Coastal parks for a metropolitan nation: How postwar politics and urban growth shaped America's shores.

摘要

Between 1961 and 1975, the United States established thirteen of the nation's fourteen National Seashores and Lakeshores. This unprecedented, nation-wide initiative to conserve America's coasts transformed how the National Park Service made parks, catalyzed the shift in conservation definitions in America, and created new conservation coalitions that paved the way for the environmental movement. The Department of the Interior began shoreline park establishment as a concerted effort to protect the nation's more natural shores from the tourist development rapidly covering American coasts in the post-World War II period. The Park Service's urgency on coastal conservation arose from concerns of overdevelopment, overpopulation, and overuse. America's coastal buy-up began as a federal initiative, a top-down bureaucratic idea presented to local communities to provide increased recreational opportunities. By the mid-1960s, however, new coalitions begged the Park Service to conserve the shorelines into their backyards. This dissertation considers five case studies, all coasts proposed for federal protection in the late 1950s and all near metropolitan areas that experienced significant suburban expansion in the postwar period.