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35 Samuel H. Ordway Jr. was in a philosophical mood. As president of the Conservation Foundation, and thus a partner with the U.S. Forest Service in what he and his collaborators considered a “unique cooperative educational venture,” Ordway used his speech at the 1963 dedication ceremonies of the Pinchot Institute to reflect on the present state of the nation—as a polity and as a land. He found it wanting because his fellow citizens had not thought hard enough about their proper place on the planet: “We as people should be sentient and humble in our way. We know that in the beginning there was no life on earth; there was no man.” Because most Americans only had an inkling about how “organic life began,” what most focused on was how relatively quickly humans had managed “to dominate the earth.” The real challenge was not to maintain that dominance but to choose to function in the future in a healthier way: “How successfully man shall now exert our power, our science, our technology, our wisdom or unwisdom, shall be the story of our time.”1 Ordway left little doubt that the choice, and the polarities that framed our options, were straightforward. Would humans demonstrate the humility necessary to admit that they were only “one organism living in a world of many interdependent organisms, and that all of these in turn are dependent on air, water, the sun’s energy, and the very rocks that form the soil Chapter four The Inseparable World We can develop a new conservation ethic, which, if widely accepted in the coming decades, could provide new and interesting purpose in life. The purpose is high. It is nothing less than to secure the permanent prosperity on a green, enduring earth. —Samuel H. Ordway Jr. 36 THE INSEPARABLE WORLD from which the forests grow”—and from which humanity pulls the “raw materials of sustenance”? Or would “man today, in his self-confidence, bulldoze his way to greater imagined glory—and insecurity, deteriorating as he goes the complex environment on which life forms depend”? If the latter was their choice, if the citizenry was willing to live in what he called a “synthetic future,” putting its trust in technology to resolve all ills, if it was content “to live despite polluted air, polluted streams and seas, on hydroponics and algae and sterilized substitutes for pure air and clean water, on a cement-covered, crowded land,” then there would be no reason for anyone to have joined in the celebrations at Grey Towers. Creating the Pinchot Institute only made sense, Ordway concluded, if Americans generally embraced their integral and integrated position in the larger ecosystem of which they were a part. And the organization would only succeed if its advocates vigorously promoted the collaborative engagement of “citizens, private enterprise, and government” that had brought it into being. The new organization’s purpose, after all, was predicated on the belief that “with insight and through education, man and nature and all science and technology together can assure the unity and worth of life on earth.” Although the questions Ordway posed, and the answers he derived from them, may have appeared self-evident, the reality of the task that he and his colleagues took on under the guise of the Pinchot Institute was not nearly as clear-cut as his rhetoric implied. Neither was it as uncontestable as he had allowed. His insights were reflective of a broader debate within American environmental culture about its aspirations and purposes. Ordway was among those calling for a “new conservation ethic” that found its inspiration in anxieties emerging out of the impact a growing population could have on a finite set of natural resources. He brought Malthus to Milford. The most intellectually pointed of the speeches that fine day in September 1963, Ordway’s words depended heavily on the arguments of George Perkins Marsh, whose seminal text Man and Nature, or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864) had urged its many readers, then experiencing firsthand the blunt, disruptive power of the Industrial Revolution, to become much better stewards of the natural resources that fueled the American economy. If they did not, they would face dire consequences. “We have now felled forest enough everywhere,” Marsh wrote, and it was past due that Americans began to “restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of [3.15.5.183] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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