Abbey, Edward (1927–89). An avid proponent of desert preservation through books and essays, Edward Abbey served as a National Park Service ranger and firefighter in the Southwest. His book Desert Solitaire (1968) opposed “industrial tourism” by automobiles and excessive development in the national parks as being both destructive to the parks and to those who visit them. The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and Hayduke Lives! (1990) made the case that the West was being destroyed by dams, irrigation systems, bulldozers, and logging trucks. His work inspired the movement Earth First! to advocate “monkeywrenching,” or the practice of sabotaging the machines that were destroying the land by strip-mining, clear-cutting, and damming wild rivers.
Adams, Ansel (1902–84). Ansel Adams’s powerful and austere black-and-white images inspired conservationists and the general public to set aside new natural areas, such as King’s Canyon National Park, and to preserve existing ones. A careful technician, he took thousands of photographs in order to achieve the desired contrast and texture in the final prints. Recognizing the uplifting power of Adams’s work, the Sierra Club made it a central feature of countless coffee-table books, calendars, and magazines.
Addams, Jane (1860–1935). Founder of Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago, Jane Addams worked to improve the lives of the urban poor by helping to upgrade their living and working environments. Over several decades, Addams and a number of other idealistic, university-educated, and financially secure women and men decided to engage with the problems and concerns of poor urban immigrants by living among them. In addition to establishing kindergartens, playgrounds, and cooperative housing for working women and their children, Hull House members were a pioneering force in bringing about environmental reforms. Noticing the piles of garbage left in streets and alleys as a result of municipal neglect, Addams and her colleagues investigated the city’s system of collection and studied the implications of untended refuse on human health. Galvanizing political support in the community, they set up incinerators, collected tin cans, and arranged for the removal of dead animals. While respectful of the cultures and practices of immigrants, they opposed activities such as slaughtering sheep in basements, collecting rags from dumps, and baking bread in unhealthy spaces. Addams’s autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull House, was published in 1910. Increasingly frustrated by the limitations of purely local action, she also helped to found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, served as its president from 1919 to 1935, and received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in 1931.
Adirondack Forest Preserve Act (1885). Created in 1885 by an act of the New York State legislature, the Adirondack Forest Preserve was one of the nation’s earliest efforts to preserve forests and watersheds and create recreational areas for the public. The movement to preserve the Adirondacks grew out of widespread concern for the loss of forests for lumber, paper, tanning, and mining, as well as the clogging of the Hudson River and Erie Canal with debris from such industries. The Adirondack Park was established in 1892 by the New York State legislature as an addition to the Preserve, and in 1894 the legislature mandated that the Preserve “be forever kept as wild forest lands.” The Preserve now consists of a complex of 2.6 million acres of public and private lands, while the Park constitutes 6 million acres.
Agriculture. The science and art of cultivating the soil to produce fruits and vegetables for human and animal consumption.
Air Pollution Control Act (1955). In 1955, Congress passed the first of several laws regulating air pollution. The Air Pollution Control Act declared Congressional protection for the rights of the states and local governments to control air pollution, and appropriated funds to support technical research carried out in the public and private sectors.
Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act (1980). A product of much negotiation between environmentalists and development interests, the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act of 1980 set aside 104 million acres of lands and waters in the state of Alaska having scenic, historic, and wilderness value. The act also declared the right of rural residents to continue their subsistence way of life. The coalition of environmentalists who backed the bill included 1,500 national and regional groups whose combined membership totaled about 10 million people. Development-oriented interests and the state of Alaska opposed the original plan for much higher acreages, resulting in the 1980 compromise signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.
Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act (1971). In 1971, as a result of the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act, Alaskan Eskimos, Aleuts, and Indians received $462.5 million in federal grants, $500 million in federal and state mineral revenues, and 22 million acres of land in exchange for their agreement to settle long-standing land claims.
American Antiquities Act (1906). In recognition of the need for cultural conservation as well as for the conservation of natural resources, Congress passed a 1906 act authorizing the president to designate federal lands containing historic landmarks and prehistoric structures as national monuments. Reputable institutions were allowed to conduct archaeological research on the monuments and to gather objects for museums and educational institutions.
American Indian Movement (AIM). A movement organized to reclaim Indians’ spiritual heritage and relationship to the land, the American Indian Movement (AIM) came alive in the mid-1960s. Its philosophy is that the land is “part of an integrated whole—of nature or the universe—which includes human beings and other living things.… Human beings … must fit in with it and take care of it.” The movement has worked to reassert its former treaty rights to land, water, fish, and wildlife resources, to reduce poverty, to reclaim health, expand education, create employment, and strengthen ties among Indian peoples.
Animism. The idea found in Native American and pagan philosophies that everything in nature, including what is now considered inanimate, is alive and has an inner spirit, soul, or organizing power.
Anthony, Carl (b. 1939). An architect and writer, described as combining the traditions of Martin Luther King and John Muir, Carl Anthony has worked for a more socially inclusive and culturally diverse environmental movement. Anthony, who is African American, has been especially active in San Francisco Bay Area initiatives such as the Urban Habitat Program, of which he is the founder and executive director, and the Earth Island Institute. His publications include a newsletter, Race, Poverty and the Environment; the Natural Energy Design Handbook (which he coauthored in 1973); and a number of articles urging African Americans to become environmentalists.
Anthropocentrism. The idea that the human species is the center of the natural world and that all other parts of that world exist for the sake of humankind.
Appalachian Mountain Club. A hiking and conservation club in the eastern United States, founded in 1876. The club’s goal is to preserve the delicate balance of nature while maintaining environmentally safe ways for humans to enjoy the wilderness. It maintains huts and hiking trails throughout the Appalachians, organizes hikes, sponsors workshops for educational programs, and produces books, maps, newsletters, and souvenirs. Its “Conservation Action Network” updates members about conservation issues on which they can take action.
Audubon, John James (1785–1851). Famous for his paintings of the Birds of America (1827), Audubon was both an artist and writer who documented his impressions of American natural history, scenery, and landscape transformation in the East and Midwest. Audubon’s paintings were made from freshly killed models, obtained by shooting and then quickly painting them in life-like poses. His Delineations of American Scenery and Character, published posthumously in 1926, chronicles his travels and observations during the years 1808–34, as Americans carved out homesteads on the frontiers, logged the forests, navigated the rivers, and transformed the land from swamps and thickets to cornfields and orchards. He both admired the industry of the settlers and lamented the rapid loss of wilderness and wildlife. Audubon’s name is given to the National Audubon Society, founded in 1886 and reestablished in 1898, and whose mission is the protection of birds and their habitats.
Austin, Mary (1868–1934). In her numerous books on the western and southwestern deserts, novelist and essayist Mary Austin was a forceful advocate for the preservation of natural areas and Indian lifeways. The landscape and its natural forces are actors in her work, shaping a complex relationship between humans and the natural world. Having built an early career in California’s interior Central Valley in the 1890s, she continued her development in the community of writers and artists on the ocean’s edge in Carmel, and ultimately in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Austin’s best known work includes her essays for the Overland Monthly in the 1890s, Land of Little Rain (1903), and The Ford (1917). The latter novel recounts the dramatic changes in the Central Valley landscape as a result of water diversion projects, oil drilling, corporate ranching, and cash crop agriculture, and suggests the alternative possibility of equitable rural productive partnerships.
Bailey, Florence Merriam (1863–1948). Ornithologist and nature writer, Florence Merriam Bailey was a distinguished contributor to ornithological studies in the Southwest. She was the author of Handbook of Birds of the Western United States (1902), which became a standard reference in the field, and Birds of New Mexico (1928), which was awarded the Brewster Medal by the American Ornithologists’ Union, commemorating original scientific work. She collaborated with her husband Vernon Bailey, who was the chief field biologist in the Southwest for the United States Biological Survey, based in Washington and directed by her brother C. Hart Merriam. She also wrote several books that brought birding and conservation to public attention, such as A-Birding on a Bronco (1896) and Birds of Village and Field (1898). At a time when birds were being decimated for their plumage for decorating women’s hats, she helped to raise public consciousness by teaching classes on birds, and in 1897 helped to found the Audubon Society of the District of Columbia.
Balance of nature. The tendency of earth and its ecosystems toward self-regulation, so as to return to states of equilibrium when disturbed.
Beckwourth, James (1798–1866). James Beckwourth was an important explorer and guide in the western mountains. Born in Virginia as the son of a slave and a white plantation owner, he traveled to the West and became a Crow war chief after gaining his freedom. While prospecting for gold in California in 1848, Beckwourth discovered the pass over the Sierra Nevada, near Reno, that now bears his name. His nearby ranch became a gateway for thousands of emigrants, whom he escorted over the pass and down the trail. In 1852, he dictated the details of his life to Thomas Bonner, who published the story as The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth (1856, reprint 1972). Beckwourth moved to Colorado in 1864 and returned to the Crow Nation, among whom he lived for the remainder of his life. His name is commemorated in an annual festival in Marysville, California, and in the James P. Beckwourth Mountain Club.
Bennett, Hugh Hammond (1881–1960). Known as the father of soil conservation, Hugh Bennett joined the Bureau of Soils in the Department of Agriculture in 1903 as a soil surveyor and became head of the Soil Erosion Service in 1933. Owing to his efforts, the Soil Conservation Act was passed in 1935. The act created the Soil Conservation Service, to provide for the prevention and the control of soil erosion, and Bennett became its first head. Soil conservation had become a national priority with the coming of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, during which loose topsoil was blown into devastating dust storms and washed downstream into rivers and oceans. Bennett’s recommendations for better management of the soil gained added credibility when one such storm engulfed the United States Capitol during a 1934 congressional hearing on the subject. Bennett’s books include Soil Conservation (1939) and This Land We Defend (1942).
Biocentrism. The idea that all plants and animals are centers of life, and as such have inherent worth and are worthy of moral consideration.
Biodiversity. The rich variety of animal and plant species in a given habitat.
Biogeochemistry/biogeochemical cycles. The transfer and flow of elements such as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus through air, water, and soil.
Biological determinism. The priority of biological over cultural factors in deciding the outcome of events or development of personalities.
Biomass. The total weight of all living matter in a particular area.
Biome. A complex of animal and plant communities maintained under particular climatic conditions in a given area.
Bioregionalism. The idea that people, and other living and non-living things in a given region—usually a watershed—are interdependent, and should live as much as possible within the resources and ecological constraints of that place.
Biota/biotic community. The complex of interdependent living organisms in a given area. Biota comprise all living animals and plants.
Bird, Isabella (1831–1904). A noted nineteenth-century traveler and writer, Isabella Bird was among the earliest women to become active in mountaineering or to seek western travel adventures. Born and raised in England, Bird first traveled through the United States in her early twenties and wrote of her experiences in The Englishwoman in America (1856). Almost twenty years later, a voyage to the Hawaiian Islands, during which she climbed Kilauea volcano despite health problems, was the basis of her account in The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875). After crossing the Colorado Rockies on horseback, she depicted their peaks and canyons in perhaps her most acclaimed work, A Ladies Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879). Subsequent trips to Asia inspired her Journeys in Asia and Persia (1991), Among the Tibetans (1894), and The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899). Bird was the first woman to become a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society.
Broad Arrow Policy (1691). The Broad Arrow Policy, a plan by the British government to increase its share of the North American timber harvest, forced colonists to think about the preservation and distribution of natural resources. Included as part of the 1691 renewal of the charter of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, the policy reserved for the British Crown all trees not on private lands, 24 inches or more in diameter at 12 inches above the ground. It drew its name from the symbol carved into trees of a three legged “A” without the crossbar, designating property of the British Royal Navy. The law was extended to New Hampshire in 1708, to all of New England, New York, and New Jersey in 1711, and to Nova Scotia in 1721. It arose out of the increasing shortage of pines for ship masts in England and the North Sea countries, and the British Navy’s quest for supremacy of the seas against its European challengers. The law and its enforcement in New England became increasingly controversial, and was part of the numerous complaints against British authority in the American colonies that led to the American Revolution.
Brower, David (1912–2000). David Brower was the first executive director of the Sierra Club, serving from 1952 to 1969. He was a defender of wild rivers and canyons and was opposed to the idea of damming any existing rivers, especially in places such as Dinosaur National Monument, Glen Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. In 1963, Brower and others reacted to the threat of dam construction in the Grand Canyon by commissioning a fullpage advertisement in the New York Times, asking, “Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So that Tourists Can Get Nearer to the Ceiling?” Another advertisement declared, “Now Only You Can Save the Grand Canyon From Being Flooded.” In 1968, the Grand Canyon dams were deleted from the Pacific Southwest Water Plan. Under Brower’s leadership, the club also won the fight to save Dinosaur, but lost on Glen Canyon, Brower’s deepest defeat. He formed a global organization, Friends of the Earth (FOE), after political and fiscal policy differences led to his resignation from the Sierra Club in 1969. He left FOE in 1986 to become head of Earth Island Institute of San Francisco, an organization he founded in 1982. He received numerous awards for his work to save the environment.
Bullard, Robert (b. 1946). Robert Bullard is a major theoretician of environmental racism. In 1990 he wrote Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, and went on to edit a book entitled Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (1993). In these and later writings, he argued that minorities suffer disproportionately from the byproducts of municipal landfills and incinerators, polluting industries, hazardous waste treatment facilities, and disposal facilities, and that institutional racism helped to shape the economic, political, and ecological landscape. He advocated a more effective incorporation of minority group concerns into plans for environmental protection.
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The Bureau of Indian Affairs is an agency created in 1824 in the Department of the Interior that is responsible for the administration of Indian lands and affairs. The BIA oversees the preservation of land and natural resources on Native American lands held in trust for the tribes by the federal government. It also operates offices, schools, and training programs on Indian reservations, and employs many Native American and Inuit peoples.
Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The Bureau of Land Management is an agency in the federal Department of the Interior, created in 1946 out of a merger of the General Land Office and the Grazing Service. It is responsible for the administration and management of public lands, including rangelands, deserts, and mineral resources. The agency manages some 272 million acres in the western states and Alaska, and reviews them for potential designation as wilderness. It issues grazing and mineral leases, and has offices and area managers in eleven Western states.
Bureau of Mines. The Bureau of Mines was created in 1910 with the goal of promoting mineral and mining technologies and mine safety. It deals with reduction of mine fires, operates safety training and rescue stations, and oversees remediation and restoration of mined lands.
Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec). An agency in the federal Department of the Interior, established by the passage of the Reclamation Act in 1902, the Bureau of Reclamation plans and administers dams and reclamation projects in the western states. It is charged with developing and promoting hydropower and irrigation delivery systems, managing recreational sites, and preserving ecosystems and parks associated with its projects.
Burroughs, John (1827–1921). A naturalist and lifelong resident of New York State, John Burroughs wrote books and essays on plants, mammals, birds, and the rural environment. He followed in the philosophical tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and hiked with John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. Books such as Wake Robin (1871), Birds and Poets (1877), The Ways of Nature (1906), and Bird and Bough (1906) presented his nature observations in a literary style that captured public attention. He chronicled his western expeditions in a 1907 volume, Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt.
Capitalism. The economic system of private ownership of production conducted to gain a profit. Laissez-faire capitalism is an early form of United States capitalism, in which competition and the free market rather than government regulate production and distribution. Corporate capitalism is a later form, characterized by increased concentration of wealth and increased government regulation. Capitalism utilizes natural resources by extracting them from the environment and creating commodities for sale in the marketplace, often resulting in resource depletion and environmental pollution.
Carrying capacity. The ability of a given environment to support uses of its resources without permanent degradation.
Carson, Rachel (1907–64). A marine biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and a well-known writer, Rachel Carson is credited with initiating the late twentieth-century environmental movement with her best-selling Silent Spring (1962). Carson’s scientific knowledge, skillful use of language, and writing style—established in earlier works such as Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1956)—were major reasons why Silent Spring became popular. She described pesticides as new synthetic chemicals that entered into the most vital processes of animal bodies, changing them in sinister and deadly ways. Such new chemical conversions and transformations, striking at the heart of the living world, affected all of nature.
Excerpts from Silent Spring appeared in The New Yorker just prior to the publication of the book and these helped to build a ready audience for it. One of the most laudatory reviews appeared in the Saturday Review, which called her book a devastating, heavily documented, relentless attack on human carelessness, greed, and irresponsibility. The Nation said that civilized man was a disease of the biosphere who was destroying the natural system and himself in the process. On the other side came devastating reviews and responses from the chemical industry. Velsicol Chemical Company advised Carson’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, that it should reconsider its plan to publish the book. The company argued that by threatening the chemical industry, the book would indirectly act to degrade the United States’ food supply. These tactics, intended to discredit her, instead aroused the nation, initiating the ecology movement, and causing a transformation in the human relationship to the natural world. Carson testified before Congress about the impacts of pesticides. She died of cancer in 1964.
Carver, George Washington (1864–1943). A scientist and pioneer in techniques for land conservation and renewable resources, George Washington Carver was raised by slave parents and privately tutored on a small farm in Missouri. After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture at Iowa State College, he became the head of the Agricultural Department at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama under Booker T. Washington. Carver directed the only agricultural experiment station staffed entirely by African Americans, where he promoted ideals of public service and the interdependence of humans and nature, as well as practical methods for producing cost-effective and protein-rich foods such as peanuts. He received numerous awards for his scientific and humanitarian work. The George Washington Carver Foundation was established to promote further scientific research.
Cash crop. A crop produced for export profit rather than local consumption or subsistence.
Catlin, George (1796–1872). A noted nineteenth-century portrait painter, George Catlin traveled widely throughout the American West and Florida and painstakingly documented the vanishing lifeways and environments of Indians. During his childhood in northeastern Pennsylvania, he was influenced by stories of his mother, who had been a captive of Indians as a girl. Catlin abandoned an early career in law and moved to Philadelphia in 1823 to begin training as a portrait painter. Inspired by a visiting delegation of Indians from the West, he devoted himself to learning more about, and preserving, their cultures. Over the course of his lifetime, Catlin produced some six hundred portraits of Indians, as well as paintings of their villages, games, ceremonies, and clothing. He documented his travels and observations in several works, among them Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians (2 vols., 1841); Life Among the Indians (1867); and Last Rambles Amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes (1867). Convinced that the Indian, buffalo, and the wilds of the West were doomed to extinction, Catlin proposed the setting aside of a “Nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild[ness] and freshness of their nature’s beauty.”
Chaos theory. The mathematical theory that a small effect can lead to a large effect that cannot be predicted by linear (first-power) differential equations (those dealing with infinitesimal differences between variable quantities), and that such complex events may better be described by nonlinear equations.
Chief Joseph (c. 1840–1904). An eloquent and forceful orator and leader, Chief Joseph was a member of the Nez Perce who had declined to enter into a treaty with the U.S. Government in the 1850s and 1860s after whites began settling on their lands. From 1872 until 1876, Joseph sought non-violent ways of resolving the disputes, but finally led his band into war in 1877. The band spent thirteen days in Yellowstone National Park, where they captured and retained a group of nine tourists. U.S. troops pursued the Nez Perce to the Canadian border, where the Indians surrendered forty miles short of their intended destination and freedom. The incident ultimately led to the removal of Indians from Yellowstone and other national parks, and to governmental efforts to halt Indian hunting and gathering in the national parks.
Following their capture, the Nez Perce were sent to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, and in 1879 Joseph traveled to Washington to plead for justice for Indian peoples. In 1885 the non-treaty Nez Perce were relocated to the Colville Reservation in the state of Washington, whence Joseph continued to make speeches to colleges, governments, and the general public seeking redress for the injustices done to Indians.
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, was a federal program established in 1933 for the relief of unemployment, the promotion of the conservation of natural resources, and the administration of educational and vocational training. Created as the Office of Emergency Conservation Work of 1933, the CCC employed some three million unemployed young men, ages 17–23, to work on projects such as the development of parks, reforestation projects, and the construction of fire towers. The CCC was abolished in 1942, but the legacies of its work live on and are visible in many state parks and recreation areas.
Clean Air Act (1963, 1970, 1990). The first Clean Air Act of 1963 modified the 1955 Air Pollution Control Act by allocating permanent funding for the work of state pollution control agencies. The Clean Air Act of 1970 more actively established national ambient air quality standards for carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide, and—beginning in 1977—lead. The 1970 Act charged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with setting standards for the entire country, based on scientific research and affordable technologies, and with supervising state-level plans for their implementation. The 1970 Act also specified automobile emission standards for carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides. Amendments to the Act in 1977 aimed to prevent further deterioration of air quality by establishing classes, such as pristine quality in national parks and wilderness areas (Class I) to moderate air quality (Class II) to air quality that met the national secondary standards (Class III). A new version of the Act in 1990 addressed issues of acid rain, toxic air pollutants, ozone depletion, and nonattainment of standards. The amendments required a reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions, tighter automobile emission standards, and cleaner gasoline. The Clean Air Act and its amendments have helped to reduce particulate matter, lead, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides from automobiles, but has been less successful in reducing ground level ozone, a component of smog.
Clean Water Act (1977). A federal act passed in 1977, the Clean Water Act changed the name of the federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972 and required that waters be “fishable and swimmable” by 1983. The act gave states the authority to operate construction grants programs for water treatment facilities. In 1981 the types of projects were modified and applications streamlined.
Clements, Frederic (1874–1945). Botanist and ecologist Frederic Clements influenced the fields of ecology, forestry, and conservation with his theory of plant succession. A professor of botany at the University of Nebraska and the University of Minnesota, and a researcher at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., he wrote several pathbreaking books, including Plant Succession (1916); Plant Ecology (coauthored with John Weaver in 1929); and Bio-Ecology (coauthored with Victor Shelford in 1939). His theory of plant succession held that plants, as the natural units of classification, were dependent on climate, which included temperature, rainfall, and wind. The type of plant community developing in a particular locale depended on temperature and rainfall, with a stable equilibrium evolving over time. Much like a living organism, the vegetative community developed from an early youthful period into a mature adult, dying back as the individual organisms died off. In 1939, using the concept of the biome, Clements and Shelford integrated animals into the plant community. Plants mediated between the habitat and the animal population, providing a buffer against extremes of climate and supplying food for animals. In papers written in 1937, on “Environment and Life on the Great Plains,” and “Succession and Human Problems,” Clements identified farmers’ reliance on monocultures, such as wheat and cotton, as causes of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
Coastal Zone Management Act (1972). A goal of the federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 was to promote “the wise use of land and water resources for the coastal zone, giving full consideration to ecological, cultural, historic and aesthetic values as well as to needs for economic development.” It stated that “there is a national interest in the effective management, beneficial use, protection, and development of the coastal zone.” The law created a federal program to develop plans for the protection and development of coastal areas. The government provided funds to the states to implement management programs that included public recreational needs and environmental protection in the face of increased home building, dredging, filling, drilling, oil development, and industrial siting. The law was extended and amended in 1976, 1980, and 1990 to include natural resources protection, the redevelopment of urban waterfronts, and the issuance of grants to provide beach access and abatement of shoreline erosion.
Cole, Thomas (1801–48). Artist Thomas Cole was a premier painter of the nineteenth-century Hudson River school, which focused on natural landscapes as sites for human awe of sublime nature. Born in England, Cole moved to Philadelphia with his family in 1819 at the age of eighteen. In the mid-1820s, his early paintings of the New York State’s Hudson River and Catskill Mountain areas brought him appreciation and fame among the eastern elite. Travels to England, Paris, Florence, and Rome in the 1830s resulted in a series of sketches of ancient temples and nature in the Italian hillsides that culminated, on his return, in the five-part series, “The Course of Empire,” completed in 1836. His continued study of the New England and New York areas in the 1830s and 1840s was punctuated by another European trip in 1841–42. Cole painted many full-color illustrations of the Catskills, using as subjects rugged rocks, dark clouds, and wilderness. Nature filled with sublime light indicated the awe of God infused in the natural world. Dark forests, barren tree trunks, and hawks were emblematic of wildness at its highest moment.
Commodity. An article bought or sold. Nature, labor, and even the human body are sometimes regarded as commodities.
Commoner, Barry (b. 1917). Biologist and author, Barry Commoner is known for his writings and activism on behalf of the environment. His works include Science and Survival (1967), The Closing Circle (1971), Energy and Human Welfare (1975), The Poverty of Power (1976), The Politics of Energy (1979), and Making Peace with the Planet (1992). Commoner was a critic of the influx of nuclear power, chlorofluorocarbons, and petrochemicals into the environment and an advocate of alternatives based on the sun, organic agriculture, and the cogeneration of energy from waste heat. In The Closing Circle, he argued that, through pollution and degradation of the four elements of the ancients—earth (Illinois), air (Los Angeles), fire (nuclear power), and water (Lake Erie)—humanity had broken out of the cycle of life that has sustained the planet and added new, life-threatening, industrially produced chemicals to the biosphere. As a social activist, Commoner proposed the decentralization of the electric utility industry, and the forgiving of Third World debt. He argued that the “demographic transition” from higher to lower birth rates as countries industrialized would ultimately reduce population growth rates throughout the Third World. In 1980 he ran for President of the United States as the Citizen’s Party candidate, with an environmental and socialist agenda.
Consciousness. The totality of an individual’s thoughts, feelings, impressions, or a collective awareness of these by a group of individuals.
Conservation. The wise and frugal use of natural resources for the benefit of present and future generations.
Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851). A novelist and historian whose work presages both the environmental and Native American movements, James Fenimore Cooper is best known for his series of five Leatherstocking tales, featuring the growth and development of the hero Natty Bumppo (also known as Leatherstocking, Deerslayer, and Hawkeye) during the white settlement of New York State and the western prairies. The series consists of The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and the Deerslayer (1842). The first book in the series, The Pioneers (1823), set in the frontier village of Cooperstown, New York, highlighted the ecological destruction of massive numbers of passenger pigeons, and sensitively portrayed the option of living by hunting only those animals needed for human survival. Cooper also criticized the encroachment of white civilization on Native American lands and the decline of Indian lifeways.
Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). An agency created by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) in the Executive Office of the President, to advise the President on matters of environmental quality, and to review agency compliance with NEPA. It existed until 1993, when President William Jefferson Clinton replaced it with the White House Office on Environmental Policy.
Culture. The concepts, habits, and institutions of a given people in a given period.
Dawes Act (1887). In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act, known as the Dawes Act, after its author Congressman Henry Dawes of Massachusetts. The act shifted the status of land on Indian reservations from communal to individual ownership by assigning 160-acre parcels to the heads of tribal families. The intent of the act was to bring Native Americans into greater conformity with the private property and farm ownership ideals of mainstream American settlement. The act broke up communally held lands on Indian reservations and stipulated that, after the individual plots had been allocated, the surplus land could be sold to non-Indians. The act not only resulted in Indian losses of “surplus” land, but additional losses accrued as speculators convinced many Indians to sell them their 160-acre allotments.
Declensionist. A narrative structure, or plot, that portrays environmental history as a downward spiral.
Deep ecology. The idea first proposed by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in his 1973 article in Inquiry, entitled, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long Range Ecology Movement: A Summary,” that environmental problems cannot be resolved merely by legislation and regulation. They also require a deeper shift in basic philosophical assumptions about human relationships with the nonhuman world, based on principles such as diversity, symbiosis, biospherical egalitarianism, complexity, and local autonomy.
Desert Lands Act (1877). Passed in 1877, the Desert Lands Act provided for the sale of 640 acres of federal land unfit for cultivation in the western states, at 25 cents per acre and $1 per acre at final proof, to any settler who irrigated it within three years of filing. Stream water over and above that actually appropriated would remain free for use and appropriation by the public for irrigation, mining, and manufacturing purposes. Desert lands were defined as lands other than timber and mineral lands in the western states and territories that would not produce a crop without irrigation.
Diversity-stability hypothesis. The theory that complex biological and physical systems result in long-term maintenance of an ecosystem. Although accepted by many twentieth-century ecologists and conservationists as an argument for conserving biological diversity, the underlying concepts and validity of the hypothesis were questioned in the last quarter of the century.
Douglas, Marjory Stoneman (1890–1998). Florida writer and environmental activist, Mary Stoneman Douglas is best known for her efforts to create the Everglades National Park in 1947. She worked as a reporter and editor for her father’s newspaper, the Miami Herald, and for the American Red Cross until 1920. Her book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947) characterized the Everglades as an interconnected system of water, grass, wildlife, and land threatened by drainage, dumping, and fill. In 1969, she helped to found Friends of the Everglades, to preserve the delicate ecosystem. She detailed her lifelong struggle to save the Everglades in an autobiography, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River (1987). She died at the age of 108.
Downing, Andrew Jackson (1815–52). A founder of landscape architecture, Andrew Jackson Downing began his career as a horticulturist in his father’s nursery in Newburgh, New York, and became its sole owner about 1838. He designed country cottages for the average rural American and country estates for the well-to-do along the Hudson River. He also planned the grounds for the United States Capitol, the White House, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He influenced the work of New York City’s Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted and worked with Olmsted’s future partner, Calvert Vaux. Downing’s books, which became classics in the field, include, Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841); Cottage Residences (1842); The Fruits and Fruit Trees of North America (1845), coauthored with his brother Charles; and Architecture for Country Homes (1850).
Dust Bowl. The term used to describe the effects of wind erosion on the soils of the Great Plains during the drought years of the 1930s.
Earth First! A movement founded in 1979 by Dave Foreman and other preservationists, in the belief that mainstream environmentalism had become too compromised by corporate interests, Earth First! vowed to make “no compromise in defense of Mother Earth.” The group had no official membership list, and used “monkeywrenching” techniques to protest logging, dam building, and billboarding that degraded wilderness and endangered biota. Its methods included tree-spiking, sabotaging the gas tanks of bulldozers, and the use of guerrilla theater to dramatize the loss of the wild. It also promoted biodiversity projects, lower consumption and birth rates, and the restoration of native species such as grizzly bears. It encouraged respect for wilderness, living simply on the land, and acts of civil disobedience to preserve wild nature.
Earth Island Institute (EII). The goal of San Francisco’s Earth Island Institute, founded in 1982, is conservation, preservation, and restoration, or as founder David Brower put it, to administer CPR (a play on cardiopulmonary resuscitation) to the environment. EII’s international mission has included such projects as holding several conferences on the Fate and Hope of the Earth, sponsoring an environmental program on Central America, promoting dolphin-safe tuna catches, protecting old-growth and tropical rainforests, restoring urban habitats, and reducing inner city poverty. Within the United States, it helped citizens to develop legal strategies for enforcing environmental statutes, to promote the Green political movement, and to support environmental justice.
Ecocentrism. The idea that the natural world is an integrated ecological whole and, as such, is worthy of moral consideration.
Ecofeminism. The idea that an historical and cultural association exists between women and nature, which have both been dominated in Western culture, and that women can liberate themselves and nature through environmental activism.
Ecological imperialism. The idea proposed by environmental historian Alfred Crosby, in a 1978 article in The Texas Quarterly, that biota (such as people, animals, pathogens, and weeds) are all part of colonization, intentionally or not.
Ecological revolution. A concept developed by environmental historian Carolyn Merchant to characterize major transformations in relationships between humans and nonhuman nature. These include the colonial ecological revolution that characterized the transition from Native American ways of life to colonial settlement, and the capitalist ecological revolution that marked the transition from the colonial to the market economy of the nineteenth century.
Ecological succession. The gradual replacement, in a given environment, of one community of organisms by another.
Ecology. A branch of science, named by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, that explores the relationships between and among organisms and their abiotic surroundings, or environment.
Ecosystem. A self-regulating and self-sustaining community of organisms that relate to each other and to the larger environment.
Ecotage. The idea, promoted by the environmental group Earth First! during the 1980s, that nature can be saved by sabotaging the machines and equipment (but not people) that destroy it.
Ehrlich, Paul (b. 1932). Biologist and conservationist Paul Ehrlich became famous for his book The Population Bomb (1968), in which he outlined the negative environmental effects of uncontrolled population growth. Adopting the approach developed by Thomas Malthus in his 1798 Essay on Population, Ehrlich argued that world population is increasing exponentially while resources such as food are increasing at a far slower rate. Ten thousand years ago, the world population was about 5 million, but by 1650 it had increased to 500 million, and by 1850 it was about a billion. If population continued to grow at rates between 1.7 and 2.1 percent per year, Ehrlich predicted that, by the year 2000, the earth would have upwards of 6 billion people, a prediction that came to pass on October 12, 1999. Unless the human species initiated an era of birth control, population growth would lead to ecological and social collapse. To help achieve population control, Ehrlich founded Zero Population Growth in 1968 to push for a balance between population and the environment. In 1990, Ehrlich and his wife, Ann Ehrlich, moderated their approach in a book entitled The Population Explosion (1990), arguing that if women, especially those in developing countries, were educated, they would achieve higher standards of living and tend to have fewer children. Two years later, the Ehrlichs expanded their approach to the problem in Healing the Planet: Strategies for Solving the Environmental Crisis (1992).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82). An American essayist and philosopher of the Transcendentalist school of thought, Emerson spent most of his life in Concord, Massachusetts, where he wrote and lectured. His essays, which were published in several collections, dealt with topics ranging from nature and the beauties of his surroundings to wealth and self-reliance. He graduated from Harvard College in 1821, and in 1825 began divinity school in Cambridge to prepare for the Unitarian ministry, but did not remain in the profession. His philosophy was influenced by European writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1732–1834), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), and Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). He believed that the human soul and the universal Oversoul corresponded, and that humans could look within themselves in order to find larger truths. Each person was contained within the unity of the Oversoul, and the eternal One existed within every individual. In his 1836 essay “Nature,” he wrote that the natural world was emblematic of the universal spirit. Emerson influenced the work of Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), who placed greater emphasis on the material world as a source of truth, and John Muir (1838–1914), who held that nature was like a mirror that reflected the Creator. Emerson visited Muir in Yosemite Valley in 1872, but, to Muir’s disappointment, did not join him for a month of immersion in the high Sierra mountains. Of the three, Emerson, in addition to his worship of nature, extolled the virtues of the commercial spirit, while Thoreau eschewed them for the middle ground of Walden Pond, and Muir escaped them for the mountain wilderness.
Endangered American Wilderness Act (1978). Passed in 1978 to augment the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Endangered American Wilderness Act set aside many additional undeveloped national forest lands. Designated lands in the Western states were added to the National Wilderness Preservation System for their value in areas such as watershed preservation, wildlife habitat protection, scenic and historic preservation, scientific research and education use, primitive recreation, solitude, and physical and mental challenge.
Endangered Species Act (ESA) (1973). The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is a federal measure, passed in 1973, that established procedures for identifying and protecting endangered plants and animals in critical habitats, and for prohibiting the taking, harvesting, hunting, and harming of listed species. The ESA, applying stricter standards than an earlier act in 1969, defined two levels of enforcement: an “endangered” species, as one “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range,” excluding those species considered to be pests or risks to humanity; and a “threatened” species, as one “likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future.” ESA prohibited the importation and exportation of endangered species and the “taking” of such species within the United States or its possessions, but it allowed limited taking of threatened species. The law also prohibited federal agencies from destroying the critical habitat of an endangered species, a provision that met with controversy when the snail darter’s only known habitat was threatened by the completion of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. Provisions added to ESA in 1978 defined a process for public participation in the listing of species, a five-year review of all species on the list to determine if any should be removed, a requirement that the critical habitat of a species be specified at the time of listing, and a recovery plan for listed species. Further amendments in 1988 provided more details on the recovery plans and reauthorized ESA for four years. By 1992, when the list included 389 animals and 373 plants native to the United States, further reauthorization encountered political opposition due to the perceived confiscatory power of the “takings” provision. Instead, a compromise emerged that called for development mitigations through creating habitat conservation plans (HCPs). Developers and landowners agreed to leave portions of forests and wetlands untouched and to preserve wildlife corridors in exchange for development permits. Although many HCPs were subsequently approved, critics argued that they represented shortsighted compromises that favored development at the expense of wildlife.
Endangered Species Conservation Act (1969). The goal of the Endangered Species Conservation Act, passed in 1969, was to prevent the importation of endangered species threatened with worldwide extinction into the United States, and to prevent the shipment within the United States of reptiles, amphibians, and other wildlife that were protected by state laws. The best scientific and commercial data available were to be used by the Secretary of the Interior to establish lists of endangered species. A species could be endangered owing to the destruction of its habitat, its overutilization for commercial purposes, its degradation from disease or predation, or other natural or man-made factors that threatened its continued existence. The act was superseded by the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1973.
Environment. The surroundings or aggregate of external conditions that influence the lives of individuals, populations, communities, and societies.
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). A citizens’ litigating organization, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) was founded in 1967. It links science, economics, and law in an effort to create cost-effective solutions to environmental problems. From its earliest strategy of suing the polluters over issues such as the spraying of DDT to its recent concerns over acid rain and corporate emissions trading, it brings legal expertise to bear on issues of environmental quality. EDF has worked with the fast-food industry to reduce its solid waste stream and to substitute paper for polystyrene containers, implicated in upper-atmospheric ozone depletion. It has also worked with utilities to promote the use of renewable energy sources and economically efficient energy conservation programs.
Environmental ethics. That branch of philosophy that addresses questions of what one ought to do to save the environment.
Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Mandated by the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is a requirement that every federal agency prepare and circulate statements “on proposals for legislation and other major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.”
Environmental Justice Movement. The idea that minority communities have been disproportionately affected by the negative aspects of environmental pollution and resource depletion and that steps must be taken to reverse those effects. The movement arose during the 1980s when African and Native Americans in Warren County, North Carolina, protested a proposed disposal site for PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in 1982, and a United Church of Christ report, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States” (1987), showed that communities with the greatest number of commercial hazardous waste facilities had the highest composition of racial and ethnic residents. The movement against inequities and for environmental justice has grown to include numerous ethnic and racial communities in both urban and rural environments throughout the country and the world.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Created by executive reorganization in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is an agency in the executive branch of the federal government, with authority to regulate air and water quality, radiation and pesticide hazards, and solid waste disposal. In the late 1980s it also began to address issues related to global climate change and its impact on the environment. The EPA, from its main office in Washington, D.C., and ten regional offices throughout the country, works with the states to conduct research, oversee environmental programs, and evaluate federally mandated Environmental Impact Statements (EIS). The EPA also has the authority to develop regulations that enforce congressional legislation concerning environmental quality. It maintains field laboratories that collect data for monitoring and enforcing its regulations.
Environmentalism. Beliefs and actions taken to preserve the environment, encompassing a range of impulses from preservationism, or the intention to save undisturbed nature for its own sake, to conservation, or the maintenance of nature for human use by present and future generations.
Equilibrium. The tendency for a system to restore itself to a particular condition.
Exploit. (1) to make use of; (2) to use for one’s own advantage, profit, or selfish gain.
Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956). Culminating several years of study and planning, Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, creating the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The system has been lauded as increasing economic productivity, competitiveness, safety, and freedom, and criticized for creating automobile dependent urban sprawl, air and water pollution, and for slowing construction of mass transit systems. The federal government’s cost share was 90 percent, to be paid for by an increase in gasoline taxes, with the remainder being paid by the states. The system required interstates to be divided highways with a minimum of two lanes in each direction, moderate grades, high-speed curves, and conveniently spaced rest areas, with no intersections or traffic signals. It incorporated existing turnpikes and highways that met the standards, and by the 1990s consisted of over 40,000 miles of highway, representing about one percent of the nation’s roads.
Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) (1976). With the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), Congress granted the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) the authority to manage lands under its jurisdiction more effectively. The act retained public lands in public ownership, effectively closing the public domain to private entry; established guidelines for the sale of public lands; and gave the BLM the authority to set grazing, preservation, and mining policy. According to the act’s provisions, Congress would have final approval over the reauthorization of ten-year grazing permits, as well as the state-by-state designation of BLM lands as wilderness areas.
Fernow, Bernhard (1851–1923). One of several influential forest conservationists at the turn of the nineteenth century, Bernhard Fernow was born in Prussia and educated in forestry at the Hanover-Mueden Academy before coming to the United States in 1876. He managed a private forest in Pennsylvania, became secretary of the American Forestry Association (1883–95), and served as chief of the Division of Forestry in the executive branch of the U.S. government from 1886–98. His books on forestry, including Economics of Forestry (1902), Care of Trees (1910), and A Brief History of Forestry (1913), helped to educate the public on the decline of forests and the need for conservation. He fought for the passage of the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, which authorized the president to create reserves from forested lands in the public domain. A critic of laissez-faire individualism, a philosophy that supported private control of the forests, Fernow advocated a policy of faire marcher (literally, “to make it work”) with the central government representing the communal and future interests of the people.
Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is a unit in the Department of the Interior of the executive branch of the federal government that conserves, protects, and enhances fish and wildlife, as well as their habitats, for the benefit of the American people. It was created in 1940 by merging the Bureau of Fisheries in the Department of Commerce with the Bureau of Biological Survey in the Department of Agriculture. It oversees national wildlife refuges and fish hatcheries, develops recovery plans for endangered species, restores fisheries, monitors and enhances wetlands, and enforces wildlife laws.
Food web. Interlocking systems of organisms and food chains in which energy, in the form of food, is transferred from one trophic (nutritional) level to another.
Foreman, Dave (b. 1947). Controversial founder of the radical environmental organization, Earth First!, Dave Foreman began his career in Washington, D.C., with the Wilderness Society in the 1970s. He was angered by the extreme profit motive of the resource extraction industry and became disillusioned with the ineffectual strategies of both government regulatory agencies (such as the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Department of Agriculture) and conservation groups (such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the Wilderness Society). Influenced by Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), in 1979 Foreman founded Earth First!, a group of anonymous activists who advocated attacking the machines that were destroying the last remaining wilderness. Following its motto, “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth,” the group filled the gas tanks of bulldozers with sugar, spiked trees to break chain saws, cut down high-voltage power lines, and rolled black plastic strips down the outside of dams to simulate cracks. Foreman’s book Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching (1987) and his autobiography Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (1991) promoted the destruction of property, but not people, in defending wilderness. In the wake of an FBI enforcement campaign and Foreman’s arrest and plea bargain in 1989, Earth First! split into two factions. Foreman went on to found the Wildlands Project in Tucson, Arizona, and to publish a guide to books on the “Big Outside.”
Forest Management (Organic) Act (1897). The Forest Management Act stated that the purpose of forest reservations was “to improve and protect the forest within the reservation or for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” Included in an 1897 appropriations act about “Surveying the Public Lands,” the act provided that the Secretary of the Interior Department (the department that administered the forests at the time), could permit timber harvesting, mining, and water use on the forest reservations by settlers, miners, residents, and prospectors. Private owners could exchange lands within the reservations for equivalent lands outside them, in some cases leading to abuse when companies and railroads cut the forests before exchanging them.
Forest Reserve Act (1891). The Forest Reserve Act was the last section of an act that repealed the Timber Culture Act of 1873 and authorized the president to “set apart and reserve in any State or Territory having public land bearing forests, in any part … covered with timber or undergrowth, whether of commercial value or not, as public reservations.” The act arose out of concern to create watershed protection to prevent flooding and soil erosion, to preserve the nation’s forests and wildlife, and to reserve the forests for democratic development. Division of Forestry head Gifford Pinchot later stated that he considered the act to be the most important legislation in the history of American forestry. The act was used extensively by President Theodore Roosevelt in the first decade of the twentieth century, under Pinchot’s guidance, to create the national forest system.
Forest Service (USFS). The Forest Service is a federal agency in the Department of Agriculture that was created in 1886 as the Division of Forestry and renamed when the forest reserves were transferred from the Department of the Interior to Agriculture in 1905. The forest reserves, created through the advocacy of forest division chiefs Bernhard Fernow and Gifford Pinchot and the powers of President Theodore Roosevelt, were declared national forests in 1907. The Forest Service, responsible for the administration of the nation’s forests, has a mandate to provide multiple uses of the forest resource, including timber, wildlife, recreation, range, and water. The USFS, and some of its sustained yield policies, have evoked controversy: among them old-growth and clear-cutting practices, the issuance of grazing permits on forested lands, and the failure to establish adequate protection for particular threatened species such as the northern spotted owl.
Forestry. The science of cultivating forests and managing the production of timber.
Free Timber Act (1878). The Free Timber Act was a federal act, passed in 1878, that gave residents of nine western states the privilege of cutting timber on public mineral lands for building, agriculture, mining, or other domestic purposes.
Friends of the Earth (FOE). Friends of the Earth (FOE) is an international environmental organization, founded in 1969, dedicated to protecting the planet from environmental disaster and to preserving biological, cultural, and ethnic diversity. It was founded by David Brower and other environmentalists, who promoted an activist approach to dealing with urgent environmental degradation using boycotts, demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches. It later adopted a more mainstream approach of endorsing green products and promoting legislation. Through its worldwide organization, it works at all levels of society to create networks that can influence legislation and arouse public awareness of environmental problems.
General Land Office (GLO). Established in 1812, the General Land Office was created by the federal government to conduct land surveys and to process and record sales, entries, withdrawals, reservations, and leases on the public lands. It had primary jurisdiction over the entire public domain until 1946, when it was merged with the Grazing Service into the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
General (Land) Ordinance of 1785. Passed by the Continental Congress, the General Land Ordinance established the rectangular land survey system of townships, 6 miles square divided into 36 sections of 640 acres each, that could be sold at auction for not less than $1 per acre. Section 16 of each township was reserved for schools and four sections for government disposal. The ordinance fostered both widespread land speculation and squatting and was the basis of the Homestead Act’s provision of 160 acres, or one-fourth of a section, for individual land claims.
Gibbs, Lois (b. 1951). An activist for healthy, toxic-free environments, in 1978 Lois Gibbs organized neighbors of a toxic chemical dump underlying Love Canal, an area of Niagara Falls where her children attended school, to seek relocation and retribution from the state. The chemical manufacturer initially denied allegations that the high rates of cancer, birth defects, and miscarriages experienced by the surrounding population were caused by leaking chemicals, but in August of 1978, state officials closed the school and 239 residents were moved out of the area. In 1980, an emergency declaration by President Jimmy Carter moved nine hundred families from Love Canal. In 1981, Gibbs founded the Citizen’s Clearing House for Hazardous Wastes, and the newsletter “Everyone’s Backyard.” The goals were to coordinate grassroots efforts nationwide to oppose and remove hazardous waste sites and to promote environmental justice. She received numerous awards for her work, was the subject of a prime-time movie—“Lois Gibbs: the Love Canal Story”—and is the author of Love Canal, the Story Continues (1998).
Global warming. The idea that the earth’s surface temperature is gradually rising, owing to industrial processes that raise gas levels, trapping heat.
Hamilton, Alice (1869–1970). Public heath activist, physician, and founder of occupational medicine, Alice Hamilton was a pioneer in the field of industrial health and safety and the remediation of hazardous effects of the workplace. After a medical education at the University of Michigan, from which she received a degree in 1893, and in Germany, she became a bacteriologist at the Memorial Institute for Infectious Diseases in Chicago, beginning in 1902. During her time in that city, she lived and worked at Jane Addams’s Hull House, publicized the problem of the spread of typhoid fever from flies on sewage during the epidemic of 1902, and pressured the city to correct the unhealthy working conditions of immigrant laborers. Heading an Occupational Disease Commission created by the Governor of Illinois in 1910, Hamilton succeeded in pressing for legislation for job-related health and injury compensation. As a founding member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which promoted peace and an end to World War I, she explored wider concerns about social welfare. Hamilton’s later career centered on Harvard University, where she served as an assistant professor of industrial medicine in the School of Medicine between 1919 and 1925 and at the School of Public Health until 1935. She subsequently worked as a consultant for the Division of Labor Standards in the U.S. Labor Department and was awarded many honorary degrees and awards for her work. Her books include Industrial Poisons in the United States (1925), Industrial Toxicology (1934), and an autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943). She died in 1970 at the age of 100.
Hatch Act (1887). The Hatch Act is a federal act, passed in 1887, for the purpose of establishing agricultural experiment stations. The stations, associated with land grant universities, undertake research on the production of food, fiber, and nutrition. The results are disseminated to the public through the Cooperative Extension Service, whose agents work with growers to improve production techniques and crop yields and with the public to promote better nutritional standards.
Homeostatic. Maintenance of a constant value or steady state within a narrow range, such as the human body temperature.
Homestead Act (1862). A federal act, passed in 1862, which aimed to encourage rapid settlement of the western lands of the United States and to distribute lands equitably to all settlers. The act specifically authorized any person who was the head of a family or over twenty-one years of age, and who was a citizen of the United States or had declared an intention to become one, to enter upon no more than 160 acres (one-fourth of a section) of unappropriated land subject to preemption and sale at a minimum price of $1.25 per acre, or not more than 80 acres subject to sale at a minimum price of $2.50 per acre. The act was consistent with the Jeffersonian ideal that every person should be able to own enough land for farming. It provided opportunities to those who were unable to purchase land outright, to single, divorced, and widowed women, and to European immigrants. Owing to grants to railroads and to fraud by speculators, only about one in six to nine acres actually were acquired by homesteaders by the end of the nineteenth century. Repercussions of the act included extensive railroad development, land acquisition by speculators and absentee landlords, tenant farming, decimation of the Plains buffalo and Indians, and degradation of the prairies and arid lands due to extensive cultivation.
Homocentrism. The idea that humans are the center of all existence and deserve moral consideration above all other parts of the natural world.
Hudson River school. A group of nineteenth-century American artists, including Thomas Doughty, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran, and Albert Bierstadt, who explored the relationship between the land and human society. Their paintings of the Hudson River and a number of other areas, done primarily between 1820 and 1880, made landscapes the main subject and contrasted wild and forested nature with human effects on the land. The paintings were both realistic depictions of nature and romantic renderings of a “wilderness” that once covered most of the American continent, but by the mid-nineteenth century was seen as vanishing before the advancement of civilization.
Human ecology. The study of human communities and their changes over time with respect to their interactions with other communities, species, and the natural environment.
Ickes, Harold (1874–1952). Harold Ickes, as the Secretary of the Interior under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, beginning in 1933, and continuing under Harry Truman until 1946, did much to modernize the administration of federal lands. Arguing that conservation was a major responsibility of the federal government, he expanded the National Park System to include Olympic National Park in Washington, Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, and King’s Canyon National Park in California, and took steps toward creating the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. In 1939, under his auspices, the National Fish and Wildlife Service created 160 wildlife refuges. Progressive in his policies toward minority groups, he supported John Collier of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in passing the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and worked to elevate the status of African Americans in his department. He was responsible, moreover, for outlawing the killing of predators, such as wolves and coyotes, in the national parks.
Imperialism. The view that the role of human beings and governments is to establish power over nature and over as great an area and as many peoples as possible.
Indian Civil Rights Act (1968). A federal act, passed in 1968, denying states the authority to extend their civil and criminal jurisdiction over Indian lands without tribal consent, and imposing certain restraints on tribal governments.
Irrigation. The means of causing water to flow onto land for cultivating plants.
Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826). As the nation’s third president, serving from 1801–1808, Thomas Jefferson contributed to the growth of diplomacy, democracy, agriculture, science, and natural history. His Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) set out the natural history of Virginia, expounded on its physical features, biota, agriculture, and commercial products and discussed Indians, slavery, religion, and society. Jefferson extolled the nation’s farmers as the “chosen people of God,” and advocated keeping manufacturing in Europe to prevent degrading human labor systems from taking hold in America. Jefferson’s legacy was the agrarian ideal that every individual should be able to own a plot of land. His finalization of the Louisiana purchase in 1803 more than doubled the size of the country and was followed by the explorations of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whose mission was to map the new territory and to collect and record species of plants, animals, and minerals. As a farmer who yearned to give up politics to return to his fields, Jefferson experimented with agricultural improvement, employing methods of restoring soil fertility and improving crop yields.
Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849–1909). Short-story and nature writer, Sarah Orne Jewett is best known for her acclaimed literary work The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and for her impassioned plea for plume-bird conservation in her short story “A White Heron” (1886). In the latter story, a vagrant snowy egret being hunted by a gun-bearing ornithologist looking for a specimen is saved by a young girl who intimately knows the marshes where the bird nests, but decides not to reveal its location to the scientist. The story, written at a time when public consciousness about bird endangerment was only beginning, was a critique not only of the milliner’s trade in bird plumage, but also of collecting scientific specimens as a hobby and for museums. Beyond that, the work reveals cultural as well as gendered tensions between civilization, represented by the male urban ornithologist, and untouched nature, symbolized by the heron and the small girl.
Kemble, Frances Anne (1809–93). As an actress and author, Frances Kemble was a passionate critic of the environmental degradation and brutal labor systems associated with cotton production in the nineteenth-century American South. Born in England, Kemble and her father came to the United States in 1832 to join the Park Theatre Company in New York. After marrying Pierce Butler, she left the stage, and in 1838–39 accompanied him to his plantation on the Sea Islands of Georgia. Horrified by slavery, but delighted by the natural surroundings, Kemble penned a caustic, critical treatise, entitled Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (first published in 1863), which criticized the treatment of slaves and the waste of the soil under careless cotton cultivation, while extolling the beautiful flowers, birds, and marshes of the islands. She subsequently left her husband and used her acting talents to give well-attended public readings of Shakespeare, settling in the Berkshire Mountains in Lenox, Massachusetts. Her other writings included a two-volume work, Journal of a Residence in America, published in 1835, the critical tone of which met with mixed reviews in the United States.
Land and Water Conservation Fund Act (1965). The Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965 has been amended numerous times to preserve, develop, and assure accessibility to outdoor recreation resources and to develop land and water areas and facilities. It assesses user fees at recreation areas, such as national parks, monuments, and scenic areas, in order to subsidize state and federal acquisition of lands and waters for recreational and conservation purposes. These acquisitions include additions to the national parks, national forests, and national wildlife refuges.
Land ethic. A term used by twentieth-century ecologist Aldo Leopold in his 1949 A Sand County Almanac to refer to the extension of the ethics of the human community to include “soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”
Land stewardship. The responsible use and care of the environment and its natural resources.
Leopold, Aldo (1887–1948). Aldo Leopold, a pioneer in such fields as wildlife and restoration ecology, strongly influenced emerging ideas about environmental ethics and decision-making. After completing his degree at the Yale Forestry School in 1909, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Arizona and New Mexico. In 1925, Leopold moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he was the associate director of the United States Forest Products Laboratory, and in 1933 became professor, holding the new Chair of Game Management, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Early in his career, he thought of wild animals as a crop to be harvested for human use. In his book on Game Management (1933), Leopold considered deer to be a resource to be managed by controlling the environmental factors pertaining to the seed stock.
Two decades later, Leopold looked back to an Arizona experience that he identified as a transformative moment in his thinking. In his book A Sand County Almanac, published posthumously in 1949, he included a chapter entitled “Thinking Like a Mountain,” stating that his conviction arose from the day he saw a wolf die. A wolf came out of the river and “in a second we were pumping lead into the pack.… I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would be hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the fierce green fire dying in her eyes, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
A prolific writer, Leopold founded what became the science of restoration ecology when he bought an old farm in the sand counties of Wisconsin and began to replant it. His observations about nature and ecology published in A Sand County Almanac became a bible for environmentalists and environmental ethicists. The “land ethic,” he wrote, “simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” In implementing the ethic, Leopold stated, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
MacKaye, Benton (1879–1975). A regional planner with a master’s degree in Forestry from Harvard University (1905), Benton MacKaye was a co-founder of the Wilderness Society in 1935 and a strong advocate for the preservation of forests and wildlands for hiking and outdoor recreation. He conceptualized the Appalachian Trail in a 1921 article entitled, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” and worked for its implementation and completion. The goal was to create an interlinked chain along the Appalachian crest, from northern Maine to the southern tip of the Appalachians, that would provide an escape for overworked eastern urbanites. Work on the trail commenced in the 1920s and was completed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1937. MacKaye published The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning in 1928, served on the regional planning commission of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) from 1934 to 1936, and on the staff of the Rural Electrification Administration from 1942 to 1945.
Marsh, George Perkins (1801–82). George Perkins Marsh was one of the earliest advocates for the wise use of land. Born in Woodstock, Vermont, he became fish commissioner from that state. As the Vermont fish commissioner, he could see that cutting the forests was polluting rivers, causing them to silt up and preventing fish from spawning. There was thus a direct relationship between forest use and other resources, such as fisheries. He later turned his attention to national and international matters as a U.S. congressman and, ultimately, a twenty-one year career in the diplomatic corps. In the latter post, he drew explicit connections between the historical destruction of Mediterranean lands—how the forests had been devastated, the soil eroded, and pastures over-grazed—and what he regarded as similar changes in America.
His book Man and Nature, published in 1864, sold 100,000 copies in a few months, testimony to the increasing numbers of people becoming concerned about the waste of resources and desiring to take action. “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent,” he wrote. “Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.” Marsh’s book put forward the basis for an ethic of human cooperation with the land. He said that man should become “a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the damaged fabric,” and he must “reclothe the mountains as the valleys are deforested.” Humans ought to use natural resources, but work with the land in order to restore it. Ten years later, he republished the book under the title The Earth as Modified by Human Action. Today Marsh is looked upon as America’s first prophet of ecology.
Marshall, Robert (1901–39). Robert Marshall was an influential and controversial activist on behalf of wilderness conservation. He attended Syracuse University’s School of Forestry, which had been endowed by his father. After serving as a silviculturist in Montana between 1925 and 1928, he spent two years studying tree growth, climate, and society in the Alaskan village of Wiseman. From 1932 to 1933 he worked for the U.S. Forest Service, drafting a National Plan for American Forestry. In 1933, as chief of the Division of Recreation and Lands of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), he proposed a plan for indigenous management of Indian reservation forests. Marshall sharpened his appreciation of the delicate balance of forest life, and the way it was being disrupted by lumber companies, when he headed the Outdoors and Recreation Office in the National Forest Service in the late 1930s.
In his most important book, The People’s Forests (1933), Marshall criticized the Forest Service and the timber companies for their emphasis on profits and advocated full governmental control over all forests. In Marshall’s view, timber companies, which artificially inflated consumers’ need for wood products, had not proven to be able caretakers of the land; rather, he proposed, the public should acquire at least 562 million acres out of the 670 million existing acres of forest, for their social as well as natural value.
Marshall’s activism continued throughout his life. Working with Olaus Murie, Aldo Leopold, and Benton MacKaye to establish the Wilderness Society in 1935, he proposed that the society be dedicated to creating and protecting wilderness areas and to preserving public lands, including forests, sea shores, wildlife refuges, and lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management. Wilderness areas, in contrast to national parks, were to be places free of cars or established guest facilities, in which people could walk, backpack, or travel with pack trains and camp out. Marshall’s insistence that wilderness areas be set aside near large concentrations of factory workers and underprivileged populations put him at odds with many of his colleagues, who feared that popular use of the wilderness would destroy its special virtues. His advocacy for causes associated with socialism opened him to harassment by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1930s. After his death in 1939, his $1.5 million estate was distributed to trust funds benefitting social advocacy, civil liberties, and the preservation of wilderness areas. In order to commemorate his passion, the Wilderness Society created the Bob Marshall Wilderness in northwestern Montana.
Maya, Esperanza (b. 1942). A co-founder of El Pueblo Para Aire y Agua Limpio (People for Clean Air and Water) in 1989, as well as California Communities Against Toxics, Maya helped to devise tactics by which communities can fight environmental hazards. Responding to a plan by Chemical Waste Management in 1989 to add a toxic waste incinerator to a landfill site above an area of predominately Hispanic farm workers in Kettleman City, California, she and other members of the community began to intervene in company-dominated planning meetings, and to demand that there be simultaneous translation in Spanish so that residents could hear what was actually proposed.
Working with black activist Jesse Jackson and with Lois Gibbs of Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, El Pueblo Para Aire y Agua Limpio staged marches and coordinated with other communities throughout the country who were mounting similar protests. The group filed and in 1992 won a lawsuit protesting the adequacy of the Environmental Impact Report (EIR). Chemical Waste Management withdrew the incinerator proposal, and the people in Kettleman City won. The group went on to become part of a network of green activists throughout the country.
McHarg, Ian (1920–2001). Landscape architect and urban planner, Ian McHarg is noted for his innovative designs integrating ecology and landscape with human communities. Born in Scotland, McHarg received master’s degrees in Landscape Architecture and City Planning from Harvard University before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where he became a leader in the emerging field of ecological city planning. His book Design with Nature (1969) became a bible for city planners seeking to integrate ecological factors, such as climate, geology, soil, vegetation, wildlife, and historical landmarks, into urban and suburban design. He developed integrative plans for cities such as Denver and Minneapolis and designed communities in Woodlands, Texas and Davis, California. In addition to Design with Nature (1969), his books include a collection of his writings, To Heal the Earth (1999), and his autobiography, A Quest for Life (1996).
Mechanism. A philosophy that arose in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century that likens the world to a vast machine made up of inert parts that obey the laws of physics and chemistry.
Miller, Olive Thorne (1831–1918). A writer of numerous books and short stories for both children and adults, Olive Thorne Miller (Harriet Mann Miller) was an early advocate of birdwatching and bird preservation. She popularized birds and their behavior in books such as Bird Ways (1885), In Nesting Time (1888), A Bird-Lover in the West (1894) and With the Birds in Maine (1904). She contributed articles to the journal of the Audubon Society, Bird Lore, and her work helped to strengthen the movement to protect birds from plume hunters for the millinery trade and to promote nature as a refuge and source of spiritual renewal.
Mining Law (1872). The General Mining Law of 1872, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant to encourage western settlement and development of the country’s mineral resources, has come under criticism for its failure to extract royalties for the government, and numerous attempts have been made to modify it. It allowed prospecting by individuals and corporations on the nation’s public lands and the staking of claims for development of a deposit. The law covered placer deposits of gold and other minerals in streams and lode deposits of gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, tungsten, uranium, and all other minerals except coal. Modifications to the law require claimants to pay an annual holding fee of $100 per claim and to purchase surface and mineral rights of $2.50 per acre for placer claims and $5 per acre for lode claims. There is no limit on the number of claims a person can hold and no royalties for the minerals extracted paid to the federal government.
Monoculture. The raising of only one crop in a field or on a given piece of land.
Morrill Act (1862). A federal act, passed in 1862, granting each state a minimum of 30,000 acres of public land for sale, for the purpose of creating a fund to establish agricultural and technical colleges of agriculture.
Moses, Robert (1888–1981). Parks Commissioner of New York City from 1933 to 1959, Robert Moses transformed the urban landscape of the city and its surroundings through a series of parks, playgrounds, tunnels, bridges, and parkways. He led the city’s efforts to construct public housing to replace and improve tenements. He also held a variety of public and state offices, including chair of New York States’s Council of Parks in 1924 and Secretary of State for New York (1927–28), ran for governor of the state in 1934, and wrote Working for People (1956).
Muir, John (1838–1914). One of the country’s foremost advocates of wilderness preservation, John Muir was born in Scotland but grew up on a farm near Portage, Wisconsin, to which his family emigrated in 1849. In The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), Muir described the severity of the work extracted from him by a Protestant father, his self-education, and mechanical inventions, experiences that later led him to leave established religion to seek God in the richness and beauty of nature. After studying chemistry, geology, and botany at the University of Wisconsin and surviving an eye injury at an Indiana factory where he worked, he determined to “study the inventions of God,” and in 1867 set out on a journey described in A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916). Muir traveled to the West in 1868, where he explored the Sierras and the Yosemite Valley, interspersed with explorations in the Northwest and Alaska, before marrying in 1880 and settling on his father-in-law’s farm in Martinez, California.
With Robert Underwood Johnson, Muir mounted a campaign to save western forests from logging and grazing, which was influential in establishing Yosemite National Park in 1890. He founded the Sierra Club in 1892 in order to preserve the forests and valleys of the Sierra Nevada. Muir described his experiences in the Sierras in The Mountains of California, which appeared in 1894. His impassioned writing, including such articles as “Forest Reservations and National Parks” (Harper’s Weekly, June 5, 1897) and “The American Forests” (Atlantic Monthly, August 1897), as well as a book, Our National Parks (1901), proved vital for raising consciousness about the need to save the national forests. His growing reputation enabled Muir to camp with Theodore Roosevelt in Yosemite in 1903 and convey to him the urgency of setting aside even more land as national forests and parks. Victory, however, did not come within Muir’s lifetime, and his greatest defeat occurred when Congress passed the Raker Act in 1913, authorizing a dam for water and power for San Francisco in Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. Dispirited by his failed campaign, Muir died in 1914, two years before Congress passed the National Parks Service Act to administer the country’s thirteen then existing and future national parks.
National Audubon Society. Initially organized in 1886 and reestablished in 1905, the Audubon Society, named after ornithologist John James Audubon (1785–1851), promotes the study and protection of bird life and publishes Audubon Magazine (formerly entitled Bird Lore) for its members. Its goal is to preserve birds, their habitats, and migratory routes, to conserve and restore ecosystems, and to educate the public on the importance of wildlife conservation. The society originated in New York City in the 1880s in the attempt to protect birds whose plumes were used in the millinery trade to decorate women’s hats, bonnets, and garments. In 1886, it succeeded in having a “model law” passed in New York State to protect the state’s birds, and by 1905 twenty-eight states had passed the law. From its early work in protecting wild birds, the society expanded toward promoting appreciation of avifauna through birdwatching, compiling an annual census of birds, and producing educational materials on birds, their habits, and habitats. It is now one of the oldest and largest conservation groups in the world.
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) (1969). The National Environmental Policy Act, passed in 1969 and signed into law on January 1, 1970 by President Richard Nixon, requires every federal agency to prepare and circulate Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) on proposed legislation and actions affecting the quality of the human environment. The law created the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in the Executive Office of the President, which was replaced by the White House Office on Environmental Policy in 1993. NEPA’s broad mandate is to “create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.”
National Park Service Act (1916). In 1916, Congress passed the National Park Service Act to transfer administrative power over national parks from the United States Cavalry to the Department of the Interior. Its mission was to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such a manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” The law allowed for limited timber cutting to control insect damage or to conserve scenery, the removal of detrimental animals and plants, the leasing of land for guest accommodations, and limited livestock grazing. From thirteen parks in 1916, the National Park System had grown by the late twentieth century to include approximately 355 sites that covered over 125,000 square miles of natural, cultural, historical, and recreational lands.
National Wildlife Federation (NWF). Founded in 1936, the National Wildlife Federation is dedicated to the conservation of fish, wildlife, and other natural resources. The organization lobbies for legislation to conserve wildlife, maintains an institute for wildlife research, sponsors programs and camps for children, issues wildlife stamps, and publishes several magazines and directories. In contrast to absolute preservation of all biota, the NWF promotes hunting and trapping as a means for managing wildlife populations.
National Wildlife Refuge System. A collection of federally owned properties, the National Wildlife Refuge System is designed to preserve threatened wildlife habitats. The earliest federal wildlife preservation efforts, including a northern seal reserve on Alaska’s Pribiloff Islands declared by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1868, were accomplished by executive fiat. President Benjamin Harrison, twenty-five years later, used the newly authorized presidential power to set aside timber reserves (1891) as an opportunity to create the first wildlife refuge on Alaska’s Afognak Island. With a proclamation that stressed the common good, Harrison barred fishing and settlement on the island, and protected the resident salmon, sea lions, and sea otters. President Theodore Roosevelt, beginning in 1903, began aggressively to build a system of over fifty refuges. In his first such action, Roosevelt asked if any law prevented him from declaring Florida’s Pelican Island, whose birds were being decimated by plume hunters, as “a Federal Bird Reservation.” When told that no such law prevented it, he said, “Very well, then I so declare it.” The National Wildlife Refuges are currently administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and included 520 units, covering 93 million acres, by the late twentieth century.
Natural resources. Objects of use or sources of wealth found in or arising from nature, as opposed to being produced by human labor. Renewable resources consist of living entities that can reproduce themselves after use, such as trees, grass, or fish. Nonrenewable resources are entities that cannot replace themselves once used or extracted, such as minerals and fossil fuels.
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Founded in 1970, thehe Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a citizen’s litigating organization working on behalf of the environment. It focuses on drafting environmental laws, lobbying for their passage, and litigating for their implementation. Among issues it has taken up are the phase-out of lead from gasoline, electrical utility conservation and efficiency, old-growth forest preservation, and the protection of the environment from oil drilling, pollution, nuclear weapons proliferation, and pesticides. NRDC, which publishes the journal Amicus, advocates the creation of a sustainable society in which people can live in a harmonious relationship with the environment.
Nature. Nature is one of the most complex words in the English language and has several interrelated meanings that have evolved over time. On the one hand, it is the physical universe, including all its physical features, processes, organisms, and their interactions. Although it technically includes human beings, it is often used to refer to the world as distinct from or prior to human beings and their social and cultural institutions. Another meaning is that of an inherent force or impulse to act and sustain action; hence to go against nature is to go against this inherent impulse. A third meaning is the fundamental character or quality of an individual entity.
Historically, Nature has often been personified as a mother, virgin, or goddess who acted in accordance with her own dictates, or capricious impulses, or who carried out the mandates of a superior deity. The latter meaning was elaborated as the unchanging natural laws of the universe which could be discovered, rationally understood, classified, or used for prediction; the idea of the state of nature was used as the basis for an ideal society obeying natural laws. Natural selection referred to an active evolutionary process through which species competed and survived or went extinct. Ideas of nature as unchanging and competitive or changing and cooperative were projected onto society and used to justify political and social goals and programs.
Nature Conservancy. Founded in 1951, the Nature Conservancy is a citizens’ environmental organization dedicated to protecting the habitats of plants, animals, and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on earth. The Conservancy works with individuals and communities to set aside habitats as nature preserves and has acquired more than 1,500 preserves, encompassing over 9 million acres in North America. It has pioneered debt-for-nature swaps by which developing countries can reduce their debt to the United States by setting aside nature preserves in their own countries. The organization oversees over 90 million acres in Latin America and the Caribbean, and maintains a global database of endangered species.
New Ecology. A school of ecology, prominent in the 1930s through the 1960s, that emphasized the quantitative study of energy, energy exchanges, and ecological efficiency. Major figures included Arthur Tansley, Raymond Lindeman, and Eugene Odum.
Newell, Frederick (1862–1932). A hydraulic engineer and hydrographer with the U.S. Geological Survey beginning in 1888, Frederick Newell made irrigation surveys in the West. After passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902, he became director of the Reclamation Service (now the Bureau of Reclamation), serving in that post from 1907 to 1914. Newell was instrumental in organizing President Theodore Roosevelt’s White House Conference of Governors in 1908, which promoted the conservation of the nation’s natural resources. He wrote several books on irrigation, including Hydrography of Arid Regions (1891); Agriculture by Irrigation (1894); The Public Lands of the United States and their Water Supply (1895); Irrigation in the United States (1902); and Water Resources, Present and Future Uses (1919).
Odum, Eugene (b. 1913). An ecologist and environmental philosopher, Eugene Odum developed a systems approach to interactions between humans and the environment based on the concept of balanced, homeostatic ecosystems. Influential in the 1960s and 1970s, his work integrated Frederic Clements’ ideas of ecological succession with thermodynamic approaches focused on energy transfers within the system. While nature (conceptualized as the oikos, or human home) tended toward a homeostatic balance within particular ecosystems, disturbances came from both human and natural causes. Nevertheless, humanity had the possibility of restoring degraded ecosystems through science, ethics, and the wise management of landscapes. Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology (1953), a definitive work for a generation of ecologists and environmentalists, set out the basic concepts and principles of ecology and applied them to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and the natural resources they contained. Odum won several prizes, including the Tyler Prize, for his achievements in environmentalism (1977) and served as the president of the Ecological Society of America.
Olmsted, Frederick Law (1822–1903). Noted both as a writer and landscape architect. Frederick Law Olmsted was an early advocate for, and designer of, public parks in the United States. Before taking up a career in design, he wrote several accounts of his travels, including A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), and a report on “The Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees” (1864) that led to the preservation of Yosemite Valley. In collaboration with architect Calvert Vaux, Olmsted won the commission to design New York’s Central Park in 1866. Although reconfiguring and managing every aspect of the landscape, Olmsted wanted the park to appear as though it had simply been preserved from development. Park workers created a lake, planted a forest, and filled a former dump with topsoil to restore native meadows. In addition to Central Park, he designed the Boston Fens, participated in campaigns to preserve Niagara Falls and the Adirondacks of New York State, and designed several university campuses, city parks, cemeteries, and hospital grounds. A guiding philosophy of his work was the necessity for accessibility to nature by all walks of society for a democratic culture to thrive.
Organicism. A philosophy that the world is like a living organism, such as the human body. Each part of nature, including animals, plants, and minerals, is part of a larger whole and participates in it.
Pinchot, Gifford (1865–1946). Gifford Pinchot is considered the founder of modern forestry in the United States. He went to Yale University and studied forestry in Germany and France. When he returned to the United States, he experimented with different forestry techniques while managing the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. Succeeding Bernhard Fernow, he served as chief of the Division of Forestry (now the Forest Service) in the U.S. government between 1898 and 1910, during which time he strove to create forest reserves and to train a core of young foresters in the latest management techniques. Pinchot’s policies included transferring the forest reserves out of the Department of the Interior and into the Department of Agriculture in 1905, on the grounds that forests ought to be managed as a crop, instituting fire suppression programs in the national forests, and devising a sustained yield program in which any trees cut would be replanted. Some of his decisions, such as allowing grazing permits in the national forests and supporting the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, put him at odds with the preservationist movement. After leaving government office in 1910, he pressed for the passage of the Weeks Act in 1911, which authorized the purchase of additional forest reserves, and was a founder and president of the Society of American Foresters between 1900 and 1911. Pinchot served as Governor of Pennsylvania from 1922 to 1926. He wrote about conservation in The Fight for Conservation (1910), and described his life’s work in Breaking New Ground (1947).
Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act (Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act) (1937). The Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act was first passed in 1937, and has been amended numerous times since then. It provides federal aid to the states to restore and manage wildlife and to acquire wildlife habitat, funded through a tax on sporting guns and ammunition. The states submit to the Secretary of the Interior detailed five-year plans for fish and wildlife management or for wildlife restoration that ensure the perpetuation of wildlife resources for economic, scientific, and recreational purposes.
Plant associations. Groups of plants usually found together in areas having similar ecological conditions.
Polyculture. The raising of several crops together in one field or piece of land.
Population. The total number of people or organisms living in a given area.
Population biology. The study of those factors that determine the size and distribution of organisms in a given area and the ways they change over time.
Portmanteau biota. The term used by environmental historian Alfred Crosby in his book Ecological Imperialism (1986) to characterize associated animals, plants, weeds, pests, and pathogens accompanying people on ships when establishing New World colonies.
Positivism. The philosophical theory that only mathematical statements and empirically verifiable statements are true and lead to positive knowledge of the external world.
Possibilism. The philosophical theory that allows for a multitude of choices, influences, or explanations of an event or outcome.
Powell, John Wesley (1834–1902). John Wesley Powell was an ethnologist and geologist who strongly influenced Americans’ view of the western landscape. Born in Mount Morris, New York, Powell fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union, becoming a major, after which he took a position as professor of geology at Illinois Wesleyan College and subsequently became curator of the museum of Illinois Normal University. He conducted a number of exploratory surveys of the West, including a hazardous journey down the Colorado River in 1869 (described in Explorations of the Colorado River, 1875), a federally funded scientific mission in 1871, and a survey of the Rocky Mountain region in 1875–79. His efforts helped establish the U.S. Geological Survey, which he led from 1881 to 1894 and at which he instigated the compilation of topographic maps, geological, soil, and groundwater surveys, and proposals for flood control and irrigation. He was also the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology, a position he held from 1789 until his death in 1902.
Powell’s most important legacy is his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, which identified a fundamental difference between the lands of the western and eastern United States and proposed strategies for constructive human settlement in the West. The meager rainfall in most areas west of the 98th meridian, averaging less than twenty inches annually, divided the landscape into distinctive zones: whereas fertile areas in river valleys and adjacent irrigated lowlands could support farms as small as 80 acres, non-irrigated lands could only be used for grazing, and required tracts upwards of 2,560 acres. A third classification of valuable timberland, he asserted, should be set aside and reserved for commercial use. These findings cast into doubt the idea of the standard 160-acre allotment that had been prescribed by the Homestead Act of 1860.
The most radical position Powell took was that people should continue the medieval and New England ideal of the commons on western lands. He argued that cooperative irrigation districts should be created, so that a group of people could irrigate a district together, grazing their animals on the commons. The federal government should supply funds to aid people in cooperative irrigation projects by setting aside money to help them build reservoirs to store the water, from which the irrigation ditches could be channeled. Scientific surveys would be conducted to identify soil characteristics suitable for farming and pasturage. Although the more radical features of his work were not accepted, Powell’s Report led ultimately to the passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902 and the creation of the Bureau of Reclamation.
Preservation. The belief that natural areas should be left undisturbed by human beings.
Public domain. The lands owned and managed by the United States government.
Railroad Land Grants. A federal policy of granting even-numbered sections (640 acres) of land on either side of a right of way to western railroads. The land grants, meant to spur the rapid construction of transcontinental routes for the carrying of mail and troops as well as the general settlement of western lands, resulted in a great deal of land speculation.
Raker Act (1913). The passage of the Raker Act in 1913 was the culmination of the famous struggle during the first decade of the twentieth century over whether or not to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. The controversy polarized the followers of John Muir, who likened Hetch Hetchy to a cathedral, and the followers of Gifford Pinchot, who saw a greater public good in damming the valley as a source of water for the city of San Francisco. The act, which provided for land appropriations within, and rights of way through, federal lands in and around Yosemite, stipulated that the resulting water and power resources must be kept in public hands, a requirement that was afterwards ignored.
RARE I and II. Two studies, Roadless Areas Review and Evaluation I (1971) and II (1977), that were undertaken by the U.S. Forest Service, with massive public involvement, to identify wilderness areas for protection and open non-wilderness roadless areas to multiple-use management.
Reclamation. The process of making the land productive for agriculture through irrigation. Also, the process of restoring disturbed land to an ecologically healthy state.
Reclamation Act (1902). The Reclamation Act, otherwise known as the Newlands Act, was passed in 1902 to aid in the settlement of the arid West. It established a fund, generated from the sale of public lands, for the construction of dams and irrigation systems. Water from federal projects was restricted to land parcels of 160 acres or less, or 320 acres for married couples, and to bona fide occupiers of the land. Speculators thwarted the act’s provisions for the democratic distribution of land and water, as had been the case with the earlier Homestead Act.
Recycle. To reuse materials over again in new products, as opposed to throwing them away as waste.
Resource. Money, property, or natural entities that can be used to the advantage of an individual or a country.
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) (1976). Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976 in an effort to manage the increasing volume of solid waste with better methods. The goals of RCRA, which amended the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, are to protect human health and the environment, to reduce waste, and to conserve energy and natural resources. RCRA’s Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments were added in 1984 to address the problems of production and reduction of hazardous waste. RCRA created a program to handle hazardous and medical wastes from “cradle to grave,” and to develop standards for underground petroleum storage tanks to prevent leakage into groundwater. The act delegated to the states the development and implementation of solid waste management plans in accord with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards for landfills, and is implemented with EPA technical and financial assistance. Waste recovery policies developed by the EPA follow the hierarchy of first reduce, then reuse, recycle, incinerate with energy recovery, and finally, only as a last step, to resort to landfills.
Richards, Ellen Swallow (1842–1911). Ellen Swallow Richards, a chemist and educator, conceptualized ecology as the study of the human home, or community. After undergraduate work at Vassar, from which she received a bachelor’s degree in 1870, Richards continued her research in chemistry as the first woman to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT, where she remained throughout her career, she incorporated into her framework the ideas of Frank Storer, a professor studying the atmosphere, and concepts of the earth derived from the work of her future husband, Robert Richards.
The concept of oekology as the science of living, which Richards introduced in 1892, led to a later definition of “human ecology” as “the study of the surroundings of human beings in the effects they produce on the lives of men” in her book Sanitation in Daily Life (1907). The features of the environment, according to this theory, came both from the climate, which was natural, and from human activity, which was artificial, or superimposed on it. “Human ecology” laid the groundwork for the sanitation and home economics movements, and raised public consciousness of problems caused by humans living in industrializing cities, such as noise, smoke, and water pollution.
Richards was a pioneering educator as well as researcher and theorist. She used funds from the Women’s Education Association to establish a Woman’s Laboratory in 1876, where she and growing ranks of scientists devised protocols for testing food, water, and other materials. In 1881, she extended this initiative to include a summer laboratory in Massachusetts, which later moved to Woods Hole and eventually became the Marine Biological Laboratory. Her books include The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning (1882), Home Sanitation (1887), Air, Water, and Food (1890), Euthenics, the Science of Controllable Environment (1910), and Sanitation in Daily Life (1907; 2d ed., 1910).
Right of Way Act (1901). The Right of Way Act was passed in 1901 to allow the Secretary of the Interior to permit rights of way through public lands, national forests, and national parks. Specifying Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant National Parks in California, the act allowed the construction of electrical and water transmission reservoirs, conduits, and equipment for mining, domestic, and other beneficial uses on rights of way. Although the act technically would have allowed the construction of Hetch Hetchy Dam and the transmission of its water and power through Yosemite National Park, permission for right of way for the development was denied until the Raker Act in 1913.
Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919). Conservationist, outdoors adventurer, politician, and President of the United States from 1901 to 1908, Theodore Roosevelt made major contributions to the conservation movement at the turn of the nineteenth century. A bird-watcher, hunter, and rancher, Roosevelt pursued a vigorous outdoor life in the western United States in his youth and through trips after his presidency to Africa and South America. After serving as Governor of New York State from 1898 to 1900, where he became an advocate for forest and bird preservation, Roosevelt ran for the vice-presidency and, after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, became the nation’s twenty-sixth president. While in office, he frequently collaborated with advocates such as Gifford Pinchot to promote efficiency in natural resources use and forest conservation and John Muir to preserve national parks. To these ends, he worked with Congress to pass the Reclamation Act of 1902, appointed commissions to study the use of public lands (1903) and inland waterways (1907), and held a White House Conference of Governors on the conservation of natural resources (1908). He increased the forest reserves from 50 million to 150 million acres and created fifty wildlife refuges. Roosevelt’s legacy in conservation endures through his efforts to preserve the resources of his day for future generations.
Sears, Paul (1891–1990). A botanist, ecologist, and conservationist, Paul Sears studied the link between human disruption of nature and the desertification of landscapes. He argued that planners and government officials at every level should consult with ecologists to understand how both settlement and agricultural and extraction schemes relate to the degradation, conservation, and the health and stability of nature. As chair of the Conservation Program at Yale University, he created a graduate program in Conservation of Natural Resources and publicized the dependency of humanity on other biota, natural resources, and habitats. He called ecology a “subversive science” for its capacity to question the assumption, central to the development of modern Western culture, that human society progresses through the transformation of nature. His books include Deserts on the March (1935), This Is Our World (1937), Life and the Environment (1939), The Living Landscape (1964), and Lands Beyond the Forest (1969).
Sierra Club. The Sierra Club was founded in 1892, under the leadership of John Muir (1838–1914), to promote the enjoyment and protection of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. From an initial focus on creating and preserving parks in the western mountains, the organization has undertaken wider efforts to preserve wilderness areas, such as old-growth redwoods, national seashores, and the Grand Canyon, and to lobby for clean air and other environmental protection legislation. The club has more than 58 chapters throughout the United States, which work on issues from the local to the national and beyond.
Social ecology. The study of human social and economic institutions and communities with respect to their interactions with other humans, species, and the natural environment.
Soil Conservation Act (1935). Enacted by Congress in 1935 out of concern over soil erosion and the Dust Bowl, the Soil Conservation Act established a permanent Soil Conservation Service in the United States Department of Agriculture.
Soil Conservation Service (SCS) (1935). An agency in the Department of Agriculture in the executive branch of the federal government, established in 1935 by passage of the Soil Conservation Act, to provide for the control and prevention of soil erosion. It makes soil surveys throughout the country, reports on salinization, wetlands, and water quality, and combats soil erosion by wind and water.
Stability. Relative constancy over time of the numbers of individuals in a species or of different species in a given area.
Standing Bear, Luther (1829?–1908). Luther Standing Bear was a leader of the Ponca Indian tribe of northern Nebraska. In addition to his successful legal campaign to preserve his tribe’s ancestral lands, he is noted for his statement that he and his people did not consider their beautiful lands as wild. “Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful …” The statement is seen by some as challenging the idea that the North American continent was a pristine wilderness at the time of European settlement and therefore that Indians both managed and were stewards of the landscape. Standing Bear’s memoirs were published posthumously in Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933).
Staple. (1) A chief or leading crop or commodity regularly grown or sold in a particular place, such as sugar, wheat, or cotton. (2) The fiber of cotton, wool, or flax, with reference to its length and fineness.
Sustainable development. The idea that each generation can satisfy current needs for natural resources while respecting those of future generations.
Steady state. A dynamic balance between inputs and outputs of a system, such as an organism or an ecoystem.
Subsistence. The means of providing sustenance, support, or livelihood for the continued existence of a human being.
Tansley, Arthur G. (1871–1955). British plant ecologist Arthur Tansley introduced the concept of the ecosystem to the field of ecology. A member of an international botanical expedition to the United States in 1913, Tansley toured the Great Plains, the Sierras, and the Southwest and prepared the final report of the expedition, noting that, despite the inevitability of economic development, “tracts of original untouched nature can and should be preserved for the enjoyment and use of our successors.” As Professor of Botany at Oxford University from 1927 to 1937, he published a foundational essay in the journal Ecology, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetative Concepts and Terms” (1935), defining the ecosystem as “the biome [animals and plants] considered together with all the effective inorganic factors of its environment.… In an ecosystem the organisms and the inorganic factors alike are components which are in relatively stable dynamic equilibrium.” In 1939, he published a classic book on plant ecology entitled British Islands and Their Vegetation (1939), and in 1946 put out a revision of his 1923 textbook entitled An Introduction to Plant Ecology. Tansley’s later years were devoted to the cause of conservation in Great Britain, where he served as the first head of the Nature Conservancy.
Taylor Grazing Act (1934). First passed in 1934, the act retained all unreserved public domain lands and federally regulated grazing on public lands through establishing grazing districts and managing livestock grazing in those districts. The Secretary of the Interior is charged with providing for the preservation of the land and for issuing permits to graze livestock to settlers, residents, and livestock owners for periods of not more than ten years, and may suspend permits in times of range depletion due to drought or during epidemics. Other resources such as stone, timber, and coal within the districts must remain accessible. Hearings are held in the states affected before grazing districts are created and adjacent landowners may apply for rights-of-way through the districts.
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is an agency created in 1933, for unified development of the resources of the Tennessee River Valley to achieve flood control, navigation, electric power generation, reforestation, and the economic well-being of the people of the valley. A product of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” it was designed to bring electricity to rural households and to provide employment during the Depression era and beyond. Originally based on hydroelectric power, the project later turned to coal and nuclear sources to maintain its electrical distribution systems. TVA has had impacts on the environment in the form of air pollution, habitat degradation, and species depletions in the region.
Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62). Nature writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau was an early advocate for an environmental consciousness. After attending Harvard College from 1833 to 1837, he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, and became engaged in the intellectual currents there, including intense interest in the natural world and the philosophy of transcendentalism, or the idea of an overarching unity in all things. At Concord, he became a follower and protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom he also worked on abolitionism during the year 1844. This passion led to his essay “Civil Disobedience” (1847) and to the later use of his home as a station on the Underground Railroad. In 1845, he moved to Walden Pond to undertake an experiment in solitary living for two-and-one-half years, from which emerged his most famous book, Walden (1854). Walden is a landmark in American nature writing, natural history observation, and environmental history. It reflects on the qualities of life that can be found in and from nature and the ambiguities associated with so-called advancements such as the railroad and commerce. Thoreau’s essay “The Succession of Forest Trees” (1860) is heralded as a major early contribution to the ecological theory of plant succession. Journals kept throughout his life, contain much of his best writing and nature observations. His collected works were published in 1906 as The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (20 volumes). He died of tuberculosis in Concord in 1862.
Timber and Stone Act (1878). A federal act, passed in 1878, that provided for the sale in Washington, Oregon, California, and Nevada of 160 acres of land valuable for timber and stone, but unfit for cultivation, for not less than $2.50 per acre.
Timber Culture Act (1873). A federal act, passed in 1873, to donate 160 acres of public land to any person who would plant 40 acres with trees and keep them healthy for a period of ten years. Due to the practical difficulties of planting trees on the prairies and plains, as well as problems of fraud and speculation, the act’s provisions were repealed by the Forest Reserve Act of 1891.
Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) (1976). Congress, in response to nationwide concerns over asbestos, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and vinyl chloride, passed the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976. The act mandated that manufacturers and processors keep records about the production and transportation process, as well as health and environmental effects, of all chemicals regulated by the law. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was charged with determining whether new chemicals can be manufactured, a task it has had difficulty fulfilling.
Tragedy of the commons. The theory that a group of self-interested people collectively using resources will degrade and deplete those resources. Examples include the overgrazing of open rangelands, the overfishing of the oceans, and the pollution of air and water.
Transcendentalism. The idealist, Platonist philosophy held by a group of individuals in nineteenth-century United States, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reality was ideal and the material world only a constantly changing appearance. Symbols and emblems in the material world provided clues to ideal truths through visionary insight and spiritual intuition, enabling the human soul to transcend physical limitations and gain insight into the Oversoul, or divine One.
Trophic. Food and nutritional processes entailing the transfer of energy from one organism to another.
Tucker, Cora (1940–1997). Cora Tucker founded Citizens for a Better America, an early spearhead in the movement for environmental justice. An African-American grandmother, activist, and self-described homemaker, Tucker began to fight uranium mining projects and nuclear waste dump sites while living in rural Virginia’s Halifax County. In 1986, she organized the successful efforts of a coalition of residents of Halifax County to protest a disposal site for a high-level nuclear dump, using a federal law requiring that siting decisions take minorities and Indians into consideration. She is also credited with turning the derogatory phrase, “hysterical housewives,” into a term of empowerment for organizing. In 1991, Tucker received a Bannerman Fellowship for Long-Time Activists of Color. She was the chair of the Board of Grassroots Leadership in Charlotte, North Carolina and the first President of Virginia Action.
Turner, Frederick Jackson (1861–1932). A pioneering historian of the development of western lands, Frederick Jackson Turner is famous for his “frontier thesis.” Born in Portage, Wisconsin, Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1885 until 1910 and Harvard University until his retirement in 1924. His essay entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” first presented at the Columbian Exhibition at Chicago in July 1893, is one of the most influential and hotly debated explanatory principles in the interpretation of American history. Turner stated: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explains American development.” Continuous waves of trappers, ranchers, prospectors, and farmers, drawn to rich natural resources in the West, were stripped of the trappings of European culture and transformed into a new, and uniquely democratic, type of American. In addition to his frontier thesis, Turner is noted for The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), delineating the differentiation of the United States into economic sections in the early nineteenth century and those sections’ formative roles in American historical development and conflict.
Udall, Stewart (b. 1920). Noted for his book The Quiet Crisis (1963), Steward Udall served as Secretary of the Interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1969. Appearing the year after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had alerted Americans to the threat to human and biotic health from the use of pesticides, Udall’s book was noted for its warning about the creeping effects of pollution on the landscape and the need for conservation education. While science and technology had opened up new sources of energy and possibilities for the control of nature, he wrote, they had also contributed to the increase in garbage, roadside litter, contaminated lakes and rivers, polluted air, and declining wildlife. Udall called for new educational initiatives, legislation, and technologies to respond to the crisis and restore the balance of nature. In addition to his service in the Cabinet, Udall served as a congressman from Arizona from 1955–60, and was a member of the Joint Committee on Navajo-Hopi Indian Administration. He contributed to National Parks of America (1966), The National Parks (1974), and, beginning in 1970, wrote “Udall on the Environment,” a column syndicated in many newspapers.
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The Department of Agriculture is an agency within the executive branch of the United States government that oversees agricultural production and crop protection. From a division within the Patent Office in charge of seed distribution, statistics, and research started in 1840, Agriculture became a department in 1862 and rose to cabinet rank in 1889. The Department oversees farm production, sets health standards for farm products, develops overseas markets, provides assistance to rural residents, and is charged with protecting soil, forests, and other resources. The Department’s Natural Resources and Environment Division contains the Forest Service and the Soil Conservation Service.
United States Department of the Interior. The U.S. Department of the Interior was founded in 1849 to manage the western lands and their allocation to settlers, railroads, colleges, and universities. In the twentieth century, as public lands became increasingly closed to settlement, the Department shifted its energies towards caring for public lands and natural resources. It administers wildlife refuges, wetlands, national parks and monuments, wild and scenic rivers, and Indian reservations. It oversees the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Mines, the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation, and Enforcement, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. While criticized by some for the construction of large dams and reclamation systems that result in ecological degradation, the Department also is a primary conserver of ecosystems and wildlands.
United States Geological Survey (USGS). The U.S. Geological Survey is a federal agency in the Department of the Interior, created in 1879 to survey mineral resources and rivers in the American West. The agency’s first two directors included geologist Clarence King (1879–81), who conducted a survey of the fortieth parallel, and explorer John Wesley Powell (1881–94), who conducted the first survey expeditions down the Colorado River in 1869 and 1871. The USGS maps topography, catalogs natural resources such as minerals, fuels, and water, and conducts research on fossil and glacial history, hydrology, oceanography, geophysics, and geochemistry. It compiles information on volcanic action, landslides, floods, and droughts, and monitors underground aquifers, streamflows, and water quality.
Washington, Booker T. (1856–1915). A scientist and educator, Booker T. Washington effectively pioneered improved farming methods and worked to diffuse practical knowledge among African Americans in the South. Born a slave in the Virginia Piedmont, Washington grew up on a 207-acre tobacco farm now a national monument. As a young man he worked in the West Virginia coal mines and was educated at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Norfolk, Virginia, graduating in 1875. In 1881, he moved to the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, and built it from a school for prospective schoolteachers into a regional center of agricultural and industrial training, research into better farming methods, and outreach. To better equip blacks to be successful farmers and owners of land, he developed the Tuskegee Negro Conference for distributing agricultural techniques through methods such as county fairs, short courses, and leafleting. During his career, Washington delivered numerous speeches and wrote books on the education and potential of African Americans, including his Autobiography (1901).
Water Pollution Control Act (1948, 1972). The Water Pollution Control Act, passed in 1948, was the first federal law that officially dealt with water pollution. It provided funding for state and local governments to identify and improve polluted waters. The Water Pollution Control Amendments passed in 1972 shifted the major responsibility for directing water pollution control programs to the federal government. As revised and expanded, the act mandated that discharges of polluting and toxic materials be halted by 1985 and that water quality improve to a level that would protect fish and wildlife. Funds for the construction of waste treatment plants were authorized and the states were charged with introducing technologies to halt pollution and to control polluting forms of runoff. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was given the responsibility of issuing guidelines to the states and polluting industries for the treatment of wastewater using the best practicable technologies to control organic wastes, sediment, acid, bacteria, viruses, nutrients, oil and grease, and temperature levels. The EPA was also directed to publish a list of toxic pollutants and standards for releasing each substance into the environment.
Water Quality Act (1987). The Water Quality Act passed by Congress in 1987 ended federal funding for treatment of wastewater and instead emphasized control of toxic substances in sewage and storm water. The states were directed to list toxic hot spots unable to be improved by control technologies. The act left many states with unmet wastewater treatment needs and waters that did not meet federal water quality standards. Runoff and toxic substances pollution continued to present problems as well.
Water Quality Control Act (1965). In 1965, Congress passed the Water Quality Control Act, giving the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration the power to establish water quality standards.
Wheatley, Phillis (1753–84). Born in Gambia, West Africa, and brought to Boston as a slave in 1761, Phillis Wheatley used nature imagery in her poetry, drawing on classical and biblical references in the style of the eighteenth-century neoclassical Enlightenment. She was bought by Susanna Wheatley, who had several black slaves as servants in her household, and schooled by Wheatley’s youngest daughter, Mary, who taught Phillis English and the alphabet. At twelve, Phillis began to study Latin, and after four years began translating portions of Ovid, gaining a reputation in America and abroad. Under the influence of the Latin classicists, she began to write her own poetry, published in 1773 as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, which brought her to the attention of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others. Although much of her poetry commemorates individuals, those which extol nature use classical allusions such as Aurora as dawn, gentle zephyr as wind, the sun as king, and birds as the feathered race in appreciation of God’s power in the natural world.
White, Laura Lyon (1839–1916). Conservationist Laura (Mrs. Lovell) White, founder and president of the California Club, was instrumental in the preservation of California’s redwoods. From 1900–1909, she led a nationwide campaign to save the Calaveras Big Trees (Sequoia gigantea) in the Stanislaus River basin, the largest known redwoods in existence, measuring over 12 feet in diameter. Taking office in 1903 as president of the Sempervirens Club (which later became the Save the Redwoods League), she worked with others to save the coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). An advocate of scientifically based forestry, she chaired the Forestry Committee of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs from 1910–12, which coordinated efforts nationwide to preserve forest reserves and watersheds. She gained a national reputation for her work on behalf of forest preservation through her executive abilities and tireless advocacy in the cause of conservation.
Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968). The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, passed in 1968 in the wake of the controversial damming of western rivers, began the process of designating and protecting wild rivers. The act designated free-flowing rivers that were free of dams and had outstanding scenic, geologic, historic, recreational, or wildlife features. The National Rivers Inventory, published in 1982, listed 1,524 portions of rivers eligible for the designation. When so listed, the river—whether in a remote, rural, or urban area—would be ineligible for hydroelectric or other water projects or for mineral extraction. By the mid-1990s, 152 rivers with a total of 10,516 miles of river segments had been designated as wild and scenic under the act. The rivers are managed by the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, the Department of the Interior’s National Parks Service, or its Bureau of Land Management.
Wilderness. The word wilderness derives from medieval terms such as wildern (wild savage land), wilddeor (wild deer), and wilddren (wild man). Wild places were uncultivated, uninhabited forests, wastes, and deserts. Deep forests were dark, unknown places in which one might become bewildered and lost. Wastes were open, unused lands with little vegetation. Wilde and wylde pertained to untamed animals living in a state of nature and to uncultivated, undomesticated plants. Although in colonial America wilderness denoted an unknown forested place, it later took on positive characteristics of awe, beauty, and the sublime, and ultimately of untrammeled lands worthy of preservation for scientific or recreational purposes.
Wilderness Act (1964). The Wilderness Act, passed in 1964, designated certain federal lands as wilderness areas, preventing their development, and defining wilderness as an area “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” It established the National Wilderness Preservation system, which grew to comprise over 95 million acres of land in its “natural condition.” In 1975, Congress created sixteen wilderness areas in the eastern states with the Eastern Wilderness Act. The Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE I) and its successor, RARE II, played a key role in the designation process.
Wilderness Society (TWS). The Wilderness Society is an environmental organization, founded in 1935, dedicated to the creation and protection of wilderness areas in particular and to the preservation and management of the nation’s public lands in general. These lands include national parks, national seashores, national forests, national wildlife refuges, and other federal lands. The Society was co-founded by forester Robert Marshall, wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold, Appalachian Trail founder Benton MacKaye, and others. It was instrumental in the passage of the Wilderness Act (1964), as well as other conservation laws such as the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), the National Forest Management Act (1976), and the Alaska National Interest Conservation Land Act (1980). Its goals are to save old-growth forests, to prevent below-cost timber sales in the national forests, to prohibit oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to expand the number of wild and scenic rivers, and to double the size of the National Wilderness System.
Winters decision. A decision by the United States Supreme Court, in January 1908, explicitly affirming water rights claims by Indian tribes in the western states.
Works Progress Administration (WPA). The Works Progress Administration was an agency founded by the Roosevelt administration between 1935 and 1943 to create employment during the depression in areas such as conservation, education, the arts, writing, and theater production. The workers constructed parks, bridges, and public buildings.
World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Founded in 1961, the World Wildlife Fund is an international conservation organization dedicated to worldwide conservation and the maintenance of habitats, endangered species, and essential ecological processes. It monitors international trade in wildlife and endangered species and works with other national and international conservation organizations to conduct scientific research that will preserve biodiversity and protect wildlife, such as the African elephant and the giant panda, which is its logo.
Wright, Mabel Osgood (1859–1934). Mabel Osgood Wright, president of the Connecticut Audubon Society in Fairfield, Connecticut from 1898 to 1925, helped to build a national network of activists on behalf of wildlife. She was an editor of Bird Lore, which became Audubon magazine, and the director of the National Association of Audubon Societies (which became the Audubon Society) from 1905–28. She encouraged the secretaries of the other state Audubon societies to send in news items to the magazine in order to publicize the plight of song and shore birds, whose plumes were being used for women’s hats. This work was influential in the passage of a “model law,” restricting the harvesting of birds for their feathers, a Tariff Act in 1913, outlawing the importation of wild bird feathers, and the success of the campaign to convince women to change their hat styles. Devoted to the observation and teaching of birds in their habitats, Wright taught bird classes to children and wrote several children’s books on nature, including The Friendship of Nature (1894), Birdcraft (1895), Birds of Village and Field (1898), and Citizen Bird (1897).
Yellowstone Park Act (1872). The Yellowstone Park Act of 1872, which set aside “a tract of land lying near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River as a public park,” created the nation’s first national park. It was “set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” including “all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders” so that they might be retained in their “natural condition.” The act allowed the construction of buildings to accommodate visitors and forbade the destruction of fish and game within the park boundaries. The area had been explored in 1871 by the Hayden Expedition, which brought back photographs taken by William Henry Jackson and paintings by Thomas Moran. The legislation was promoted by the Northern Pacific Railroad, which saw the potential for tourism in the American West.
Zahniser, Howard (1906–64). A major influence in the writing and passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, Howard Zahniser served the federal government and the Wilderness Society in numerous capacities between 1930 and his death in 1964. He was a writer and researcher with the Bureau of Biological Survey (later to become the United States Fish and Wildlife Service) from 1931 until 1942, and for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Division of Information until he joined the staff of the Wilderness Society in 1945. He edited the society’s magazine The Living Wilderness and wrote “Parks and Wilderness” in America’s Natural Resources (1957) and “Wilderness Forever,” in Wilderness: America’s Living Heritage (1961).