Yellowstone and Yosemite were turned into parks by expelling people who had been there for centuries. As the journalist Mark Dowie has documented, similar dispossessions in the name of Nature have taken place ever since. All too often, the results have been dreadful, both morally, because they involve tearing people from their homes, and practically, because these areas were molded in the shapes of their first inhabitants. The peoples of the U.S. West, for example, burned undergrowth frequently, to discourage insects and encourage the tender new growth that attracted animals. Eliminating fire
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