Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, was created in 1872. It took rather longer for politicians to set up an agency to actually oversee such places: they got around to that in 1916. So the US National Park Service celebrates its centenary this year.

The agency also marked a shift in the way people think about parks. Yellowstone, which lies mostly in Wyoming, has little in common with the manicured gardens enjoyed by European gentry or admired by ancient Chinese kings. It and other huge, wild national parks are places where nature can supposedly be seen unmodified and unadorned, far from the pollution and bustle of cities.

Like much contemporary thinking, this rather ignores the history of native peoples and their stewardship of swathes of land before the arrival of Europeans. But this relatively new idea of parks as a wild refuge from the modern world has taken root. The United States’ national parks have become some of the most iconic places in the country. Yellowstone and Glacier National Park in Montana rival the White House and the Smithsonian as tourist attractions.

Similarly beloved national parks exist in other countries. The United Kingdom protected the Peak District in 1951 and now has 15 national parks. China started to protect nature reserves in the 1950s and now has jewels such as the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park and Jiuzhaigou nature reserve. In 2007, Pudacuo National Park became what is sometimes claimed to be the country’s first true ‘national park’ (as it reaches standards laid down by the International Union for Conservation of Nature).

It has even been suggested that cities themselves can be parks, rather than just containing them. A campaign has been launched to have London declared a kind of urban national park. This might seem a backwards device — in general, parks are established in beautiful places that people love, not established to make places beautiful and encourage people to love them. But it goes to show the affection that many feel towards places classified as parks, be they vast national expanses or local patches of scrubby grass.

Setting aside an area as a park should not be used as a fig leaf for a lack of a wider environmental approach.

This affection is not based solely on a misty-eyed yearning for the outdoors. There is an evidence base that parks are a good thing. Many studies have confirmed that they come with significant benefits. They seem to make people who use them healthier and happier. They make local ecosystems more diverse and more resilient. They can even help to mitigate climate change to a small degree.

But not everyone is happy when land is set aside in parks and other uses are limited. In the United States, a group of armed men have seized — and, as Nature went to press, were still in control of — the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Although there are a plethora of issues related to that act of insurgency, this event is linked to a dispute over attempts by the federal government to control cattle grazing so as to protect a species of tortoise.

This situation might be extreme. But the story of conflict between park authorities and people who may once have worked inside park boundaries, or who wish to work there, is universal. Last week, 60 non-governmental organizations again raised the issue of threats to the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the last remaining strongholds for mountain gorillas. The prospect of drilling for oil in the park itself has been of concern in the past, and environmental groups are now warning that oil drilling in nearby Uganda could harm the ecosystem of which the park forms a part.

Things have been equally fraught at sea. As governments have created more and more ‘marine protected areas’, fishermen have railed against being excluded from waters they once hauled nets in. Researchers have questioned whether many of these areas are actually protecting what needs to be safeguarded. And there are questions about just how protected some of these areas are, and whether countries are gaming systems to hit international targets.

The spirit of international targets to protect 17% of terrestrial areas and 10% of marine areas certainly intends that they be reached by protecting places that warrant support, not those that are easy to protect because no one cares about exploiting what is there.

Paradoxically, as it becomes ever more apparent that we need to protect areas of outstanding beauty and delicate ecology, it is becoming increasingly clear that it is not enough to do only this. Setting aside an area as a park should not be used as a fig leaf for a lack of a wider environmental approach. Cities, agricultural landscapes, wasteland and seas open to industry all need to be managed in a sensible and planned fashion.

We need more parks. But the real challenge is to make people treat the whole planet with the respect that most show to their parks.