The national park movement has been evolving for more than a century, and it is by no means complete. The movement grows as governments, scientists, and society seek ways to cope with climate change, protect endangered species, manage landscapes, and to simply set aside more space for recreation and preservation.

And this varies from country to country. Around the world you’ll find parks that encompass working communities, such as the Lake District National Park in Great Britain. There are parks with little, if any, infrastructure, and which harbor great biodiversity, such as Chiquibul National Park in Belize. And there are parks that protect resources and give local communities and visitors access, such as Lampi Marine National Park in Myanmar.

The national park movement has expanded globally from the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, and this book from the University of Oklahoma Press offers a collection of essays and papers that examine how different nations interpreted, and implemented, the parks movement on their own landscapes.

National Parks Beyond the Nation, Global Perspectives on “America’s Best Idea” has case studies from New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Indonesia, and other countries. These show the different approaches to park creation and management. Argentina’s first park, for example, came from a donation of 23,000 acres from Francisco Pascasio Moreno, who had helped negotiate that country’s border with Chile. Moreno, who also guided Theodore Roosevelt through Patagonia, made the donation with the caveat that the land be protected as Parque Nacional del Sur. Today it’s known as Perito Moreno National Park.

And land donations continue to expand the national park movement, as seen in the last year’s establishment of Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine and the recent commitment to create five parks in Chile.

The book’s first chapter, Beyond the Best Idea, touches on one of the foundational reasons nations create parks:

“National parks help bound the nation both physically and culturally. Physically, nation-states have used parks to define their territorial sovereignty. Culturally, parks supply powerful narratives that identify who is in and who is out with regard to imagined national communities. For these reasons people in many parts of the world have come to equate national parks with nations.”

And yet, the authors tell us, “Mount Rainier, Antarctica, and the other regions this book explores, however, reveal the myopia of framing national parks that way. Parks are at once much bigger and much smaller than the nation-states that house them. By refusing to stop at the borders, the essays productively and humanely draw our attention beyond the nation.”

National Parks Beyond the Nation tracks the global national park movement, and reveals what parks mean to different cultures, and the roles they play nationally.