When we hike or bike in preserved space, such as a state or national park, we’re not just enjoying nature—we’re experiencing a contested political space. Take, for example, the Trump administration’s executive order on March 27, 2025, calling for the removal of any content on United States (U.S.) Department of the Interior properties—including National Park Service (NPS) sites—that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” or casts America in a “negative light.” Beyond its historical absurdity, the order is a clear example of government censorship that risks scrubbing parks of information about historically marginalized communities, which often include different, yet important stories of oppression, discrimination, and inequality. Because of this order, visitors to national parks, monuments, and other federally preserved outdoor spaces are now encountering signs asking them to report any “unpatriotic” information or exhibits. The impact of the order was on full display this past January, when NPS ordered the removal of exhibits on slavery and George Washington’s treatment of slaves at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. Spaces for recreation and leisure are marked by power struggles over who gets to define each space’s meaning and national significance.

The administration’s executive order is just one chapter in a long history of cultural and ideological struggles surrounding the preservation of perceived “nature,” “wilderness,” or other space deemed significant. In U.S. history, the roots run at least as far back as the nineteenth century, when members of what historian Roderick Nash termed a “wilderness cult” of Euro-American figures (President Theodore Roosevelt being one of them) called for the creation of national parks and wilderness preserves as counterpoints to the nation’s industrialization and urbanization. These predominantly male advocates saw parks and preserved spaces in terms of Euro-American pleasure and identity. Thus, as one example, the creation of the NPS involved the forced, violent dispossession of Native American peoples from those lands. U.S. history is tragically rife with examples of dominant groups using the preservation of natural spaces to advance their worldview and silence others.

To fully understand this issue – the contested meaning of preserved spaces – we would profit from thinking about it in terms of physical activity, recreation, leisure, and sport, for it is often through these activities that people come to understand the meaning of a space. Many visitors to national parks, monuments, and memorials will presumably be walking, hiking, biking, or otherwise engaging in recreational movement when they encounter informational displays about a space’s history.

Though the executive order targets things such as interpretive and other informational displays, this contested meaning of a preserved space lies in its very existence and the prescribed ways people are meant to physically use it. Take, for example, the Appalachian Trail, which is managed in partnership with the NPS and U.S. Forest Service. In my recent book Physical Culture and the Biopolitics of the International Garden City Movement, I explored the history of the Trail and its creation, specifically the ideas of the American forester and planner Benton MacKaye. It is understandable that many people today see the trail as an opportunity to engage in healthy, recreative hiking, but this neglects the cultural values that shaped MacKaye’s vision of wilderness recreation. In his original vision for the Trail, outlined in his 1928 book The New Exploration, MacKaye echoed the values of Progressive Era environmental reformers like Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold by seeing “nature” as a “resource” to be reaped through physical activity. Preserving nature spaces offered not only economic benefits (say, extractable “natural resources” and healthful, recuperative outdoor recreation for the nation’s workforce) but “social values” or “psychological resources,” which, for MacKaye, meant those values he associated with the Euro-American “pioneer” experience and men like the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who championed values of self-reliance and simple living amidst “nature.” For MacKaye, an Appalachian Trail was about more than creating an opportunity for strenuous recreation: he wanted to return those living in the metropolises of the Eastern Seaboard to the “frontier” spaces of early Euro-American history. It was at once a question of social value and healthful outdoor recreation.

MacKaye was explicit in seeing physical activity as a means for humans to obtain the supposed values of a preserved environment. Though industrialization signaled the end of “pioneering” engagement with the land, the economic and psychological value of the American wilderness could be preserved through sport, recreation, and other “arts” of “living in the open.” Through hiking, athletics, and camping, one can still derive the same masculine fruits of the natural environments as those Euro-American pioneers supposedly derived through the exploration and settlement of the western frontier. This is a vision of U.S. history based on the settler colonial myth that the frontier was an empty, “virgin” wilderness tamed by “rugged individual” pioneers, obscuring Indigenous peoples’ deep ties to the land and their violent colonization by the U.S. government and its settlers, the racial diversity of the west, the complex experiences of women who moved and lived out west, and the contradictory and often brutal realities of settler life. It’s this vision that informed and colored MacKaye’s Appalachian Trail project.

The point is this: preserved spaces are and have always been ideological and contested in meaning. The Trump administration’s executive order is harmful in its effects (historical censorship, the silencing of marginalized stories and perspectives) and deserving of condemnation, but preserved spaces will remain politically contested long after the sunsetting of the second Trump administration. The struggle to construct inclusive and multicultural spaces through preservation—spaces in which we can engage in recreation and learn about all its meanings for different groups of people—continues, as it must.

Author Biographical Note:

Samuel M. Clevenger is Assistant Professor of Sport Management at Towson University. His research centers on the history of sport and physical culture, the intersections of sport and cultural ideas of “nature,” and the envisaging of post-growth forms of physical culture.