Ronald and Nelani Walker Lecture
"Framing Nature at the Grand Canyon: Creating an American Icon"
The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is an internationally known feature of the North American landscape, attracting more than five million visitors each year. A deep cultural, visual, and social history has shaped the Grand Canyon’s environment into one of America’s most significant representations of nature. Yet the canyon is more than a vacation destination, a movie backdrop, or a scenic viewpoint; it is a real place as well as an abstraction easily summoned in the minds of Americans. The Grand Canyon, or the idea of it, is woven into the fabric of American cultural identity and serves as a cultural reference point—an icon.
In Framing Nature, Yolonda Youngs traces the idea of the Grand Canyon as an icon and the ways people came to know it through popular imagery and visual media. She analyzes and interprets more than fourteen hundred visual artifacts, including postcards, maps, magazine illustrations, and photographs of the Grand Canyon, supplemented with the words and ideas of writers, artists, explorers, and other media makers from 1869 to 2022. Youngs considers the manipulation and commodification of visual representations and shifting ideas, values, and meanings of nature, exploring the interplay between humans and their environments and how visual representations shape popular ideas and meanings about national parks and the American West. Framing Nature provides a novel interpretation of how places, especially national parks, are transformed into national and environmental symbols.
Dr. Yolonda Youngs
Dr. Yolonda Youngs is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at California State University San Bernardino. Her expertise is in Long Term Environmental Monitoring (LTEM) in national parks and international protected areas, conservation of natural resources, environmental policy and management, outdoor recreation, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). She teaches classes in environmental sustainability, conservation and natural resources, field methods, national parks and public lands, environmental justice, social science GIS, and coastal resources management. She has written or co-authored over 30 journal articles, books, book chapters, and book reviews, scientific reports, and essays featuring her research across the U.S. National Park Service system. Her second book Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon (2024, University of Nebraska Press) won the 2025 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the American Association of Geographers, one of the highest awards in the discipline. Her first book is The American Environment Revisited: Environmental Historical Geographies of the United States (2019 paperback, with Dr. Geoffrey Buckley). Learn more about Dr. Youngs’ current and ongoing projects at https://www.csusb.edu/profile/yyoungs.
Students in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences gain Experience Points for attending this lecture. Learn more about Experience Points.