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ABSTRACT
The death of American environmentalism has recently been proclaimed by some commentators (Schellenberger and Nordhaus 2005). Such declarations tend to be limiting because they fail to explore and evaluate the historical context of international, national, and regional social forces and social changes that shaped the American environmental movement over the past century. In this essay, I propose to explore the important question of the decline of American environmentalism within the context of a recurring theme pursued by the American movement: the protection of places wherein we dwell. David Brower has called this the practice of Conservation, Preservation, and Restoration, or CPR (Brower 1995).
KEYWORDS
sense of place, grassroots environmental activism, cultural transformation, local culture, environmental ethics
Origins of American Environmentalism
The environmental movement in America is complex and multifaceted. It includes national, regional, and local organizations. The movement has spiritual, religious, scientific, and secular dimensions. It has been said that the movement began when Congress established Yellowstone National Park in 1871, and the state of New York included a "forever wild" statement in its laws to protect the Adirondack mountains from development during the 1880s (Nash 2001, Terrie 1985). Other historians consider the founding of the Sierra Club in 1892 as the symbolic beginning of the movement (Fox 1981). Conservation organizations, as part of a growing national movement from 1892 to 1916, focused their activities on creating national forests, establishing more national parks, protection for migratory birds, creating national wildlife refuges, and efforts to protect specific ecosystems such as old growth redwood forests. In addition, hunters and anglers united to protect public areas as habitat for the wildlife they hunted (Reiger 2002). Many of these efforts involved management of federal and state lands, but some involved buying private property to protect the property from development (Graham 1992).
These efforts to protect specific places from development led to conflict with other social forces in America. For example, the energies devoted to preventing the building of a dam in the Hetch Hetchy valley came to national attention as a result of John Muir whose writings were published in influential magazines. Building a dam inside the boundaries of a national park would set a precedent. The scenic and recreational values that Muir espoused would be sacrificed...