Conservation Movement

Conservation Movement. Launched in 1908 as a national crusade, the conservation movement involved the wide range of concerns later embraced by the environmental movement. Its intellectual origins date to the western land surveys of the nineteenth century, but it belongs to the realm of politics as much as to science. In the Progressive Era, two main branches, utilitarian and preservationist, emerged. Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946), a wealthy Pennsylvania forester who in 1898 became head of the federal government's small division of forestry (renamed the U.S. Forest Service in 1905), led the utilitarian wing. He advocated multiple‐purpose use of the national forests. An astute strategist, he won the support of industries and interest groups eager to exploit the forests for profit by proposing a system of government regulation that eliminated wasteful competition and conflict. Close to President Theodore Roosevelt, Pinchot spearheaded an expanding program focused on “wise use” of natural resources, coordinated with other departments and agencies concerned with federal lands. The National Reclamation Act of 1902, establishing a federal agency to oversee irrigation projects in the Southwest, exemplified this objective.

Opposition to these policies arose in the western states most affected by them, and congressional opposition soon followed. The “conservation movement” was, in effect, Pinchot's public‐relations crusade to create broad popular support for policies that until then had been promoted by narrow interest groups and bureau chiefs like himself—policies that western opponents identified with eastern corporations and elitist eastern bureaucrats. Through magazine articles and a 1908 White House conference, Pinchot crafted a public constituency for conservation.

The forest service's timber doctrine—of continual yield management (cutting no more timber than annual growth replaced)—became the foundation for a wildlife‐preservation policy and the central doctrine of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A former forest service ranger, Aldo Leopold, carried over from forestry the notion that game populations were an agricultural crop to be harvested periodically to prevent overpopulation and preserve their range and food supply. Leopold also learned from Pinchot to cultivate an interlocking coalition of support groups constituting an effective wildlife lobby.

The preservationist wing of the movement, originally a part of Pinchot's grand concert of interests, split off after the Hetch Hetchy controversy (1913). This conflict focused on whether the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a part of Yosemite National Park, should be used as a water reservoir for San Francisco—the position Pinchot supported—or preserved for its natural beauty, as advocated by John Muir, a nature writer and activist well-known to readers of mass‐circulation magazines. Although the Hetch Hetchy Valley became a reservoir, disappointed preservationists helped in 1916 to establish the National Park Service, a federal bureau that rivaled the utilitarian forest service. The first director, Stephen Mather, proved as adept as Pinchot at buttressing his agency with the support of friendly industries and interest groups whose managers understood the commercial benefits awaiting those who helped meet the leisure needs of a rapidly growing urban middle class.
See also Ballinger‐Pinchot Controversy; Environmentalism; Forests and Forestry.

Bibliography

A. Hunter Dupree , Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940, 1957.
James Lal Penick Jr. , The Progressives and the Environment: Three Themes from the First Conservation Movement, in The Progressive Era, ed. Louis L. Gould, 1974, pp. 115–131.

James Lal Penick Jr.