Polytropy

I’m going to make some comparisons here, even some likenings, mainly between

• Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), especially chapter 2, and
• Wendell Berry, “Conservation is Good Work” (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1993; reprinted in Essays 1993–2017, Library of America, 2019).

Pirsig recounts a motorcycle trip west from Minnesota across the prairie. The riders pass through Yellowstone National Park, but Pirsig does not like it. At least his former self did not like it. This is in chapter 12 of ZAMM:

The guided-tour attitude of the rangers angered him. The Bronx Zoo attitudes of the tourists disgusted him even more … It seemed an enormous museum with exhibits carefully manicured to give the illusion of reality, but nicely chained off so that children would not injure them.

For Berry, such parks set the wrong standard for what should be conserved:

Right at the heart of American conservation, from the beginning, has been the preservation of spectacular places. The typical American park is in a place that is “breathtakingly” beautiful or wonderful and of little apparent economic value. Mountains, canyons, deserts, spectacular landforms, geysers, waterfalls – these are the stuff of parks. There is, significantly, no prairie national park.

I do see that Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve was created in Kansas in 1996.

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