The
first Nature Center Centennial – Yosemite Valley 1910
by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
 |
| Primroses and Half Dome |
Today
all of us are familiar with nature centers. We know there will be
photos, illustrations, exhibits, items we can buy that allow us to
better understand the world of nature and the history that
accompanies it, usually specific to that location. Nature centers
came from the idea that it would be well if we understood the natural
world, being a part of it. The year after next will mark the
centennial of the modern nature center, an event to be celebrated.
We
take for granted those educational resources, familiar with their
use of movies, lectures, specimens to explain to the curious the
natural world. That was not the case a century ago.
The
first such center was located near the Yosemite Chapel next to what
was once the road that turned towards the Valley wall. Now that
'road' runs through the parking lot there. There is no marker. That
first nature center occupied the small space alloted to the Studio of
the Three Arrows, owned by Arthur C. Pillsbury, who had always been
fascinated by the world of nature and saw the need to save the wild
flowers then being mowed in the meadows of Yosemite. He could have
protested, gathered petitions and appealed to Congress. Instead he
decided that if people could 'see' the world of nature in all of its
beauty and complexity they would love it, understand their
connection, and ensure its survival.
Pillsbury said
in his book, “Picturing Miracles of Plant and Animal Life,”
published in 1937, “One of the first reactions of seeing a reel of
flowers growing and opening was to instill a love for them, a
realization of their life struggles so similar to ours, and to wish
to do something to stop the ruthless destruction of them which was
fast causing them to become extinct.”
Pillsbury had
first arrived in Yosemite on his bicycle from Stanford in 1895 along
with his cousin, Bernard Lane, and a friend. There, he signed the
guest book at the Cosmopolitan. His trip had been motivated by a
mention of the glories of the Yosemite by an acquaintance of his
mother's, Susan B. Anthony. That year marked Anthony's last trip to
the Yosemite, this time without her long time friend and fellow
advocate for the rights of women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Dr. Harriet
Foster Pillsbury had gotten her degree in medicine at the Women's
Infirmary of New York in 1880, three years before she and her
husband, Dr. Harlin Henry Pillsbury, moved their family to Auburn,
California, where young Arthur and his brother Ernest, were raised.
Arthur
Pillsbury had grown up on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry
David Thoreau. In the collection of small classics that accompanied
him when ever he traveled, were well worn copies of their works.
Arthur's
interest in nature began with cataloging plants and studying the
ideas of Mendel; using the two microscopes his parents had brought
with them to California. The family had also brought a massive
library of books on all subjects relating to science. Yosemite was
more beauty than Pillsbury had ever imagined possible. He fell in
love with the place and all that he saw.
Arthur had
begun attending Stanford University with a major in Mechanical
Engineering its first year of operation. To earn his tuition he ran
a combined photography and bicycle shop near campus. While at
Stanford he invented a specimen slicer for microscopic slides and the
first circuit panorama camera. Each came into existence to solve a
problem he had encountered. The slicer was used for his own
microscope and the circuit panorama allowed him to take in the vast
spaces he encountered in nature.
While
in Yosemite in 1895 Pillsbury had taken photos of the wildflowers.
He would later write for his book, “I had still pictures taken of
the meadows taken in early days in '95 showing them covered with
flowers waist high and the same meadows as they were at this time.”
He
had grown up hearing and reading and understanding that world through
the lens of science so he used the then exploding technology of
photography as his tool for helping others see as well.
Conservation
had become a national issue through the bully pulpit of Teddy
Roosevelt and the writings of Gifford Pinchot, whose book, “The
Fight for Conservation,” framed the political debate on the
subject. becoming , along with Herbert Croly's, “The Promise of
American Life,” two of just a few books that would frame the Age of
Collectivism in America.
Awakening
understanding of nature itself and trusting the people to do right
was different, contradicting the underlying assumptions of the New
Progressivism that a cadre of leaders who 'knew best' should
determine the future for everyone.
This
became the first confrontation between the knowledge commons, the
network, which today in the age of the Internet, we see as allowing
individuals to cooperate through persuasion and consensus, and the
rigid, top down approach typified by government and corporations.
Over the next century the steady increase in human knowledge and the
parallel growth of control through the alliance of government and
corporations would compromise the very survival of humankind. It was
a conflict between individualism and collectivism, open information
sources and closed sources. This conflict in organizational
structure would define the entire 20th Century.
Today
we recognize that sharing knowledge is an essential aspect of
freedom. Then, the view that people should know only what made them
useful, interchangable cogs, was ascendant and fashionable.
It
was a war of ideas that has only recently been decided.
On May
13, 1908, President
Theodore Roosevelt delivered the opening address, "Conservation
as a National Duty," at the outset of a three-day meeting billed
as the Governors' Conference on the Conservation of Natural
Resources. He explained to the attendees that "the occasion for
the meeting lies in the fact that the natural resources of our
country are in danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful
methods of exploiting them longer to continue." The conference
propelled conservation issues into the forefront of public
consciousness and stimulated a large number of private and
state-level conservation initiatives. A new role for government was
being forged, one that would prove useful to corporations.
The past was
filled with incidents of individuals abusing the environment, but it
was nothing to what corporations, with the cooperation of government,
would do in the coming years.
Writers such as
John Muir were moved by the real and present problems in the Yosemite
caused by, “cattlemen, shepherds and land speculators.”
An
article from American Park Network reports on Muir's thinking,
“One summer, with his trusty mule Brownie, he had traveled
extensively in the Sierra Nevada to study the threatened territory.
He was exhilarated each time he encountered an alpine meadow of
wildflowers but also wondered if their kind would survive to witness
the 20th century. His arguments for preserving them included their
value as watersheds for the water-dependent San Joaquin Valley
agricultural industry. Muir worked ceaselessly to keep Yosemite
intact and in its original state. Among his many notable
accomplishments, Muir was a charter member and the first president of
the Sierra Club which was formed in 1892 to secure federal protection
for the Yosemite region. He died on December 24, 1914, at the age of
76. “
Seeing a
problem Muir had looked for a solution. But he did so without
understanding that the means adopted will mold the future. The 20th
Century would be marked by solutions using government to coerce
outcomes instead of relying on the use of consensus and persuasion as
the tools appropriate to a free people. Muir loved nature but his
solutions were based on the idea that only with the intervention of
force wielded by government could nature be protected.
The opposite
theory that drove a lifetime of inventions for Arthur C. Pillsbury
was the observed fact that if people could 'see' the world as it was,
with its processes and beauty made visible for them, they would
connect to that reality and be moved to understanding and so wish to
protect what they saw.
To accomplish
the preservation of the wild flowers and open nature to understanding
Pillsbury made the first nature movie, built the first lapse-time
camera to for plants in 1912, the first microscopic motion picture
camera in 1927, the first X-ray motion picture camera and the first
Underwater Motion Picture Cameras in 1929 and 1930. He then declined
to patent them so that they would always be available to extend our
understanding.
Instead of
following the usual practices of inventors in his day Arthur C.
Pillsbury dedicated all of his cameras to the extension of human
understanding. His book, “Picturing Miracles of Plant and Animal
Life,” published by Lippincott in 1937 is essentially a manual on
how to build your own cameras and achieve the same results.
By do doing he
employed action to make a statement about the profit he most valued
from his life.
An explosion of
understanding resulted. In the first half of the 20th
Century insights flowing from the reality of the world of nature
provided new approaches in medicine, physics, and every other
discipline. Today we talk about the idea that there should be a
commons in knowledge, unbound by the limits of individual ownership.
Sometimes philosophy is something you live instead of something you
just write and talk about.
Ideas adopted
by individuals are passed by example and through the flow of our life
experiences. Through that steady adoption of ideas through families,
educators, and the day to day exchanges of life we compile our
culture.
The first
nature films were shown on the porch of the Studio in the evenings,
starting by 1910. The flickering images were the backdrop to his
lecture on the habits of the flowers found in the meadows. This
venture into providing a new perspective on the living world would
soon be followed by more, using the photography to provide a visceral
understanding and appreciation. It helped but still the mowing
continued.
He had seen the
first lapse-time camera slow down motion at Berkeley. He decided
that the same idea could be applied to bringing the motion of the
flowers into a human frame of reference. He also realized that the
attention span of most people was limited.
“I realized
that a scene had to be very dramatic to to hold the interest for over
30 seconds,” Pillsbury wrote in his book; he went on to explain how
he had thought out each step in the motion picture process he
originated.
When he began
work on the lapse-time camera to record the life story of plants, the
idea of spending time preserving wild flowers was not on the horizon
for those who then thought of themselves as Conservationists. The
year was 1912 and the Sierra Club, lead by John Muir, who loved and
wrote about flowers himself, was focused on the problem of the
Hetch-Hetchy that would keep him busy until his death. Arthur had
gotten to know John Muir in the late 1800s, photographing him in
Alaska, Yosemite and for the magazine, Camera Craft, in 1900.
Muir chose Pillsbury's photos for his last book, "The Yosemite," in 1911.
The mowing of
the meadows was ended after one showing of his first film in 1912.
Pillsbury's approach had worked immediately.
You could
characterize the work of Arthur C. Pillsbury as the last gasp of
individualism, struggling to survive the deluge of collectivism that
was then over taking America. Or you could see him as the first to
see that technology could bring forth understanding that would, one
mind at time, change the world.
