“Why should not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth,’— our forests, not to hold the king’s game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation,— not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation? or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?”

-Henry David Thoreau, 1853

(63 years before the establishment of the United States Park Service)