by Emrys Westacott
I have just spent nine days visiting a few of the great national parks of the American South West. In aesthetics, there is a well-known distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, a distinction made popular in the 18th century by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Roughly speaking, the experience of the beautiful is purely pleasurable, and it is prompted by forms that exhibit grace and proportion such as one finds in a flower, a face, or a well-tended garden. The experience of the sublime, by contrast, contains an element of fear, and is typically produced by what seems to exceed our powers of comprehension. Forbidding mountains, dizzying chasms, raging seas and the like are paradigmatically sublime in this sense. They are literally awesome in that they inspire awe.
The distinction is less pronounced for us than for people back in the 18th century. Our technological power has diminished our fear of nature, so we feel less uneasy when we encounter the sublime, especially in the managed environment of a national park. 
Capitol Reef National Park receives far fewer visitors than the better known parks in Utah such as Zion, Bryce, and Arches. But the scenery it offers is every bit as spectacular and rather more varied. Capitol Reef extends along a great fold in the earth's crust. Subsequent erosion has exposed numerous multicolored strata and produced a vast array of weird and wonderful rock formations, including arches, slot canyons, and waterpockets. Here, geological time is rendered visible.
Only 85 miles North West of Death Valley, at the edge of Sequoia National Park, is Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States. OK, so I didn't climb Mount Whitney; we were headed for the Eastern part of Sequoia. But the contrast between the extreme desert and the wooded slopes of the snow-capped mountains in the Sierra Nevada just a few hours away is still astonishing. There are certainly contrasting landscapes in countries like Britain, Spain, or France; but nothing to compare with this range of scenery over such a short distance.
Sequoia National Park is famed for its massive sequoia tress, among the largest trees on earth, some of them over 3,000 years old. Just as contemplating the rock rainbows in Capitol Reef, laid down over hundreds of millions of years, puts a human lifespan into perspective, so does walking around inside a sequoia provide a useful corrective to any inflated sense of self-importance.
From ridges and peaks in Sequoia National Park there are many wonderful vistas. It's hard to imagine anything more magnificent. Then you arrive at Yosemite. 
In the parking lot at Yosemite I noticed a car sporting a bumper sticker that read, “Don't steal! The government hates competition.” This sort of hostility toward the federal government has been commonplace among conservative-minded Americans for many years now. Those who embrace it typically lionize Ronald Reagan, who famously said that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” This is the attitude that animates Tea Party Republicans, NRA extremists, and people like Ammon Bundy, the anti-government activist who recently led a an armed occupation of a wildlife refuge in Oregon.. It is probably also common among many of those who view Donald Trump as an “outsider” who will shake things up in Washington.
This blanket hostility toward government is, in most cases, ignorant and stupid; and the national parks are a shining example of just how enlightened government policy can enhance the quality of life for millions. Largely because of Republicans in Congress who consistently seek to reduce government spending on just about everything other than the military, the National Park Service is severely underfunded. Yet the parks generally do a fantastic job of handling huge numbers of visitors, maintaining trails and campgrounds, and providing all sorts of services, including information centers, museums, ranger-led walks, lectures, and activities to inspire “junior rangers” with a life long love of nature. They could undoubtedly do a better job, were they given the money. Such an investment would be small as a proportion of the total federal budget, and would probably more than pay for itself through encouraging tourism. But implacable anti-government ideology is deaf to rational argument.
A key part of the mission of the Park Service is to preserve natural and cultural resources for future generations to enjoy. Those who despise government should consider how things would stand now were Yosemite, Sequoia, and similar natural treasures privately owned. Many areas of great beauty might have been irretrievably spoiled by unfettered industrial, agricultural or commercial activity. 