Lecture 31 Monday April 11, 2005

The Rise of Scientific Conservation

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Announcements:

(1)           Term papers:paper length excerpt from Dr. Dave’s Sin Boldly: Dr. Dave’s Guide to Writing the College Paper. INVEST IN A STYLE MANUAL.

(2)           The possessive its versus it’s meaning “it is”

 

I. Conservation Coincidence: Who Was Leon Czolgosz?

Shot President William McKinley, twenty-eight years old at the time (CZOLGOSZ pronounced cholgosh).

Anarchist, cited influence of Emma Goldman

 

Who was William McKinley? twenty-fifth president, Republican from Ohio.

Senator Mark Hanna

Vice President Theodore Roosevelt

1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo New York

September 6, 1901, McKinley shot; McKinley dies September 14, 1901

Hanna: “There now, that damned cowboy is president," possibly apocryphal

 

The long-range implications of Roosevelt becoming president included conservation legislation: e.g., Antiquities Act of 1906

 

Czolgosz executed

 

II. The Progressive Movement

See again Samuel P. Hays’s book, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency,

Note the distinction between “the Progressive Movement” and progressivism in the sense as used by Leo Marx.

Most historians interpret the progressive movement as a result of three factors: industrialism, urbanization, and immigration.

Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives

Women’s suffrage movement

 

Progressive movement values include:

* Efficiency

* Rational management

* Professional expertise

* Enlarged role for government

* Maximum sustained yield

 

See Dunlap for Lacey Act of 1901

 

But recall Hays’s book Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920

 

III. Early fisheries management: Progressive conservation precursor?

See Joseph E. Taylor, III. Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999).

See also Dunlap’s book, e.g.:

U.S. Fish Commission

C. Hart Merriam

U.S. Biological Survey

 

Significance of Spencer Fullerton Baird

Earlier European development of fish culture

Replenishment of New England fish stocks

Baird first director of U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, 1871

Fish "acclimatization"

 

See Taylor’s book Making Salmon:

“This rhetoric of [fish culture], of combining the pastoral and the technical to create a more efficient nature, indicates that the shift to so-called Progressive conservation may not have been as abrupt as some historians suggest. Historians trace the origin of government-sponsored conservation to the Progressive Era and Gifford Pinchot’s Forest Service. They emphasize the importance of progress and efficiency as guiding principles of the period, yet these themes were already in play thirty years earlier. Progressive conservation was not cut from whole cloth but emerged over a longer period of economic and social change. The speeches of [fishery biologists] Stone, Edmunds, and Goode reveal an intellectual flux. The Jeffersonian ideal of a pastoral middle ground held elements of perfecting nature that proved amenable to newer priorities of industrial efficiency in the service of social progress. The USFC was the epicenter of nascent efforts to get the federal government to manage the nation’s natural resources” (p. 79 Taylor).