I.

Introduction

National Parks and Nature Reserves, areas selected by governments or private organizations for special protection against damage or degradation. They are chosen for their outstanding natural beauty, as areas of scientific interest, or as forming part of a country's cultural heritage, and often also to provide facilities for public recreation.

II.

Origins

The concept of creating national parks and nature reserves developed in the early 19th century in response to increasing industrialization that had begun to cause large-scale damage or destruction to natural environments in western Europe and North America. Many heavily populated countries already had urban parks and public gardens, while some rural areas had long been reserved as hunting grounds or private estates by monarchs and nobles. In most parts of the world, however, human activity had had little impact on enormous areas which were sparsely inhabited or untouched wildernesses, such as the Great Plains of North America, the Amazon Basin, the forests of sub-Saharan Africa, or the Australian bush. These did not seem to need special protection, since most of them were still inaccessible or inhospitable to human beings.

The modern idea of deliberately conserving special areas of the countryside and opening them to the general public rather than reserving them for the wealthy and privileged, originated in the 19th century. For example, in 1832 the American artist George Catlin called for the protection of wildernesses in the western United States in order to preserve the landscapes which he had painted; and in 1835 the English poet William Wordsworth suggested in a guidebook to his native region, the Lake District, that it should become “a sort of national property” (although, unlike most later campaigners for national parks, he was opposed to large numbers of people being allowed to visit it).

Yellowstone National Park, covering parts of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, is regarded as the first national park in the world. It was designated by the United States Congress in 1872. The term “national park”, however, was first used for the Royal National Park established in New South Wales, Australia, in 1879. The concept of national parks then spread to Canada and New Zealand during the 1880s and several more parks had been established in all four countries by 1909, when the first national park in Europe was designated in Sweden. Similar parks were created in Japan, Mexico, the former Soviet Union, and several British colonies during the 1930s, and in Britain, France, and elsewhere in Europe during the 1950s. (Some of these incorporate former royal hunting grounds.)

Since then many more have been created, notably in India, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. Today the term “national parks” is also applied to other, usually smaller and often less protected areas set aside for conservation, such as the forest parks of Scotland and Ireland, the National Wilderness Areas and National Monuments managed by the United States National Parks Service, the provincial parks in Canadian provinces, or the state parks in the United States and Australia.

III.

National Parks Today

In addition to the original purposes of landscape conservation and public recreation many parks have been established to protect endangered species of animals or plants and to promote scientific research. They may therefore be seen as nature reserves, a term which refers to a variety of areas in which rare animals, plants, or whole environments are protected and studied. Hunting and other disruptive activities are limited or banned and public access is often strictly controlled or even forbidden. These areas may be inside national parks—for example, the Kanha Tiger Reserve in Kanha National Park, northern India—and in general they are smaller than most national parks.

National parks are usually owned and managed by national or state governments. In Britain the National Trust, a private charity founded in 1895, owns more than 2,700 sq km (1,047 sq mi) of countryside, and 853 km (530 mi) of coastline, as well as over 200 historic houses and gardens. Similar organizations exist in Australia and elsewhere. In November 2000 the governments of South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe agreed to the creation of Africa’s biggest wildlife park, the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, to be jointly managed by all three nations. As for nature reserves, some, such as the National Nature Reserves in Britain and the National Seashores and National Preserves in the United States, are managed by government bodies, but many are owned by national trusts, animal protection charities, or other voluntary organizations.

Many national parks and nature reserves are affected by a conflict between the needs of conservation and recreation; by their sheer numbers, visitors may unintentionally destroy the landscapes or interfere with the flora and fauna that the parks were created to protect. In response to this threat, parts of several American national parks have been closed to the public and a limit placed on the number of visitors permitted to enter certain fragile areas. Designated trails or roads have been created, as in several African national parks, and guided tours made compulsory, as in some national parks in India.

The designation of national parks and nature reserves can also conflict with other possible uses for the land and resources, especially in the relatively remote, sparsely populated, and politically unimportant areas which tend to be most suitable for conservation. They may be attractive, for example, to military forces for training purposes, as, for example, inside 6 of the 11 national parks in England and Wales. Some conservation areas may be threatened by commercial exploitation of their minerals or trees: for example, national parks in Tasmania and in the South Island, New Zealand, were extended in the 1980s to protect rainforests from logging. Electricity companies may develop hydroelectric schemes or build nuclear power stations. In many developing countries farmers, hunters, or mineral prospectors eager for uncultivated land or unexploited resources may intrude into protected areas. The elephants in African national parks, for example, were in serious danger from poaching during the 1970s and 1980s. In Amazonia National Park, Brazil, frequent confrontations occur between native groups and incoming farmers and prospectors. In parks where quarrying, mining, electricity generation, or other large-scale activities are permitted, they are carefully and expensively monitored to minimize pollution and degradation of the landscape.

The conservation of such areas of natural beauty, cultural heritage, or scientific interest is especially problematic in developing countries where, in contrast to those industrialized nations which were the first to establish national parks and nature reserves, governments and pressure groups often find that proposals to impose limits on further development are too costly or unpopular. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) all support and sponsor national parks and nature reserves in developing countries; in addition UNESCO has placed many national parks and nature reserves, in both developed and developing countries, on its World Heritage List of unique environments. As economies and populations continue to grow, the creation and maintenance of national parks and nature reserves seems likely to be both increasingly necessary and increasingly difficult.

The largest national park in the world is the Tumucumaque National Park in the Brazilian state of Amapá, created in 2002; it covers about 38,850 sq km (15,000 sq mi) of largely uninhabited rainforest. The Salonga National Park, in the Bandundu and Kasai regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is the second largest (36,000 sq km/13,900 sq mi).