Abstract

The history of the Swiss National Park, from its creation in the years before the Great War to the present, is told for the first time in this book. Unlike Yellowstone Park, which embodied close cooperation between state-supported conservation and public recreation, the Swiss park put in place an extraordinarily strong conservation program derived from a close alliance between the state and scientific research. This deliberate reinterpretation of the American idea of the national park was innovative and radical, but its consequences were not limited to Switzerland. The Swiss park became the prime example of a “scientific national park,” thereby influencing the course of national parks worldwide.

Winner of the Turku Book Prize of the European Society for Environmental History and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

“Well tied into the literature of national park studies worldwide, this exquisite book… chronicles the unique Swiss experience in creating and managing a national park in which wilderness was nonexistent… Highly recommended.” · Choice

“Kupper effectively links the specific case of Switzerland with globalization and Westernization, international conservation paradigms, the social construction of wilderness, and an evolving understanding of ecosystem dynamics and the science of conservation.” · Mountain Research and Development

“Readers interested in early twentieth-century Swiss conservation (especially its international connections), the bureaucracy of setting up a new national park (particularly one based on a new, science-focused national park idea), and theoretical ideas about the constructed nature of national parks and wilderness will find reward in this work.” · The Public Historian

“Creating Wilderness is a detailed and thought-provoking historical analysis of the origins and development of the Swiss National Park.” · Mountain Research and Development

“National parks have long been a favoured  subject for environmental histories, as microcosms where the interaction of nature, science, politics and leisure can be observed. By linking the Swiss National Park with developments elsewhere in the world, Kupper has delivered an important contribution to this literature…Kupper has provided a comprehensive  account of the development of the Swiss National Park as well as a fascinating reinterpretation of the national park as a transnational phenomenon  in the twentieth century.” · German History

“This is environmental history of the first order, ranging widely across geographical scales and historical periods to trace the changing discourses and manifestations of the national park model. Kupper convincingly proves that the Swiss national parks, while inspired by the global movement sparked by the creation of the American national parks in the late 19th century, quickly established themselves as a countermodel to the American national parks, and how the Swiss model reflected specifically European concerns.” · Andrew Denning, Western Washington University

“Patrick Kupper’s book is an important contribution to the history of national parks… [by putting] the creation of a Swiss national park into an explicitly transnational context.  He understands the Swiss national park not as a mere copy of an American model but in a more nuanced way that blends different international examples with the Swiss historical context… Kupper’s work is squarely in the tradition of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities… Indeed, he nicely debunks the idea that the US invented the national park idea.  One might say that Kupper does for national parks what Anderson did for nationalism itself.” · Andrew Isenberg, Temple University

Patrick Kupper is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Innsbruck. He is the co-editor of Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective (Berghahn, 2012).