Environmental history of the United States

[1] The term "conservation" appeared in 1908 and was gradually replaced by "environmentalism" in the 1970s as the focus shifted from managing and protecting natural resources to a broader concern for the environment as a whole and the negative impact of poor air or water on humans.

The absence of large domesticable animals in North America affected the development of societies, limiting hunting and herding and later giving European colonizers a biological edge.

Romantic writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson helped Americans appreciate the aesthetic and recreational value of forests, beyond just their economic importance.

Hacker describes that in Kentucky about 1812: Farms were for sale with from ten to fifty acres cleared, possessing log houses, peach and sometimes apple orchards, inclosed in fences, and having plenty of standing timber for fuel.

It was, not his fear of a too close contact with the comforts and restraints of a civilized society that stirred him into a ceaseless activity, nor merely the chance of selling out at a profit to the coming wave of settlers; it was his wasting land that drove him on.

The Union forces had much better medical and hospital facilities, while the supply system failed so often in the Confederacy that for months at a time soldiers marched and fought barefoot, with little medicine available to their overworked doctors.

This rapid population influx and agricultural expansion was a hallmark of the settlement and development of the Great Plains in the late 19th century, as the region attracted waves of new settlers from Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia, as well as farmers who sold land in older states to move to larger farms.

Environmental degradation, ignored at first, became an increasing concern regarding sewage, garbage, drinking water, and clean air and adequate medical care.. Pollution was caused by primarily by coal.

Carson's urgent message warned about the perils of harmful chemical pollutants, notably substances like DDT with immediate benefits but long-term detrimental impacts, resonated with an educated audience deeply concerned about quality of life issues.

President Richard Nixon took proactive steps through executive actions and collaboration with Congress to enact pivotal legislation establishing regulatory frameworks that curbed air and water pollution and mitigated adverse effects of corporate greed and rampant consumerism.

The emergence of a more radical activism came in the late 1970s and early 1980s, exemplified by chemical disaster at Love Canal in 1977, and a battle in 1982 against a PCB toxic waste dump in a Black community in North Carolina.

[57] According to historians Samuel P. Hays and Clayton Koppes, the conservation movement was launched into the national political arena in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt and his top advisor Gifford Pinchot.

Efficiency was to be achieved by full-time experts in the federal bureaucracy (headed by Pinchot) who would use the latest scientific results to manage the public domain to eliminate waste.

Wild and scenic lands should be set aside in national parks, not for their intrinsic value, but to provide free recreation, refresh the spirit weakened by urbanization, and even upgrade "sissies" into virile outdoorsmen.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded the E-E-E tradition to include poor whites, with his key advisors being Harry Hopkins and Harold L. Ickes.

Using a broad definition, Jason T. Carmichael, J. Craig Jenkins, and Robert J. Brulle identified over 6,000 national and regional organizations, plus another 20,000 or more at the local and state levels that were working on behalf of a multitude of environmental causes in the year 2000.

Decades of suburbanization, rapid national and global population growth, renewed worries about soil erosion, fears of oil and water shortages, and the sudden increase in farm exports beginning in 1972 all were worrisome threats to the long-term supply of good farmland.

The Carter administration in the late 1970s supported initiatives like the National Agricultural Lands Survey and liberals in Congress introduced legislation to control suburban sprawl.

[92] The EPA was established to combine into a single agency many of the existing federal government activities of research and development, monitoring, setting of standards, compliance and enforcement related to protection of the environment.

Kraft considers the next major transition in environmental policy to be the process of insuring the "sustainability" of resources through a coalition of interests ranging from policymakers to business leaders, scholars, and individual citizens.

Pinchot, at that time Chief Forester of the U.S., was the primary mover of the conference, and a progressive conservationist, who strongly believed in the scientific and efficient management of natural resources on the federal level.

"[119][120] Even more important to the New Deal's ambitions, it clothed, fed, housed and gave medical, dental, and eye care, as well as vigorous outdoor exercise, to unemployed urban youth who needed help that their poverty stricken families could not provide.

The Department sought to build "the foundations for a more stable economy in the West that would expand enormously and bring in its wake a rising standard of living, increased population, and a greater measure of equality with other sections of the country".

[139] In 1967, Johnson and Senator Edmund Muskie led passage of the Air Quality Act of 1967, which increased federal subsidies for state and local pollution control programs.

She worked to beautify Washington D.C. by planting thousands of flowers, set up the White House Natural Beauty Conference, and lobbied Congress for the president's full range of environmental initiatives.

"[151] Time magazine called Barry Commoner the "Paul Revere of ecology" for his work on the threats to life from the environmental consequences of fallout from nuclear tests and other pollutants of the water, soil, and air.

[153] On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day took place, which saw 20 million Americans demonstrating peacefully in favor of environmental reform, accompanied by special events held at university campuses across the nation.

The Iron Triangle was the informal backstage coalition of key members of Congress, plus leaders of the major federal agencies, plus local businessmen keen on speeding up economic development by using natural resources.

Zahniser and Brower, working with 30 other groups, launched recruiting drives to bring in middle class members with idealistic goals to fight the destruction of the wilderness at Echo Park.

The editorial concludes that Congress should reform the permitting process and preempt state and local rules that make it harder to build high-priority clean energy projects.