What we now know of as environmentalism began with the establishment of the first empire
forest in 1855 in British India, and during the second half of the nineteenth century, over ten
per cent of the land surface of the earth became protected as a public trust. Sprawling forest
reservations, many of them larger than modern nations, became revenue-producing forests
that protected the whole'household of nature', and Rudyard Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt
were among those who celebrated a new class of government foresters as public heroes …

When and where did the environmental movement begin? To understand how a public
endued with the principles of laissez-faire reversed in such short order a century-old policy
of government land disposal, this paper examines how public ownership of land came to be
celebrated, with a newly defined professional corps of government foresters such as Dietrich
Brandis and Gifford Pinchot feted as popular heroes. Hard-headed environmentalists and
legislators found in empire forestry a ready-made model to construct vast areas of the public …