The Mission 66 Cinematic Universe
Wilderness, wi-fi, and the intersecting sequels of natural stories
A funny thing happened on the way to last week’s essay on Yellowstone broadband in the context of the book and political movement Abundance. In an early draft, I made a historical analogy—but then I had to delete it so that it didn’t take over the whole piece. It felt like its own storyline, like the best character in a Hollywood movie who deserves center stage in a sequel.
The analogy was to Mission 66, a National Park Service infrastructure-building program from the 1950s. Sounds really boring, right? And yet Mission 66—especially as captured by Ethan Carr’s terrific book of that title—gets at the heart of the conflicts humans face when we try to incorporate more nature into our lives. Mission 66 is so weirdly all-encompassing that I have come to think of it as an entire cinematic universe, like Marvel or Star Wars or The Naked Gun.
Among the liveliest criticisms of Mission 66 is the name, which requires a complicated explanation. The effort was designed to instill a sense of mission at the Park Service, centered on building new facilities in preparation for the organization’s 50th birthday in 1966. The agency had struggled to meet the post–World War II tourism boom, and Park Service director Conrad Wirth decided to respond bigly. Mission 66 began the same year as the Interstate Highway System, 1956, and with the same principle—that Congress should commit to funding a ten-year development program.
Mission 66 thus made investments in visitor centers, roads, trails, campgrounds, sewage systems, and employee housing. Without those investments, the parks simply would not have functioned for the last 60 years. Why? Because it turns out that managing any kind of public facility requires a high priority on things like providing enough toilets. Mission 66 built lots of toilets.
Mission 66 built lots of other things, too—some of which, as I’ve written, are easy to criticize. Its weaknesses included a top-down vision with little public participation, an over-dependence on automobiles, a weirdly rigid dichotomy between humans and nature, and frequently unromantic modernist architecture.
Today, Mission 66 mostly gets criticized for an ethos of overdevelopment, for turning parks into places of civilization rather than wilderness. But, Conrad Wirth argued, “The parks belong to the people, and they have the right to use them.” Rather than restrict access, or dictate how people should experience nature, Wirth believed that the Park Service should accommodate their desires for motels, good roads, and 1950s-style suburban developments.
Thus, what nearly derailed me last week was the realization that wi-fi is just the latest sequel to Mission 66. The fiberoptic lines are being installed along Yellowstone’s roads—in what Wirth called the “zone of civilization.” So we’re having the same argument now as then: how many modern amenities do we need to install, and how close to the wilderness, in order to help people gain the benefits of that wilderness?
The debates around firefighting techniques during Yellowstone’s 1988 fires (how much do we let nature take its course?) were another chapter in this storyline. So were 1990s debates around wolf reintroduction (how much do we use our management skills to manipulate that nature)? So was Alston Chase’s controversial 1984 bestseller Playing God in Yellowstone (especially its chapters on the environmental hazards caused by the post–Mission 66 construction of Grant Village). The 1915 debates about cars in Yellowstone were a prequel.
There’s another set of storylines, around the 1964 Wilderness Act, that exist in the same world. How do we define wilderness (and its opposite), and how do we bring those benefits to the ideal number of people without degrading wilderness itself? Every story about the buildup to that Act, and every story of perceived threats to wilderness (from climate change to recreational overuse), is another movie in that world.
We all love parks and wilderness for being not-civilization. But as members of civilization seeking to appreciate wilderness, we debate our own impacts. In the complaint from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) about inappropriate wi-fi fee waivers, I heard concern about capitalism in national parks. In other words, here was an allusion to a different-but-intersecting set of storylines, including fights against dams such as Hetch Hetchy, the role of advertising in wilderness, the origins of the parks’ concessions system, and the way Mission 66 nearly broke those concessions.
What distinguishes a cinematic universe from a series of linked sequels is having multiple intersecting storylines within a single continuity. As Reddior JGorgon said, “you might like Iron Man, but Iron Man is going to show up in films like Civil War, and to understand Civil War you have to watch Captain America's films, because all of these adventures are taking place in one continuity.”
Substitute David Brower for Iron Man and Mission 66 for Captain America. You might like Brower, the charismatic Sierra Club leader who defeated the Echo Park Dam and arguably kicked off the modern environmental movement. But he shows up in Mission 66: Yosemite (“Coming this summer: In a world of unparalleled natural beauty, the people want a better road—but this maverick has a bolder plan!”).
Personally, I’ve never gotten into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It seems like way too much to keep track of, for too little payoff. I fear that the characters will feel too flat, like comic-book heroes, and their self-serious quests to save the world from imminent destruction will feel irrelevant to my everyday life. The critics say that Captain America: Civil War is a great movie about the conflict between individual freedom and collective accountability. But as someone who hasn’t yet bought into that cinematic universe, I didn’t bother to go.
As advocates for nature ponder our struggles in the sphere of public opinion, maybe we could ask: does the average American see the Mission 66 Cinematic Universe the same way?
Discussion:
Granted, despite its vast artistic merit, The Naked Gun series probably isn’t yet a cinematic universe. But what if next month’s reboot includes an appearance from Roger Murdock, Nick Rivers, jr., or Topper Harley!?!
I quote Wirth from Ethan Carr’s Mission 66, pp. 105-106, and from Mary Shivers Culpin’s “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People”: A History of the Concession Development in Yellowstone National Park, 1872–1966, p. 111.
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Hmm? I think I believe that there is nothing as civilized as wilderness.
Coincidentally today I read some words by and about Bob Marshall that you may find apropos—for example, this letter home:
‘Robert Marshall
Wiseman
Alaska
September 23, 1930
Dear Family et al:
And here I am, back again at Wiseman, after four ideal weeks
of exploration in the jagged wilderness between here and the Artic Divide. But this is the wrong end of my tale on which to begin.
Logically it commences on the afternoon of August 25 when
we took off from the Fairbanks flying field. We, meant Clara Carpenter (22 year old schoolmarm of Wiseman, returning from a visit outside), her big brother Lew (Wiseman miner), Al Retzlaf (my last year's partner), myself, Robbins (the pilot) and two goldfish which Clara was transporting to brave the Arctic winter.
As I'd taken the same 225 mile flight three times before there were few fresh thrills, except flying over the Yukon Flats (a vast plain, 40 miles wide and extending as far as the eye can see from 4,000 feet above it, just filled with a myriad of glistening ponds and the mile wide silver ribbon of the Yukon River) which is a fresh thrill each time and getting lost for a short while in a country in which there are five landing fields in 300,000 square miles. Robbins had only been into Wiseman once before, and the entire region north of the Yukon is so inadequately mapped that it's very easy to get mixed up. So when we came, flying
a little off course, to the place where the Jim, South Fork, Middle Fork, North Fork and Wild Rivers all come within a few miles of each other and all head in the same general direction we didn't know for a while which was which. It wasn't quite like being lost in an auto either, where you can stop and study the map at leisure, for here we were moving at 110 miles an hour and there wasn't a decent map anyway.
But pretty soon Lew picked out Wild Lake for which we were heading
and simultaneously Al and I recognized some of the topography of the North Fork which we had explored the summer before, so Robbins banked her sharply around and we returned to the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk which we had erroneously crossed.
The welcome awaiting us when we landed at Wiseman would seem
preposterous to anyone afflicted with the conventional notions about the stolid frontiersman. The instant I stepped out of the plane Martin Slisco, jovial roadhouse proprietor ran up and threw both arms around my neck. Little Willie English, seven-year-old Eskimo boy with whom I used to have hopping races last summer, was next and he jumped up and kissed me. Old Pete Dow, hard-bitten, cynical old sourdough of 32 Arctic winters, pretty nearly pumped my hand off and
his face was all cracked with smiles. And following them came all the others, for every soul in town, eskimo and white, was out at the field.
They greeted
me with everything from just a warm handshake and a "Well, Bob," to a regular pumping and a long conversation…’