We all have favorite things. A favorite color. Perhaps a favorite flower. Or maybe a favorite bird.
The flip side of that is that we also have things we hate. Or at least strongly dislike. One of the things I have been working through is whether the things that have made it on my dislike list really deserve to be there.
The idea of the national park is 150 years old today. On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed an act setting aside Yellowstone as a public park. It wasn’t the plan, but it ended up being the first of many. Over the century and a half that followed, the United States added another 62 parks and hundreds more federally-protected scenic areas, monuments, seashores and rivers.
The concept of the national park has been called “America’s best idea,” but as Yellowstone has shown, the idea itself has evolved dramatically over the years.
