uninformed and sometimes actively anti-intellectual majority—the erosion of content.
At least they don’t talk about the specified complexity of Mount Rushmore…
And WTF is a “pleasuring ground”?
And WTF is a “pleasuring ground”?
Speaking as a young person, I can only say “if you have to ask, you’re too old to know” :P
I believe I found a pleasuring ground in Amsterdam once. It involved a trapeze, whipped cream, and a lot of leather.
Religions making the decisions about what can be said. Grand Canyon, Muslim cartoons, silenced NASA climate scientists, references to the Big Bang excised, . . . and who knows what next? It must be some virus going around.
I’m a man of the world*: A pleasuring ground is supposed to bleed off most of the current from the car battery while it’s in use, so you get “happy” instead of dead..
*not actually a man of the world.
…It’s amazing how low I can go.
This is ridiculous, but it will continue and probably get worse before it gets better.
This is ridiculous, but it will continue and probably get worse before it gets better.
In a post about the Grand Canyon, such erosion was to be expected.
Uh-oh. Now the punsters are going to drive this thread right into the ground. I’m worn out just thinking about it.
i suppose if you were willing to torture language a bit (and the USNPS copywriters sure seem to be, don’t they?) you might call the Grand Canyon a “gift” from the native peoples who used to live in it before it got designated a national park. they, or their descendants, might not exactly agree, however.
“Grand Canyon? More like Grand Cantyon!”
or
“Grand Canyon? I don’t even know her!”
Culture of life, bitches. I’m here all week . . .
I doubt that the religious conservatives would agree with that either. This is the same crowd that polices social studies textbooks to make sure they are “positive” enough about American history.
How about it being a gift from visionary Americans to posterity? Park was established as such in 1919. It has survived plans for multiple damsites and other development that would have destroyed it, and so far it still survives despite a Republican/Libertarian movement to privatize every good public institution and resource.
Not every bit of bureaucratic prose contains creationist code-talk.
It’s not so dire; it’s not like the entire site is scoured of contra-YEC facts.
Scroll down to “How old is the Canyon?” at:
http://www.nps.gov/grca/grandcanyon/faq.htm
Still, I agree: “gift”, “transcend”, and “humble” (and quite likely “millenia” as well) strike me as code-words used so that fundamentalists won’t cross off “go to the grand canyon” from their summer vacation list.
I was forced to watch the Super Bowl this year, and saw that FedEx did their part to subtly reinforce a certain appalling popular notion– so it’s strictly UPS from now on.
http://www.thenewsmarket.com/CustomLink/StoryDetailsEx.aspx?GUID=cbe4d623-02d4-4b3e-afd3-eb043e938e7f&CustomPage=1&ParentGUID=f0e31f73-0dcb-4dde-a93f-09274f0b472f
While the description reads like a form of glurge, I have to say that seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time this past summer (at age 34) was about as close as this atheist suspects he’ll come to an awe-inspiring moment akin to anything spiritual.
Pictures just don’t do it justice (but then neither does attributing its beauty to a deity that so loathed his own creation that he drowned 99.9% of it).
They just failed to complete that second (grand canyon) paragraph properly, eg:
“a gift from past generations” … of microscopic organisms, whose labours resulted in the variety of rock layers and who were the ancestors of today’s life-forms.
Of course the religious are plagarists, yu think they invented any of that stuff in the Bible? Half of it comes from the babylonians, the rest from the Greeks and Egyptians. Mostly, the hebrews defined themselves by what they didn’t do (all that fun stuff being Babylonian) but the Christians are like the frickin’ Borg: they gobble up any myth that makes it past the arrival of the missionaries and claim it for their own, after a judicious white washing.
PZ, as a former Seattleite, you must know that pleasuring grounds are extracted with hot water to make coffee.
Keith – To a theologian, being an innovator is worse than being a plagiarist, because in theology-speak, being an innovator is akin to being a heretic.
Pete – Driving away the fundamentalists would not be a big loss. It would just mean more parking spaces for everyone else.
Romy B. wrote:
Romy — do you like beer?
(Yah, yah, I know: most of you have probably already seen this…)
I’d invoke Linus’ Law about attributing to malevolence what can be explained by stupidity.
At Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada, however, the state hired a stealth creationist as chief ranger a few years back, and said ranger promptly stocked the bookstore with Hovindian blather. This was, I think, in 1998. By the time I got there in 1999, the ranger had moved on and the reputability of the books in the store restored, and the staff at the park were noticably embarrassed by the whole thing.
to actually explain what I meant by the Linus’ Law comment: stupidity as expressed in purple prose.
“Gift” is a little churchy, I’ll admit. “tranmscends what we experience” likely means you can’t experience the whole thing. Hike down into the thing and you can understand why a writer might grope and come up with something like that phrase.
This is pretty close to objective fact, for anyone who’s been there and possesses a capacity for awe.
ibid.
Pretty straightforward.
Past generations preserved the Canyon as a National Park (Roosevelt’s generation) and kept it from being turned into a chain of reservoirs by the Bureau of Reclamation (Brower’s generation).
No nefarious intent needed.
I’m sure no one’s forgotten about the Grand Canyon – Creationist book controversy:
[From 12/2003] This July, NPS Deputy Director Donald Murphy, ordered the Grand Canyon National Park to return three bronze plaques bearing biblical verses to public viewing areas on the Canyon’s South Rim. Murphy overruled the park superintendent who had directed the plaques’ removal based on legal advice from the Interior Department that the religious displays violated the First Amendment. In a letter to the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, the group sponsoring the plaques, Murphy apologized for “any intrusion resulting from” the temporary removal of the plaques quoting Psalms 68:4, 66:4 and 104:24 and pledged “further legal analysis and policy review” before any new action is taken.
This fall, the Park Service also approved a creationist text, “Grand Canyon: A Different View” for sale in park bookstores and museums. The book by Tom Vail, claims that the Grand Canyon is really only a few thousand years old, developing on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. At the same time, Park Service leadership has blocked publication of guidance for park rangers and other interpretative staff that labeled creationism as lacking any scientific basis.
Last month, the Park Service announced that it would alter an eight-minute video containing photos and footage of demonstrations and other events taking place at the Lincoln Memorial. Conservative groups have asked to cut out footage of gay rights, pro-choice and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations because it implies that “Lincoln would have supported homosexual and abortion ‘rights’ as well as feminism.” The Park Service has promised to develop a “more balanced” version that include rallies of the Christian group Promise Keepers and pro-Gulf War demonstrators though these events did not take place at the Memorial.
The Park Service is also engaged in an extended legal battle to continue displaying an eight-foot-tall cross, planted atop a 30-foot-high rock outcropping in the Mojave National Preserve in California. PEER Board Member and former-Park Service manager Frank Buono filed suit to force removal of the cross. That suit is now pending before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Indeed. I see this pun thread heading straight for the (Precambrian) basement.
“Christians are like the frickin’ Borg: they gobble up any myth that makes it past the arrival of the missionaries and claim it for their own, after a judicious white washing.”
That is the characterisation I have been groping for. The repetitive language and often conforming clothes is alike too. Even the fundie mindset: “Resistance is futile.”
“I see this pun thread heading straight for the (Precambrian) basement.”
Surely it has now hit rock bottom!? (Sorry, nonnative english speaker here – I couldn’t resist childishness on a par with my poor abilities…)
The Park Service is also engaged in an extended legal battle to continue displaying an eight-foot-tall cross, planted atop a 30-foot-high rock outcropping in the Mojave National Preserve in California. PEER Board Member and former-Park Service manager Frank Buono filed suit to force removal of the cross. That suit is now pending before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
While I would dearly love to see the cross removed from my usual campsite at Sunrise Rock, it’s utterly false to characterize the issue as being one of “fundies trying to make inroads into the parks.” The cross is a war memorial, has been for decades, and the energy behind its supporters comes mainly from local resentment at the designation of the area as National Park land.
It’s still a problematic item. But it’s a different issue from the crackpot interpretive signs at the Canyon.
From former Arizona Rep. Bob Stump, who had the good sense to be ineffectual enough that his plan to build a dam at the bottom and turn it into a big lake never got anywhere. Alas, I moved away from Flagstaff before I was old enough to vote against him.
In actual fact, the flowery prose doesn’t bother me (except inasmuch as it’s a bit over the top, but Keats is dead and Whedon and Stoppard are busy with other things, so you work with whom you can get). Chris Clark’s comment is right; the canyon really is like that. Especially if you make the effort to go down into it.
The creationist books in the bookstores worry me much more.
BTW, the UBC Botanical Gardens are also worth seeing. The plants on the UBC campus in general are nothing short of remarkable.
Hate to be practical here, but the government probably engaged the long standing and lazy practice of allowing interest groups to help write the language that goes into official documents.
Eh. As someone who’s studied a lot of glurge about the Western environment in the context of tourism, I have to say that this is a pretty pallid specimen. The poor Grand Canyon’s been the victim of this kind of semi-religious purple-prosing for _decades_, being one of the oldest parks in the system, so I’m not surprised, especially if you’re comparing it to the copy for the newer parks.
Here’s a better basis of comparison, Yellowstone, being the oldest park in the system. Note that the mixture of glurge, folksy bits, and geology is there too, but that it’s a less glurgy mix.
The parks you’re comparing it to are ones that came later, and were part of a shift in the park system’s emphasis from “big amazing scenery that you can play in” to “environmentally and culturally significant features you can learn from.” It’s reasonable that the language describing them would reflect that, if the copywriters are drawing from the original language of the bills that made these areas parks.
In other words, I don’t disagree that the entry for the Grand Canyon is weirdly short and lacking in detail, nor that creeping religiousity is an issue, but the latter’s not necessarily of recent vintage – the emphasis on preserving the “things what God wrought” was part of how they campaigned for the creation of the parks system in the first place, so it’s not unlikely that the copy for the Grand Canyon is drawing from old-fashioned imagery and language, than a new, fundie-pleasing invention.
Now, the creationist texts in the bookstore, I can’t speak to.
Do those puns display an incisive wit? My gorge rises!