Conservation

Conservation, the principle or practice of managing the use of natural resources, is fundamental to successful human societies but became part of widespread political and economic discussion in 19th-century America. It enters into human geography through its mediation of human–environment interactions.

Although practiced—or abused—by all societies, conservation was chiefly an American ideology until recently. Today, its three strands are central to debates within environmental ethics. One strand—more aptly called nature preservation—emerged from the Romantic movement with its spiritual reverence for creation and an intrinsic value of nature. Naturalist John Audubon, an early advocate, called for protection of natural habitat against human abuse. Later preservationists John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson championed this distinctly biocentric ethic. In contrast, a second strand borrowed from the Enlightenment principle of rationalism, prompting scientific studies of land and water resources to provide understanding of the extent that nature could yield to American society. Conservation in this form holds the anthropocentric notion that nature is instrumental to the human purpose of resource development and became the dominant view of conservation by the end of the 19th century. A third strand emerged midway through the 20th century as the study of ecology provided a science-based but nonanthropocentric understanding of human–environment interlinkages, best attributed to the work of Aldo Leopold. Holistic in its approach, this view gravitates toward an ecocentric ethic and evolved into ecosystem management. The three strands created a dynamic tension that continues in 21st-century American resource management.