Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park (Environment in History: International Perspectives)

The history of the Swiss National Park, from its creation in the years before the Great War to the present, is told for the first time in this book. Unlike Yellowstone Park, which embodied close cooperation between state-supported conservation and public recreation, the Swiss park put in place an extraordinarily strong conservation program derived from a close alliance between the state and scientific research. This deliberate reinterpretation of the American idea of the national park was innovative and radical, but its consequences were not limited to Switzerland. The Swiss park became the prime example of a “scientific national park,” thereby influencing the course of national parks worldwide. Patrick Kupper is Senior Lecturer for environmental history and history of science and technology at ETH Zurich. He authored Atomenergie und gespaltene Gesellschaft: Die Geschichte des gescheiterten Projektes Kernkraftwerk Kaiseraugst (2003), co-authored Transforming the Future: ETH Zurich and the Construction of Modern Switzerland 1855-2005 (2010) and Geschichte des Nationalparks Hohe Tauern (2013), and co-edited the volume Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective (2012).