Geography 5 Week 2 Lecture 4 North American Environmental History Progressive Era of Conservation U S Public Lands Wilderness Environmental History of the United States I The Colonial Encounter Ecological Changes 1400 vs 1850 o Massive Deforestation o Native Wildlife Domesticated Animals o Prairie Farmland Ecological changes understood by looking at o Changes in ecosystem and power socio political changes ways of seeing and understanding nature social nature analysis o More complex understanding than good Native Americans and bad European Political Economic and Ecological Changes o European sedentary constantly farming same land private property surplus oriented tied to European markets commodification of nature o Native American High spatial mobility new land communal property subsistence oriented hunter gatherer cycles small cycle trading bartering little commodification of nature Wilderness encounters the Market o Shift from local production and use susbsistence to production for a global market o With European Conquest Native American s ways of interacting with the Environment altered Forced onto less desirable lands Mobility restricted Communities Disrupted Disease Native Americans increasingly altered their own ecological complexes in order to survive Example Native American involvement in the decline of the beaver Disease European military aggression forced evictions etc Social and political disruption movement of people across space increased conflict between groups demand for European made weapons overhunting Disease European military aggression forced evictions etc Social and political disruption increased demand for European goods as status markets overhunting Perceptions of Nature o Europeans see the nature of North America differently than Native Americans o Europeans see it as an opportunity to make money sees a wilderness empty landscape which can be transformed into the pastoral productive landscape like Europe Productive land ownership o Native American assumption about North America Natural Resources early 1600s to late 1800s unclaimed inexhaustible immediate use to build country transfer public lands to private to foster development ex The Homestead Act 1862 Example Cheap sale and or give away of public land to corporation and speculators o Railroad timber companies Environmental History of the United States II The Aesthetic and Efficiency Movements Context Growing unease amongst elite in the 1800s with o Rapid land conservation and deforestation o Population growth o Technological change o Increasing rarity of wilderness Two strains of the environmental movement emerge o Aesthetic movement o Efficiency movement Aesthetic interpretation of Nature and the Roots of Preservation Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 1882 o Nature 1836 made Transcendentalism a major cultural movement o Transcendentalism God s spiritual truth experienced directly from nature the nature that will bring you closest to God is the most pristine untouched nature o Correspondence from Emmanuel Swedenborg o Nature is therefore necessary for the human spirit Henry David Thoreau 1817 1862 o Abolitionist Anarchist friends with Emerson o Argued for individual resistance against an unjust state o Walden s Pond a two year experiment in simple living o Walden 1854 Explores natural simplicity harmony and beauty as models of a just society John Muir 1838 1914 o Emigrated from Scotland dropped out of University of Wisconsin o Traveled west lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains saw mismanagement o Anti civilization o Interconnectedness o Influenced President Theodore Roosevelt o Politically active preserving places in the Sierra Nevada Mountains Yosemite Valley National Park o Founded the Sierra Club 1892 o Defeats Hetchy Hetchy Valley Dam built in 1913 Characteristics of Aesthetics Interpretations of Nature o Nature as spiritual refuge handiwork of God sublime beauty avenue to spirituality o Enthusiasm for Primitivism human happiness and well being declines with civilization o Advocates preservation of nature spiritual recreational use not extraction Land policy expression National park service system NPS o Yellowstone National Park 1872 o No logging mining grazing or extractive uses o Tourism Recreation allowed o Educate the public about the value of nature o Aesthetic and eco centric perspective The Efficiency Movement and the Roots of Conservation o Forest service o George Perkins Marsh 1801 1882 Man and Nature 1864 ancient Mediterranean civilizations collapsed through environmental degradation o Advocated the rational scientific management of resources Context The Progressive Era 1890s to 1920s o Environmentalism matured o Corruption and crony capitalism government is giving the environmental resources to these companies who are just being wasteful and inefficient with them o Highly skewed distribution of wealth o Monopolies o Child labor o The progressive pushed for Social justice equality woman s suffrage public safety anti trust laws child labor laws public oversight social security