Environmental Movement

The environmental movement is perhaps the most significant contemporary global movement to have emerged in recent decades. The relationship between humankind and nature has been the subject of much debate and inquiry over time. The environmental movement had its cultural origins in literary accounts of humanity's relationship with nature, beginning from the Romantic poets such as William Blake, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, whose works were concerned with the reconciliation of man and nature. This aesthetic could also be found in subsequent Transcendentalist American literature, such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, published in 1854. The Transcendentalists were interested in the spiritual connections that connected humankind and nature with God and could be seen as the forefathers of deep green ecologists. Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species was published in 1859, creating further interest in the understanding of nature.

George Perkins Marsh wrote of the destructive effect of agriculture in his book Man and Nature in 1864, and President Theodore Roosevelt would develop the national parks with Gifford Pinchot of the Forestry Service in the early 1900s. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, concerns about protecting wildlife led to the emergence of a progressive conservation movement, alongside federal regulation of natural habitats and the [Page 160]establishment of national parks. Influential conservation groups included the National Audubon Society, founded in 1886, and the Sierra Club, founded by John Muir in 1892. Muir and Pinchot would become adversaries in the campaign to prevent the building of a dam in Yosemite National Park in the early decade of the 19th century.

The preservationist and conservationist movements were prominent in the United States during the final decades of the 1800s and the early decades of the last century. Muir succeeded in having Yosemite National Park created during the 1890s. He was also a central figure in the foundation of the Sierra Club in 1892, which focused on the preservation of the wilderness. The Audubon Society was concerned with the protection of birds, and both groups contributed to the founding of the National Park Service in 1916. Franklin D. Roosevelt would also consider the importance of conservation as part of his New Deal during the Depression years of the 1930s. Americans had become concerned about the Dust Bowl phenomenon that characterized that era, and the Civilian Conservation Corps was founded to address both the ecological and economic problems of the day. Aldo Leopold came to prominence as an advocate of forests and wilderness regions in the 1920s. In the post–World War II era, conservationists were active in highlighting the degradation caused by the urbanization of U.S. society, as well as other concerns such as nuclear warfare. Scientists concerned about the threats posed by industrialization began joining with conservationists to present an environmental critique of modernity. The 1950s witnessed a major controversy about the building of the Echo Park Dam in the state of Colorado. This campaign led to the signing of the Wilderness Act of 1964, which protected millions of acres of wilderness and forests throughout the United States.

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