of attitude and action toward the land. This would involve a description of environmental change, but my interest in it would be as evidence of man’s values, ideals, ambitions, and fear.” Donald Worster was a pioneer in this historical field. In his masterpiece,2 he explores the interrelation between the Great Depression and over-exploitation of land in the Great Plains. The key insight of Worster’s work is that the same society has produced both events under the influence of the same system: unfettered capitalism. “lt cannot be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulation or social disorder. lt came about because the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to … The Dust Bowl … was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself [the) task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth,” writes Worster.
Commenting on the work of Worster, one of the leading contemporary figures of environmental history, William Cronon (1992),3 explains that “Our histories of the Great Plains environment remain fixed on people because what we most care about in nature is its meaning for human beings. We care about the dust storms because they stand as a symbol of human endurance in the face of natural adversity – or as a symbol of human irresponsibility in the face of natural fragility. Human interests and conflicts create values in nature that in turn provide the moral center for our stories.” He adds “I would urge upon environmental historians the task of telling not just stories about nature, but stories about stories about nature.”
Cronon’s book on the development of the mid-West region4 expands on the idea that the social system imposes itself in some way on the natural world. Women and men are able to build cities in which fundamental assets are themselves. This is the case of the city of Chicago, devoid of almost any environmental asset at the time of its founding but which was able to take advantage of its social assets to become the urban center of the industrial development of the United States.
The history of the environment thus sheds light, beyond the moral apprehension of Nature, on the social and political dimension of the human relationship to the natural world. These issues were present at the very beginning of environmental governance, in the early nineteenth century.
The early beginnings of environmental governance: Preservation and conservation
In the contemporary period, the environmental preoccupation went through a mystical age, from the publication of Nature in 1836 by Ralph Waldo Emerson to the fight of John Muir, eventually supported by Theodore Roosevelt, for the creation of the first national parks in the United States. Muir (1838–1914) is certainly the most famous figure of the preservation movement. An ardent defender of the Yosemite Valley in the United States and founder of the environmental NGO Sierra Club (1892), his advocacy of Nature as a healing place for humans overwhelmed by the industrial world finds strong echoes today (see Box 3.1). It should not, however, be forgotten or overlooked that he held racist views over Native Americans living in Yosemite and supported their removal and even extermination.
Box 3.1 John Muir: Preservation and healing
The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease. Briskly venturing and roaming, some are washing off sins and cobweb cares of the devil’s spinning in all-day storms on mountains; sauntering in rosiny pinewoods or in gentian meadows, brushing through chaparral, bending down and parting sweet, flowery sprays; tracing rivers to their sources, getting in touch with the nerves of Mother Earth; jumping from rock to rock, feeling the life of them, learning the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise, and rejoicing in deep, long-drawn breaths of pure wildness. This is fine and natural and full of promise. So also is the growing interest in the care and preservation of forests and wild places in general, and in the half-wild parks and gardens of towns. Even the scenery habit in its most artificial forms, mixed with spectacles, silliness, and kodaks; its devotees arrayed more gorgeously than scarlet tanagers, frightening the wild game with red umbrellas – even this is encouraging, and may well be regarded as a hopeful sign of the times.
John Muir, Our National Parks, 1901. Accessible at https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/our_national_parks/chapter_1.aspx
Muir passionately promoted “preservationism,” a radical approach to protection, in which nature acquires an intrinsic value: It is worthy of being protected for itself, against the harmful effects of societies, according to a principle of separation of the natural and social world. The notion of wilderness is central to the movement (Muir would write that “the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness”).5
But the political dimension of the preservation movement also needs to be highlighted. In a speech delivered at the cornerstone ceremony for the Roosevelt Arch6 in Yellowstone National Park in 1903, Theodore Roosevelt (October 27, 1858 to January 6, 1919), the 26th President of the United States, insisted that national parks were created “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people” and that “the park idea is noteworthy in its essential democracy.” Environmental resources are thus part of human justice (we will come back to this in detail in Chapter 4). To make these resources freely available to the greatest possible number, regardless of money or power, must be part of the democratic project (legally transposing natural resources in the public domain, as for instance the National Trust7 does in the UK, is part of this “essential democracy” process). From a policy perspective, preservation, as implemented by Theodore Roosevelt, with the creation of national parks, has put justice, both intra-generational and inter-generational, at the forefront.
In contrast to preservationism, “conservationism” has instead proposed a reasoned management of natural resources exploited for human well-being. The movement’s momentum has greatly benefited from the publication of a major book, Man and Nature by George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882). In it, the ideal of harmony between the natural world and humanity is contested (Marsh writes about “the hostile influence of man,” the true “disturbing agent” of the biosphere) and the picture of a “second Nature” close to what Cicero has envisioned8 emerges. Celebrated as soon as it was published in 1864, the book was republished with an even more explicit title: The Earth as Modified by Human Action in 1874. Lewis Mumford9 claimed in 1924 that Man and Nature was the source of the entire conservation movement.
Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946), the most important figure of the conservationist movement that sought to bring balance back in the relation between “Man and Nature,” promoted the notion of “wise use” of resources and will later become the first head of the US federal forest service, one of the first sectors where the concept of sustainability emerged. This sustainable use of natural resources (to be achieved through government regulation) is not the same as laissez-faire “green” capitalism. The goal of conservationism is not to make money but to ensure that natural resources continue to be available for human enjoyment in the future. Yet, conservationism understood as natural utilitarianism brings about the issue of inter-generational inequality, as this statement of Pinchot in 1909 makes clear: “The first principle of conservation is development, the use of the natural resources now existing on this continent for the benefit of the people who live here now.”10
The
