Environmental Justice

Early Environmental Leadership and Movements

This vision of long-term environmental impact from human activities was first evident under the leadership of William Penn in the Plymouth Colony, who in 1681 set aside 1 acre of land for every 5 acres of land cleared to preserve the region's natural resources. Forest preservation would become an “entrenched principle of colonial management in the seventeenth century” (Switzer and Bryner 1998, 2).

Environmental and ecological concerns continued to be a part of the American conscious, in large part motivated by writings and observations of individuals like the scholar and conservationist George Perkins Marsh and his 1864 book Man and Nature, essayist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), and conservationist Aldo Leopold's A Sandy County Almanac (1949). It would be the vision and actions, however, of environmental leaders like John Muir and Gifford Pinchot that would create the impetus for the first environmental movements in the United States: the preservation movement and the opposing conservation movement.

The preservation movement, led by John Muir (1838–1914) during the Victorian era, advocated the use of the environment for “recreation and educational purposes.” Muir was a champion of Yosemite Valley and vehemently opposed and “crusaded against the development of the Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy reservoir which he viewed as a misuse of the region's natural resources” (Switzer and Bryner 1998, 5). All parks and forests, for Muir, were off limits for economic development. Muir's environmental philosophy was accepted most by middleclass Americans. Muir promoted the idea of the protection of a “sublime nature” that would energize modern men and women (McGreer 2003, 164). Although the opposing conservation movement had more of an influence at the national level, Muir's preservation movement had a lasting impact on American society. The Sierra Club, which he founded in 1892, became one of the strongest and most influential environmental nongovernmental organizations in the world and continues almost one hundred years later to shape environmental policies around the world.

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