Chris -- you should read Michael Yates' book, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate ( http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org ), which details his and his wife's experiences working at Yellowstone National Park. Mike shows how Yellowstone is packaged and sold as an "experience" -- mostly for people who don't venture far from their cars or hotel rooms. It's also not a purely state enterprises and never was:
http://astore.amazon.com/ecolcent-20/detail/0700611673
"Challenging popular perceptions that our national parks are protected from commercialism, Mark Barringer reveals how businessmen, with the support of the National Park Service, marketed Yellowstone as a museum of mythology: a landscape created to look like what Americans wanted to believe the Old West once was. ..
First marketed as a nature museum to be viewed from the comfort of stagecoach seats or hotel room windows, the park was transformed from a wilderness preserve to a series of roadside attractions."
<tangent> I happened to stumble across this when I look up the above, "http://www.danforthreview.com/reviews/nonfiction/field_guide.htm" -- Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America </tangent>
The idea that "nature" is just there and that it is just fenced in or something, set off with a gate through which we walk, bike, or drive in order to visit it, is a myth.
What is produced and distributed is the access to "experience nature". Nature is constituted via this enterprise as something we "go to" in order to "take in" and "experience" and then we can return to "civilization."
National parks provide people with "nature" -- which has to be cultivated (ha) as such: as nature to be "experienced" by us mostly because we are deemed to have some need to "get in touch" with nature, which apparently is absent from our daily lives, because it provides us something that is supposedly missing from our daily lives. Or, because it is, as with the romantics, somehow morally superior to or a source of morally superior sustenance to the civilized and soulless who must live in the planned and human environments of the city or suburbia -- which of course are manmade and, therefore, impose something unnatural upon us. For which we must construct a "nature" we can go and "experience" to replenish our souls -- because it is "unplanned" and "natural".
I quote from something I read recently on another mailing list. Talking first about Burning Man, the author writes:
"Your assertion that there is actually a little survival challenge involved and that newbies are in a bit of a stretch goal situation is a good indication that attendees have likely gained useful experience and attitude."
Going into nature, to experience it, is a way to gain "useful experience and attitude."
About his own preferences for "experiencing nature" he goes on:
"I tend to go for the minimal roughing it myself ... I know I don't have the equipment or planning for multi-day rough camping. I tend to get my fill in 4-16 hours and then scurry back to civilization to recover with air conditioning and high-tech liquids."
He does "minimal roughing it" because he doesn't have the "equipment or planning" for fully "roughing it".
My argument isn't that this is terrible, that we must be better at experiencing a "true" nature, and that the author above or anyone else ought to "rough" it without planning it or using lots of equipment.