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Conservation

The term conservation usually refers to environmental conservation or preservation of natural resources. In the United States, the term came into use in the late 19th century, when valuable natural resources such as timber, farmland, and pasture were threatened by rapid economic development. Concerns extended to include the Great Plains as frontier settlement moved westward at an increasingly rapid rate with the construction of continental railroads, which laid land open for further development. The term suggests preservation and protection of natural resources to prevent exploitation and destruction. Conservation also includes the recognition of limits to growth. Presently, the term conservation embraces the ecosystems and resource base of the Earth by protecting its capacity for self-renewal and sustainability.

The Conservation Movement in the United States

The conservation movement has a long history in the United States. In the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau—the author of Walden—expressed his concern about the loss of nature and saw in the “wild” the hope for the preservation of the world. He called attention to the sacred laws of nature, which take precedence over human actions that disturb the ecological balance. In 1864, George Perkins Marsh formulated the physical geography of the Western states as modified by human action and drew attention to the fragility of the natural ecosystem. These early efforts of consciousness-raising led to a concerted effort to protect nature and establish national parks in the Western United States. It was President Theodore Roosevelt, with the aid of his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, who established the federal role in these efforts. Roosevelt began withdrawing large areas of western public land from further development, and in 1916, the National Park Service was created to preserve valuable nature for eternity. The drought conditions, known as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, led to the foundation of the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 and the Soil Conservation Service in 1935 during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Conservation efforts in the United States also include concerns about water resources, energy use, and water and energy conservation.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the conservation movement became more actively involved in the political debate about pollution and the destruction of nature in favor of economic profit. Social justice issues transformed the conservation movement into the environmental movement and engaged the political establishment in protecting resources and the environment. The environmental movement produced profound changes in the political climate concerning the environment, culminating in the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

The Whole Earth Ecosystem

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, concerns about the health of the global ecosystem and resource base found resonance with Rachel Carson's message about the detrimental widespread use of pesticides in agriculture. In the same period, Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner raised issues about population, economic growth, and technology as causal factors in the limits-to-growth debate. Ehrlich presented a neo-Malthusian scenario of imminent population explosion and ensuing disaster and argued that society must find ways to limit population growth. Commoner presented an eco-socialist perspective to the limits-to-growth debate, arguing that capitalism and technology were chiefly responsible for the environmental degradation of Earth's ecosystem.

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