History
King Devanampiya Tissa of Sri Lanka established one of the world's earliest wildlife sanctuaries in the 3rd century BC. However, dating back to antiquity there are various cultural practices that equate roughly to the establishment and maintaining of reserved areas for biota including fish, waterfowl and other animals. These would often have a religious underpinning—for example the 'evil forest' areas of West Africa were forbidden to humans, who were threatened with spiritual attack if they went there. Sacred areas taboo from human entry to fishing and hunting are known by many ancient cultures worldwide.
In the modern era, the Drachenfels (Siebengebirge) is credited as being the first nature reserve. The site was bought by the Prussian State in 1836 to protect it from further quarrying. The first major nature reserve was Yellowstone National Park, followed by the Royal National Park near Sydney, Australia and Il'menskii zapovednik of Soviet Russia in 1920—the first of its kind set up by a federal government entirely for the scientific study of nature.
Read more about this topic: Nature Reserve
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)