Abstract
Recent calls to ‘bring the animals back in’ to geography have produced some excellent explorations of the ‘nature/culture borderlands’. Those borderlands are perhaps never more fluid than in places where a national park meets a so-called ‘gateway community’; and when a private company recently proposed to build a tourist attraction where small local fauna would be displayed in plexiglass environments in Estes Park, Colorado (gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park), a maelstrom of controversy erupted. Although it was approved by the town’s board of trustees, the proposed Rocky Mountain Interpretive Wildlife Center project was stalled after an election in which the town’s citizens passed a measure prohibiting the exhibition of caged animals because their presence was found to be contrary to the ‘character or nature of the Estes Park community’. This paper explores the local process by which what appeared on the surface to be an argument about how and where wild animals should live turned out to be rooted in classic geographical questions of space, sense of place, insiders and outsiders, land use, power, political process, and the veracity of the so-called nature/culture divide. Crucial to the discussion are the roles which competing ways and modes of seeing played in determining the appropriateness of development in the Estes Park landscape.
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