Environmental Movement

The First Wave: Saving Wild Places

The roots of modern environmentalism can be traced back more than 200 years to the resource management of Great Britain and its colonies. In what is often considered the “first wave” of environmentalism, writers and painters sought to direct attention toward the rapid industrialization of England and the United States. Both countries saw dramatic drops of rural population during that time, and those few individuals who remained in the pastoral landscape saw it shift from a postfeudal economy of subsistence farming and open grazing spaces to large-scale operations that anticipated contemporary agribusiness practices. This privatization led to concerns regarding the future of pastoral England and is best exemplified by the poetry of romantics such as William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Provoked to action by these writers, [Page 526]British citizens responded by creating a series of environmental societies, such as the Common Preservation Society in 1865, the Lake District Defense Society in 1883, and the Selborne League in 1885, which sought to protect rare birds and plants.

In North America, similar organizations were formed with an emphasis on protecting natural places. These organizations began in concert with a more philosophically based realization that the frontier was limitless neither in terms of space nor resources. With the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature in 1836, Henry David Thoreau's Walden in 1854, and George Perkins Marsh's Man in Nature in 1864, Americans became increasingly aware of the footprint they were already leaving on the natural world. Not long after, landscape painters such as George Catlin urged for the protection of native species and natural habitat, pushing the U.S. Congress to create Yellowstone, the first national park, in 1872.

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