How American Environmentalism Failed
Historically, U.S. environmentalism has not been an inclusive or democratic social movement. Rather, it’s been shaped by the affluent and professional elites, often more concerned with promoting a romanticized vision of sublime nature than protecting the people and places most at risk from environmental degradation. Finally, after several decades of research, advocacy, and organizing, environmental and climate justice have become priorities among even the most mainstream conservation organizations. John Muir would hardly recognize them; Martin Luther King Jr. would be delighted.
As early as the mid-19th century, George Perkins Marsh and Henry David Thoreau, among others, called for the conservation of nature, despairing, as Marsh did, that “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.” Thoreau lamented the rapaciousness with which Americans had exploited the land. “For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing,” he decried, “a thousand come with an ax or rifle.” Reaction to the widespread settlement and exploitation of the land in the mid-to-late 1800s, exemplified by massive timber harvesting, overgrazing of livestock, land speculation, and boom-and-bust mining, gave rise to the development of two distinct efforts aimed at protecting natural resources: preservation and conservation.
Spearheading the push for preservation was John Muir, the Scottish-born mountaineer who in 1892 founded the Sierra Club. The most vocal advocates for the creation of national parks like Yellowstone in 1872, the nation’s first, and Yosemite in 1890, Muir and his fellow preservationists sought to protect wild nature from the harmful effects of human settlement and consumption. They viewed wilderness as the antidote to the materialism and arrogance of industrial society and supported aggressive government oversight of public lands.
