Introduction: A Long Way from Earth Day

The third Conservation movement was summoned to life between Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring (1962) and the Santa Barbara Oil Spill at the end of the movement-spawning Sixties, and would be called by a more nature-evoking term—environmentalism. Looking back from there, those of us with some historical memory were struck by how far we had come from the first Conservation crusade led by John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot, or the second led by FDR in the 1930s. In those early days they thought the problem was loss of forests, soil erosion, water and air pollution, and that the solutions were National Parks and National Forests watched over by civil servants in their gray or tan-brown uniforms, along with a Soil Conservation Service for farmers.

In the Sixties we had a wider conception of the problems, which were the familiar ones, but expanded to include the human-made poisons—especially, as we learned from Rachel Carson, pesticides—whose daily distribution upon the land and waterways was imbedded in our agricultural system. We were wiser about the culprits, too, who turned out to be not only the rapacious mining and manufacturing corporations but also our own federal government—patron of DDT and other pesticides, eager auctioneer of logging rights, sponsor of river-disfiguring dams and roads for tourists wanting a few hours of “wilderness” experience camped next to the van. Our sophistication extended to the growing realization that we, too, were accessories to crimes against Nature (and ourselves), as consumers and heedless disposers of better things for a better life through chemistry.

Now we look back from the end of the century, and how long ago seems the environmentalist moment of the Sixties, and how much they had yet to learn! Their agenda of wilderness and wetland preservation, environmental inventory prior to development, and cleanup of urban air and national waterways remains important, battles never fully won. But the slowly emerging ecological crisis ran deeper and wider than they could imagine. National magazines carried colorful ads announcing the good news that “science helps build a new India” with a chemical plant bringing jobs to Bhopal, and they recorded no premonitions that industrial development might carry heavy costs for the Third World. Environmentalists thirty years ago would think a sheep named Dolly the unexceptional daughter of a ram and a ewe. Drought or hurricane to them was simply bad weather, as they gave no thought to the theory of global warming or planetary climate change.

Through the 1970s and 1980s and especially the globalizing 1990s, we have moved into new territory, land-mined with large and increasingly transborder, even planetary environmental troubles. Some are discouragingly familiar, old problems still with us and taking on new edges. A widespread “forest health” crisis was seen in the l990s, and environmentalists by then had lost confidence in Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot’s solution to the protection of public forests, the U.S. Forest Service (FS). Commercial logging was allowed on forest reserves in public lands beginning in 1897. A century later the FS, created in 1905 to balance economic gains from harvesting with other public goals, was under intense fire from conservationists to end a logging-dominated “l00 years of terrible waste and destruction,” in the words of a full-page New York Times ad by sixteen environmental groups in June 1997. ¹ FS Chief Michael Dombeck offered a new management plan subordinating timber harvesting to wildlife habitat and recreation, igniting a fierce end-of-century battle that TR and Pinchot would have understood. On private lands, in response to surging national and international demand, pulp and paper corporations in the second half of the century bought vast acreage in the Southeast especially, converting nearly half of all forest land in the region from biologically diverse ecosystems to tree-farming monocultures. There are more trees than a century earlier, but hardwoods and the few remaining long-leaf pines had been clear-cut and replanted in fast-growing slash pine to feed the insatiable appetites of the chip mills which feed the papermills which...