The Importance of Art in Protecting Public Lands

Paintings and photographs were instrumental in creating Yellowstone, and art remains crucial to conservation efforts today

Mar 01, 2026

“The withdrawal of this tract [of public land] will be regarded by the entire civilized world as a step of progress and an honor to Congress and the nation.” - U.S. House Committee on Public Lands report supporting the establishment of Yellowstone National Park (February 27, 1871)

Yellowstone did not enter into the shared American conscious as the result of a scientific conclusion. It arrived as an image, brought back east in pigments, silver salts, and stories vivid enough to make East Coasters—including, importantly, politicians—believe in a place they had never seen.

In the decades after the Civil War, the United States was expanding at a velocity that outpaced comprehension.

Railroads started stitching the continent together. Newspapers made distant events feel local. Euro-American pioneers and homesteaders traveled into the sunset, searching for opportunities and a better life. And the American West—still a blur of rumor to most people in Washington and the East Coast—was being inventoried for what could be extracted, settled, and sold.

In that world, the broad concept of “conservation” did not exist. It had to be taught. Art helped teach it.

When Ferdinand V. Hayden led the first federally funded scientific survey of the Yellowstone region in 1871, he wasn’t simply collecting rock samples and measurements. He was building a case that would have to survive political skepticism, boosterish exaggeration, and the simple human problem of disbelief: the gushing geysers sounded like tall tales, the canyon colors like frontier fantasy.

Hayden’s four-month expedition explored and documented a landscape so geologically strange and unfamiliar that even accurate descriptions could come across as unbelievable. Just like it’s still the case today, most people had to see something with their own eyes to believe it.

So Hayden brought witnesses trained not only to observe, but to show. He brought artists.

Those were, of course, photographer William Henry Jackson and England-born painter Thomas Moran—two masters of their art working in different mediums, both capable of turning “you had to be there” into “now you’ve seen it.”

Their works became what the National Archives later called “powerful testimonials,” transporting Yellowstone’s scale and grandeur across two thousand miles to the capital.

The camera mattered because it carried a new kind of authority—people were fascinated by this technological miracle. Jackson’s photographs were not decorative. They were evidence. A photograph said: this actually exists. This isn’t a campfire story. It’s not a promoter’s hyperbole. It is real. Jackson’s work—made with bulky equipment under punishing conditions—helped establish Yellowstone as something the nation could claim as fact, not folklore.

Painting mattered for the opposite reason. Moran’s Yellowstone was not just documentation—it was interpretation. It was an argument about value. The West in black-and-white could look remote, harsh, and empty. Moran, in vibrant color and light and shadow, evoked emotions. During roughly forty days in the Yellowstone region, he documented dozens of sites. His sketches and paintings, paired with Jackson’s photographs, helped capture national attention.

This is the quiet genius of art in public life: it doesn’t only show you what exists. It tells you what it means.

The Hayden Geological Survey officially ended on October 2, 1871.

By the time Hayden returned to Washington, D.C., his report came armed—literally illustrated—with materials that could do political work. Hayden pressed his findings and advocated for protection, while the images did their own lobbying without speaking a word.

Virtually no one in Congress had ever seen Yellowstone themselves, so drawings and photographs mattered.

Then the transformation happened—incredibly fast, especially by the standards of the federal government.

The following December 18, 1871, just a couple of months after the expedition had ended, two similar bills—H.R. 764 and S. 392—were introduced in Congress “[t]o set apart a certain tract of land lying near the head-waters of the Yellowstone River as a public park.” Both bills gave the Department of the Interior authority to manage the future park.

On February 27, 1872, the House Committee on Public Lands published a report supporting the creation of a national park. It said:

“This whole region was in comparatively modern geological times the scene of the most wonderful volcanic activity of any portion of our country. The hot springs and the geysers represent the last stages – the vents or escape-pipes – of these remarkable volcanic decorations more beautiful than human art ever conceived, and which have required thousands of years for the cunning hand of nature to form.

It also offered a stark warning, a compelling reason to protect Yellowstone:

Persons are now waiting for the spring [season] to open to enter in and take possession of these remarkable curiosities, to make merchandise of these beautiful specimens, to fence in these rare wonders so as to charge visitors a fee, as is now done at Niagara Falls, for the sight of which ought to be as free as the air or water.”

The report concluded with this powerful statement:

The withdrawal of this tract […] from sale or settlement take[s] nothing from the value of the public domain, and is no pecuniary loss to the Government, but will be regarded by the entire civilized world as a step of progress and an honor to Congress and the nation.

The same day, the House voted on the Senate bill, passing it 115 to 65, with 60 representatives not voting.

Just three days later—less than five months after the Hayden expedition ended—on March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act establishing Yellowstone as “a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” The law reserved the area and withdrew it “from settlement, occupancy, or sale.”

Read those phrases again.

“Benefit and enjoyment” is not the language of ore assays or timber tallies. It’s the language of a society—and its government—admitting that not everything valuable can be counted in immediate profit.

Yellowstone’s founding as the world’s first national park wasn’t just a conservation milestone. It was a cultural decision, an agreement that beauty, wonder, and shared experience are legitimate reasons for public policy.

That’s why art was not peripheral to Yellowstone. It was central.

The park required something America didn’t have much practice with at the time: a democratic imagination large enough to value a landscape for reasons other than extraction.

Moran’s canvases and Jackson’s plates expanded that imagination.

Consider the kind of work Moran’s Yellowstone paintings perform. His works were like religious revelations—canyons opening like cathedrals, steam rising like incense, pulpits presenting themselves all along the rim.

In his most famous Yellowstone-related works, including, above all, the marvelous and massive The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone—a painting that feels like you could just step into it—the scale is not simply scenic. It’s moral and philosophical. The human figures, if present at all, are small. The message is clear: this place dwarfs us. Therefore, let’s treat it with humility, care, and respect.

This, too, is how conservation movements begin—with a changed sense of relationship, with a realization that we’re all part of the same natural world, that a healthy society depends on a healthy environment. People protect what they feel connected to.

Art creates that connection.

And that is why today’s battles over cultural institutions are not a side story to conservation—they’re part of the same story Yellowstone tells.

In 2025, the Trump administration’s FY26 budget outline called for eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)—the federal backbone for grants that sustain local museums, libraries, community arts programs, historical projects, and public scholarship.

Reporting by The Washington Post at the time described the same proposal as also targeting other cultural support structures, with real-world fallout including grant cancellations and institutional disruption.

The playbook is clear: weaken the institutions that help a society remember, interpret, celebrate, enjoy, and imagine in order to make the public sphere smaller, meaner, and easier to manipulate.

Museums, libraries, archives, public broadcasting, arts councils, humanities programs: these are not luxuries added onto an established democracy. They are the very foundations of a functioning democracy.

Art is what keeps a democracy democratic.

In fact, it is what helped spark the American Revolution in the first place. You only need to look at Paul Revere’s 1770 engraving The Boston Massacre to feel how powerful a simple sketch can be.

Art, quite literally, has changed the course of history. It can also influence what happens in the future.

Whether it’s photography, videography, graphic design, drawing, writing, stand-up comedy, poetry, protest signs, memes, or music, creativity helps to hold leaders accountable. Art is what allows common people to push back and protest against things they don’t agree with. Art is almost impossible for (aspiring) authoritarians or kings to fight against. King George III would know.

And art is what created Yellowstone National Park, and ultimately the entire national park system, which Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan famously called “the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape” in their phenomenal documentary series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.

Yellowstone National Park did not arise solely because the science was compelling—though it was. It arose because the story was compelling, and art helped tell it in a way that made protection feel not merely rational, but necessary.

Once you’ve seen Yellowstone through Moran’s luminous canyon walls and vibrant hot spring or Jackson’s stark evidence, it becomes harder to reduce the place to acreage on a ledger, to mere coordinates on a map. The images insist on a different kind of citizenship—one that includes stewardship of public lands.

When cultural institutions are defunded or abolished altogether, that doesn’t just mean “programs” get cut.

It means decimating the nation’s ability to see itself clearly and to care beyond the next quarterly return or shareholders meeting. It means slashing the civic transmission belts that carry knowledge into meaning. It means shrinking the public’s opportunity to experience awe—and awe happens to be one of the emotions most likely to turn private admiration into public protection and support.

That’s the thread from 1871 to now.

Hayden needed art and awe because Congress needed to see and feel. We still need that now—arguably more than ever.

The threats are different—climate stress, biodiversity loss, political polarization, capture of public lands policy by private industry interests—but the human bottleneck is the same: if people cannot imagine, experience, and emotionally feel the worth of a shared inheritance, they will not defend one.

Yellowstone National Park, perhaps more than anything else ever created in the United States, provides irrefutable evidence that art can do more than decorate a society.

It can enlarge it. It can make a remote landscape feel like a shared responsibility. It can push lawmakers—briefly, rarely, and magnificently—toward the long view.

Established on March 1, 1872, Yellowstone—the world’s first national park—was, in a literal sense, painted and photographed into being.

When we starve the institutions that produce and preserve art, we don’t just lose culture. We lose one of the most reliable tools we have for protecting and advocating for conservation in the first place—for defending and improving democracy itself.

Art matters.

So, in this Yellowstone National Park birthday weekend—and the weeks, months, and years to come—let’s continue to celebrate, dabble in, and practice art, in all its forms.

Let’s keep sharing our photos, drawings, paintings, write-ups, op-eds, poems, and songs.

Let’s keep using our amazing American creativity and ingenuity to keep fighting for our public lands, waters, wildlife, and the enduring democratic experiment that is the United States of America.

Art has helped create the national parks—let’s build on that idea and strengthen our public lands coalition and movement.