The American Environmental Movement
Like most social movements, the American environmental movement is far from the homogenous, monolithic group it is often portrayed as in the popular media. Although a widely disparate group, all current expressions of environmentalism in the United States can be productively linked to one of two strains of early environmentalism, preservationism and conservationism. Environmental historians agree that the development of these expressions within the American environmental movement is marked by three major periods or waves (Shabecoff, 1993; McCormick, 1989; Sale, 1993). The influence of a number of noteworthy people and events is undeniable within each brand and each period of environmental advocacy. This section offers a truncated description of those principal people and events and then details the evolution of some of the many strains of environmentalism in the United States.
Just as it is impossible to define the environmental movement in uniform terms, it is equally impossible to pinpoint a definitive beginning of either preservationism or conservationism. Nevertheless, this recounting of these forms of engagement with the environment must begin somewhere; a good place to begin is at the dawn of a new nation, the United States. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a rise in the interest of natural history that powerfully influenced preservationism. This interest was in turn strongly influenced by a recurring fascination with biology and the study of the natural world in Romanticism. According to the Romantic view, wilderness areas need to be preserved in pristine states; “the Romantics saw nature as a system of necessary relationships that could not be disturbed without changing, perhaps destroying, the equilibrium of the whole” (McCormick, 1989, p. 11). The writings of George Perkins Marsh, and transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson inspired by the beauty of the North American wilderness, represent this pastoral view of nature.
Throughout the same period, the American style of conservationism developed from the European practices of forestry and resource management. By the nineteenth century, Europe had long been settled and exploited. Consequently, little unspoiled wilderness remained yet the demand for timber and other resources endured. With an emphasis on utilitarianism, European naturalists developed scientifically based management techniques to sustain the supply of commercially valuable natural resources while slighting the other components of ecosystems. For instance, trees were cultivated and harvested much like other agricultural crops without regard to commercially nonviable organisms found in natural forests. Having studied forestry techniques in Germany, a wealthy Pennsylvanian, Gifford Pinchot, was instrumental in bringing the ideas for a utilitarian management of land, water and natural resources to the United States.
As the nation expanded to the west, huge tracts of land were set aside under public domain. A conflict emerged over how these lands should be utilized and the division between conservationism and preservationism became firmly entrenched by the end of the nineteenth century. On one hand, the preservationists sought to have publics lands preserved solely for educational and recreational purposes. Energized by the writing and advocacy of John Muir, the preservationists witnessed a number of victories including the designation of two million acres in Wyoming as Yellowstone National Park and the establishment of the National Park system in 1872.
On the other hand, conservationists fought for economic utilization of the natural resources public lands had to offer, albeit in a managed, sustainable manner. Public lands, in the conservationist view, needed to be opened to the timber, mining, and agricultural industries for controlled and sustainable use. Pinchot and other conservationists found a strong ally in Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive party, called by one historian the “self appointed guardians of the public interest”. Under Roosevelt’s presidency, “Pinchot in effect became ‘Roosevelt’s Secretary of State for Conservation’ and resource management became a matter of public policy" (McCormick, 1989, p. 14). Incorporated into government bureaucracy as the U.S. Forest Service, the Inland Waterway Commission and other regulatory agencies, the conservationist approach to the management of natural resources became the predominant attitude towards the American wilderness areas.
The status of conservationism was reinforced by the business minded Republican party of the 1920s and subsequently fit well with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal ideas of professional management and efficiency (Fox, 1981, p. 128). With little presence in policy-making decisions, the preservationists were relegated to a role of reactionaries, fighting to stop proposed commercial developments in wilderness areas. For instance, in 1935 the Sierra Club that had been founded by John Muir organized a concentrated campaign to halt development of Kings Canyon in California’s Sierra Nevada. As a result Kings Canyon was declared a national park in 1939 (McCormick, 1989, 20). Throughout more than half of the twentieth century, in spite of the few successes, preservationism remained the territory of a dedicated few. Even conservationism was of little concern to the majority of Americans. Despite the extended traditions of both forms of environmentalism, in general, environmental concerns failed to garner the popular sentiments of the American public.
Public apathy towards the environment, however, changed drastically in the 1960s and 1970s, the period that marked the second wave in American environmentalism. A milestone event in the shift of public attitudes was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring. Called by one scholar, “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of modern environmentalism,” (Fox, 1981, p. 188) Silent Spring managed to catapult environmentalism into the nation’s conscious. Carson’s scathing indictment of the pesticide industry added a new word to the American vocabulary, “pollution”. Confronted with a pressing new issue, what had once been the concern of a “few scientists, administrators and conservation groups blossomed into a fervent mass movement that swept the industrialized world” (McCormick, 1989, p.47). The new environmental “battle was fought on two main fronts, one traditional
and the other new ” (Sale, 1993, p.14).
Incorporating the political action tactics – sit-ins, protest marches, demonstrations - of other social movements of the 1960s, both fronts transformed the preservationist spirit into proactive politics. In addition to fighting proposed developments on public lands and waterways, the preservationists went on the offensive, initiating legislation to establish wilderness areas off limits to commercial use. For instance, the efforts of now activist preservationist organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Izaak Walton League, and the Wilderness society paid off with President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Wilderness Act in 1964 (Shabecoff, 1993, p. 162). The growing sentiment was that, “nature, or at least some remote parts of it, was not there simply for manipulation and exploitation but, other things being equal, should be preserved and protected and cherished” (Sale, 1993, p. 18).
Fox. S. (1981). John Muir and his legacy: The American conservation movement. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.
Hays, S.P. (1987). Beauty, health and permanence: Environmental politics in the U.S., 1955-1985. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
McCormick, J. (1989). Reclaiming paradise: The global environmental movement. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sale, K. (1993). The green revolution: The American environmental movement, 1962-1992. New York: Hill and Wang.
Shabecoff, P. (1993). A fierce green fire: The American environmental movement. New York: Hill and Wang.
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