User:Guerita1188/Conservation movement

Conservation in the United States (from existing article)
The American movement received its inspiration from 19th century works that exalted the inherent value of nature, quite apart from human usage. Author Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) made key philosophical contributions that exalted nature. Thoreau was interested in peoples' relationship with nature and studied this by living close to nature in a simple life. He published his experiences in the book Walden, which argued that people should become intimately close with nature. The ideas of Sir Brandis, Sir William P.D. Schlich and Carl A. Schenck were also very influential—Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the USDA Forest Service, relied heavily upon Brandis' advice for introducing professional forest management in the U.S. and on how to structure the Forest Service.

Both conservationists and preservationists appeared in political debates during the Progressive Era (the 1890s–early 1920s). There were three main positions.


 * Laissez-faire: The laissez-faire position held that owners of private property—including lumber and mining companies, should be allowed to do anything they wished on their properties.
 * Conservationists: The conservationists, led by future President Theodore Roosevelt and his close ally George Bird Grinnell, were motivated by the wanton waste that was taking place at the hand of market forces, including logging and hunting. This practice resulted in placing a large number of North American game species on the edge of extinction. Roosevelt recognized that the laissez-faire approach of the U.S. Government was too wasteful and inefficient. In any case, they noted, most of the natural resources in the western states were already owned by the federal government. The best course of action, they argued, was a long-term plan devised by national experts to maximize the long-term economic benefits of natural resources. To accomplish the mission, Roosevelt and Grinnell formed the Boone and Crockett Club, whose members were some of the best minds and influential men of the day. Its contingency of conservationists, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals became Roosevelt's closest advisers during his march to preserve wildlife and habitat across North America.
 * Preservationists: Preservationists, led by John Muir (1838–1914), argued that the conservation policies were not strong enough to protect the interest of the natural world because they continued to focus on the natural world as a source of economic production.

The debate between conservation and preservation reached its peak in the public debates over the construction of California's Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park which supplies the water supply of San Francisco. Muir, leading the Sierra Club, declared that the valley must be preserved for the sake of its beauty: "No holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man."

President Roosevelt put conservationist issues high on the national agenda. He worked with all the major figures of the movement, especially his chief advisor on the matter, Gifford Pinchot and was deeply committed to conserving natural resources. He encouraged the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to promote federal construction of dams to irrigate small farms and placed 230 million acres (360,000 mi2 or 930,000 km2) under federal protection. Roosevelt set aside more federal land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined. Roosevelt was a leader in conservation, fighting to end the waste of natural resources. Roosevelt established the United States Forest Service, signed into law the creation of five national parks, and signed the year 1906 Antiquities Act, under which he proclaimed 18 new national monuments. He also established the first 51 bird reserves, four game preserves, and 150 national forests, including Shoshone National Forest, the nation's first. The area of the United States that he placed under public protection totals approximately 230,000,000 acres (930,000 km2).

Gifford Pinchot had been appointed by McKinley as chief of Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture. In 1905, his department gained control of the national forest reserves. Pinchot promoted private use (for a fee) under federal supervision. In 1907, Roosevelt designated 16 million acres (65,000 km2) of new national forests just minutes before a deadline.

In May 1908, Roosevelt sponsored the Conference of Governors held in the White House, with a focus on natural resources and their most efficient use. Roosevelt delivered the opening address: "Conservation as a National Duty".

In 1903 Roosevelt toured the Yosemite Valley with John Muir, who had a very different view of conservation, and tried to minimize commercial use of water resources and forests. Working through the Sierra Club he founded, Muir succeeded in 1905 in having Congress transfer the Mariposa Grove and Yosemite Valley to the federal government. While Muir wanted nature preserved for its own sake, Roosevelt subscribed to Pinchot's formulation, "to make the forest produce the largest amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees."

Theodore Roosevelt's view on conservationism remained dominant for decades; Franklin D. Roosevelt authorised the building of many large-scale dams and water projects, as well as the expansion of the National Forest System to buy out sub-marginal farms. In 1937, the Pittman–Robertson Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act was signed into law, providing funding for state agencies to carry out their conservation efforts.

Since 1970

Environmental reemerged on the national agenda in 1970, with Republican Richard Nixon playing a major role, especially with his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The debates over the public lands and environmental politics played a supporting role in the decline of liberalism and the rise of modern environmentalism. Although Americans consistently rank environmental issues as "important", polling data indicates that in the voting booth voters rank the environmental issues low relative to other political concerns.

The growth of the Republican party's political power in the inland West (apart from the Pacific coast) was facilitated by the rise of popular opposition to public lands reform. Successful Democrats in the inland West and Alaska typically take more conservative positions on environmental issues than Democrats from the Coastal states. Conservatives drew on new organizational networks of think tanks, industry groups, and citizen-oriented organizations, and they began to deploy new strategies that affirmed the rights of individuals to their property, protection of extraction rights, to hunt and recreate, and to pursue happiness unencumbered by the federal government at the expense of resource conservation.

In 2019, convivial conservation was an idea proposed by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher. Convivial conservation draws on social movements and concepts like environmental justice and structural change to create a post-capitalist approach to conservation.

Racism and the Conservation Movement
The early years of the environmental and conservation movements were rooted in the safeguarding of game to support the recreation activities of elite white men, such as hunting. This led to an economy to support and perpetuate these activities as well as the continued wilderness conservation to support the corporate interests supplying the hunters with the equipment needed for their sport. Game parks in England and the United States allowed wealthy hunters and fishermen to deplete wildlife, while hunting by Indigenous groups, laborers and the working class, and poor citizens--especially for the express use of sustenance--was vigorously monitored. Scholars have shown that the establishment of the U.S. national parks, while setting aside land for preservation, was also a continuation of preserving the land for the recreation and enjoyment of elite white hunters and nature enthusiasts.

While Theodore Roosevelt was one of the leading activists for the conservation movement in the United States, he also believed that the threats to the natural world were equally threats to white Americans. Roosevelt and his contemporaries believed that the cities, industries and factories that were overtaking the wilderness and threatening the native plants and animals were also consuming and threatening the racial vigor that they believed white Americans held which made them superior. Roosevelt was a big believer that white male virility depended on wildlife for its vigor, and that, consequently, depleting wildlife would result in a racially weaker nation. This led Roosevelt to support the passing of many immigration restrictions, eugenicist legislation, and wildlife preservation laws. For instance, Roosevelt established the first national parks through the Antiquities Act of 1906 while also endorsing the removal of Indigenous Americans from their tribal lands within the parks. '''This move was promoted and endorsed by other leaders of the conservation movement, including Frederick Law Olmstead, a leading landscape architect, conservationist, and supporter of the national park system, and Gifford Pinchot, a leading eugenicist and conservationist.  Furthering the economic exploitation of the environment and national parks for wealthy whites was the beginning of ecotourism in the parks, which included allowing some Indigenous Americans to remain so that the tourists could get what was to be considered the full "wilderness experience". '''

Another long-term supporter, partner, and inspiration to Roosevelt, Madison Grant was a well known American eugenicist and conservationist. Grant worked alongside Roosevelt in the American conservation movement and was even secretary and president of the Boone and Crockett Club. In 1916, Grant published the book "The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History", which based its premise on eugenics and outlined a hierarchy of races, with white, "Nordic" men at the top, and all other races below. The German translation of this book was used by Nazi Germany as the source for many of their beliefs and was even proclaimed by Hitler to be his "Bible".

One of the first established conservation agencies in the Unites States is the National Audubon Society. '' Founded in 1905, its priority was to protect and conserve various waterbird species.   The first state-level Audubon group was created in 1896 by Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall to convince women to refrain from buying hats made with bird feathers- a common practice at the time. '' The organization is named after John Audubon, a naturalist and legendary bird painter. Audubon was also a slaveholder who included many racist tales in his many books. Despite his views of racial inequality, Audubon did find black and indigenous people to be scientifically useful, often using their local knowledge in his books and relying on them to collect specimens for him.

'''The ideology of the conservation movement in Germany paralleled that of the U.S. and England. Early German naturalists of the 20th century turned to the wilderness to escape the industrialization of cities. However, many of these early conservationists became part of and influenced the Nazi party. Like elite and influential Americans of the early 20th century, they embraced eugenics and racism and promoted the idea that Nordic people are superior. '''

"Conservation Far" approach (from existing article)
A conservation-exploitation dichotomy has plagued a place many may not expect: Conservation institutions. Institutions such as the WWF have historically been the cause of the displacement and divide between native populations and the lands they inhabit. The overbearing reason behind this rather contradictory truth is because of the organization's historically colonial, patronistic, and neoliberal approaches to conservation. Claus, in his article "Drawing the Sea Near: Satoumi and Coral Reef Conservation in Okinawa", expands on these approaches and their effectiveness, not as much in conservation, but in creating the value of and commercializing endangered flora and fauna. One way in which this has taken place is through a separation between people, even locals, and the nature spaces they aimed to protect. This is what Claus calls the "Conservation-Far" method, in which access to lands is completely relinquished upon the locals and tourists, by an external, foreign entity. This entity is largely unaware of the customs and values held by those within the territory surrounding nature and their role within it.

Claus relays the history of an Island in Japan, Shiraho, in which the people's traditional ways of tending to nature were lost due to modernization and the rise of a fast-paced lifestyle. It is the view of a "Conservation-Near" approach that would suggest a regeneration of these customs within the local area. This engages those near in proximity to the lands in the conservation efforts and holds them accountable for their direct effects on its preservation. Unlike the hands-on, full sensory experience permitted by conservation-near methodologies, conservation-far drills visuals and sight as being the main interaction medium between people and the environment. An emphasis on observation only stems from a deeper association with intellect and observation. The alternative to this is more of a bodily or "primitive" consciousness, which is associated with lower-intelligence and people of color. A new, integrated approach to conservation is being investigated in recent years by institutions such as WWF.