The Origins of American Conservation
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Announcements:
(1) Term paper proposals are ready to go back to students
(2) Some tips for reading Dunlap
The Creative Act of 1891 created the forest reserves from land that was public domain—administered by the “Forestry Division” of the USDA. Lands could be set aside by Executive Order—over a million acres were immediately set aside at Yellowstone that year by Benjamin Harrison. Other “land grabs” by Grover Cleveland followed in 1896, precipitating the Organic Act of 1897.
Congress passed the Organic Act of 1897 (under William McKinley) to improve and protect forests or secure favorable water flows and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for citizens of the United States. The administration of the lands fell under the Dept. of the Interior.
The Act of February 1, 1905 placed the administration of the Nation's forest reserves under the Department of Agriculture in the new U.S. Forest Service.
The Weeks Act of 1911 authorized the purchase of private lands to establish National Forests.
The Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960 stated that National Forests be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes. The administration of forest lands must be carried out in a way that “provides the achievement and maintenance in perpetuity of a high level annual or regular periodic output of the various renewable resources without impairment of the productivity of the land.” Continuation of the Progressive conservation values of Gifford Pinchot and other Progressive Era reformers.
B. Be alert in your reading of Dunlap to details about specific legislation, like the Endangered Species Act, but also about the development of specific agencies—such as his discussion of the evolution of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service out of the Biological Survey.
A. From Dunlap, note the significance of professional organizations such as:
American Ornithologists Union
The American Society of Mammalogists
Gifford Pinchot’s Society of American Foresters, which was founded in 1900
B. The history of the early American “conservation” movement is interesting, complicated, and somewhat difficult, in that there are different historical interpretations available to students of the period.
Discussion of different interpretive approaches in e.g.:
David A. Clary, Timber and the Forest Service
Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness
Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy
Thomas Dunlap, Saving America’s Wildlife: Ecology and the American Mind, 1850-1990
Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920
John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation
Philip Terrie, Forever Wild: A Cultural History of Wilderness in the Adirondacks
C. Note the importance of early conservation leaders:
John Muir
Gifford Pinchot
Theodore Roosevelt
James Trefethen, An American Crusade for Wildlife:
“The word ‘conservation’ as it applies to natural resources did not come into the English language until 1907. In his autobiography, Breaking New Ground, Pinchot wrote that while riding in Rock Creek Park in Washington DC, the thought occurred to him that there was no single word to describe the interrelationship and sustained-yield use of forests, soils, waters, fish, wildlife, minerals, and all other natural resources. ‘Protection’ and ‘preservation,’ then in common use by contemporary authorities on natural-resource matters, implied non-use—a locking up of resources—a concept that grated on Pinchot’s practical sensibilities. He discussed this gap in the vocabulary with a number of friends, among them Overton Price, an associate in the Forest Service. In this discussion, either he or Price came up with the word ‘conservation.’ The word apparently was derived from ‘conservator,’ the title of an office in colonial India under the British Civil Service. When Pinchot discussed the newly coined term with Roosevelt, the President adopted it immediately and, from that point on, ‘conservation’ became the keynote of the Roosevelt Administration” (127).
A. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History
B. Pay attention to the title of Hays’s book: Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920.
C. Significance of the Progressive Movement
D. Conservation history as “morally contested terrain”
Compare Dunlap to Kristin Shrader-Frechette’s paper in last week of this course: “How the Tail Wags the Dog: How Value Judgments Determine Ecological Science.”
E. The “Great Kern County Mouse War”