A Very Large Array: Early Federal Historic Preservation - The Antiquities Act, Mesa Verde, and the National Park Service Act

This issue of the Natural Resources Journal encompasses a “very large array” of articles, to borrow the name of one of New Mexico’s wonders on the Plains of San Augustine southwest of Albuquerque and the title of National Park Service historian Richard Sellar’s history of the beginnings of the long esteemed and recently embattled agency for which he works. The “large array” in this issue runs the gamut from the economic evaluation of ecological services, a critical issue in the balancing of Forest Service multiple uses, to the real future of collaboration in environmental decision making. Some of these articles came across our threshold, as they say in the publishing world, “unsolicited” and others arrived from authors who previously had written for the Journal. But no article in this issue so embodies the spirit of this publication as does the Sellars’ article on the beginnings of the Park Service.