Back to Nature

This chapter demonstrates how conservationists pursued their central goal—a material balance and psychic renewal with a nature they thought endangered—in private lives as well as public actions. In a time when the built world had grown so complicated and consuming as to alienate many from the natural world, conservationists sought a “return to nature” in outdoor recreation, the study of nature in schools, literature, and domestic architecture. Conservation was as much about cultural change as it was an economic doctrine or a set of policies. Like conservation politics, conservation culture was aimed at escaping the artificiality and destructiveness of industrial life. By returning to nature, conservationists hoped that Americans would revitalize themselves and deepen their appreciation of the environment.

Fighting over Conservation

This chapter highlights the split between Gifford Pinchot and Horace McFarland, showing how it wrecked any hopes that conservationists could benefit from a broad-based national organization that would press for material and aesthetic measures in cities, suburbs, and the countryside. But it was only one of many splits between conservationists. The demographic and ideological heterogeneity that endowed conservation with so much of its appeal and reach also pitted different kinds of conservationists against one another, fragmenting and ultimately weakening the movement. Ironically, the considerable political victories of the early twentieth century—metropolitan park systems, federal bureaucracies, and an extensive domain in the West for conservation—exacerbated this divisiveness, since conservationists had gained something worth fighting over.

Introduction

This introductory chapter talks about a more comprehensive and balanced portrayal of conservation, exploring how it maintained race and class hierarchies, and how the movement laid the basis for real and lasting environmental improvements. Several spectators realized that conservation had a lot to do with Progressivism, as environmental measures were among the most important legacies of the Progressive era. The chapter thus introduces three goals for conducting this research. First, it aims to offer a more expansive synthesis of conservationist thinking and doing, one that stresses the movement's complexity, heterogeneity, ambition, and breadth. Second, it means to show how deeply tied this movement was to the larger course of Progressivism. And finally, it argues for the relevance of conservation for contemporary environmental reform.

Epilogue

This epilogue analyzes how environmental reform hardly ceased by the end of the 1910s. While the general expansion of the environmental state at the federal level paused with the eclipse of Progressivism during World War I, and became more coercive and reliant on state power, there was no abrupt end to conservation. Americans still sought to address the concerns about artificiality and resource scarcity that had animated the movement. In the next decade, the crisis of Depression and the politics of the New Deal particularly brought a kind of rebirth to conservation. The chapter asserts that environmental problems are about people as much as nature. Any effective remediation will be a triumph of social justice as much as a reflection of respect for nature. A better society and better laws depend on better people, as Progressive activists and theorists so acutely observed.

Fighting Against Conservation

This chapter examines how the optimism of conservationists led them to underestimate the challenges their movement faced. Allocating more control to the federal government in the name of environmental necessity provoked powerful opposition from those whose economic interests were threatened, those who doubted that pressing environmental problems existed at all, and those who objected in principle to the more muscular state called into being by Progressives. Moreover, because a wide range of rural Americans continued to hunt, fish, gather, log, and farm in the new parks and forests, the conservation state often criminalized their ways of making a living. While some of the resistance was conducted through formal politics, it also gave rise to widespread community-supported lawbreaking, violence against conservation officers, and arson and sabotage.

Landscapes of Reform

This chapter illustrates how naturalist Enos Mills' utopian vision embodied many of the elements of conservation in the early twentieth century. His sensibility reflected a broad cultural and political program that sought to address what he and many others understood as an environmental crisis. Mills thought that the scientific management of resources and lands would foster both wealth and beauty in places where they already resided and in newly rehabilitated landscapes alike. His mention of the prosperous farms made possible by well-tended forests promised the continuation of economic opportunity and independence for a large portion of the population. Mills' optimism showed forth in the generally utopian cast of his remarks, but also in the confidence he had that his diverse audiences could all find a reason to join his crusade for conservation.

Frontier, Market, and Environmental Crisis

This chapter discusses how a society's vision of apocalypse reflects its fundamental fears and values. The prevalence and the content of these visions suggest a number of important aspects of American environmental thought and reform. In the most obvious sense, these visions reflected a growing preoccupation with questions of nature and the fragility of civilization. Even when their worries did not reach the level of the apocalyptic, Americans talked about environmental changes—the cutting of forests and the fouling of urban waterways. Humanity was often at the mercy of nature in these stories, but at other times seemed to cause its own demise. Furthermore, these visions were warnings of social conflict as much as they were of purely environmental problems. Social antagonism frequently accompanied environmental destruction.

Fighting for Conservation

This chapter looks at how conservationists seemed more and more optimistic about their influence and accomplishments. By 1910, it had become common for conservationists to use the word “movement” in both their public announcements and, unselfconsciously, in their private correspondence. The word “movement” clearly conveyed the idea that conservation involved a wide range of policies, attracted a diverse set of passionate supporters, and was converting the dubious and inspiring the apathetic. In national politics, conservation reached its height during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–9). With the help of his trusted adviser Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt made conservation one of his leading causes.