1916-1962

When I started this website, the Collection was considerably smaller than it is now, and I know a hell of a lot more than I did then. If I could go back in time, I would have divided this time period into two separate sections. 1945 and the end of WWII would be a logical breaking point. But given the nature of the platform upon which this website is hosted, the process of dividing the associated Catalogue is so daunting that I am unlikely to undertake it anytime soon, if ever. However, I am going to divide this EC History Chapter accordingly, both because I think it makes sense structurally and thematically, and in order to provide flexibility in case I do ever decide to divide them sometime in the future.

The themes from the Overview chapter of this EC History section that are particularly relevant to this period are:

20. Renewed, urgent focus on game protection and management.

21. The Great Depression - large scale efforts to remediate catastrophic environmental destruction such as deforestation, topsoil erosion (Dust Bowl) and wetlands eradication, through massive land protection programs and remediation efforts by armies of CCC/WPA workers.

22. Public use/recreation vs. conservation/protection (biocentric management) in management of protected areas. Separate protection of wilderness areas. Widespread state-level protection efforts, particularly state parks.

23. The development of ecology as a science and framework for understanding human environmental impacts.

24. A Malthusian focus on the risks and effects of overpopulation on the environment, along with threat of nuclear war and radiation fallout from nuclear testing.

25. Widespread recognition of impacts of non-visible pollutants in the air and water from pesticides, industrial activity, etc.

The mid 20th century saw the rise of many of the lions of the 20th century conservation movement - most of whom were in their formative adult years during the conservation-minded 1930s. Some were impactful during that decade, such as Ansel Adams, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Bernard DeVoto, Richard Pough, Olaus and Mardy Murie, Roger Tory Peterson and John Clark Salyer II. But many of that same cohort, including such luminaries as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, David Brower, Sigurd Olson, Howard Zahniser, William O. Douglas, Nancy Newhall, Jacques Cousteau, Joseph Wood Krutch and Paul Brooks became more impactful beginning after the war.

Douglas Brinkley refers to this generation as "proto-environmentalists." Like me, Brinkley identifies the publication of Silent Spring in 1962 as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. But the period between the end of WWII and 1962 saw a dawning awareness of the issues that would galvanize the movement beyond the traditional ones involving land, resources and wildlife protection. These burgeoning issues included nuclear test fallout, air and water pollution, and dam construction, among others. It can be no coincidence that most of the mid-century proto-environmentalists were in their formative early adult years during the heavily conservationist New Deal era.

PART ONE - 1916-1945

Notwithstanding the conservation gains achieved during the Progressive Era, the years from WWI into the early 1930s saw the natural environment take a serious beating. This was a period when war priorities gave way to a dominant laissez-faire philosophy of government. Unbridled industrial and population growth, short-sighted agricultural practices, corruption, complacency, and the active co-optation of many national conservation groups and even governmental agencies by special interests such as timber companies and gunmakers, collectively led to a point where the natural environment was in deep trouble, heading for disaster.

Some examples are striking. For instance, the first decades of the 20th century saw an estimated 80% decline in the population of ducks and geese, massive declines in forests and clean water resources, and ultimately the natural and human misery of the dust bowl years.

Paradoxically, it was the economic misery of the Great Depression which gave FDR the ability to aggressively combat these issues and make meaningful progress in turning the tide. The government was able to acquire denuded, foreclosed agricultural land for a pittance, and armies of unemployed provided the manpower (the use of the gendered term is deliberate) to remediate both that land and adjoining private holdings. Theodore Roosevelt, as much as he did to preserve and protect government-owned land, did little to mandate environmental stewardship on privately-owned property. FDR continued his cousin's passion for creating National Parks, Monuments and Wildlife Refuges, while also using the Civilian Conservation Corps to create many State Parks, also a not a TR focus.

Many of the authors discussed in the preceding chapter continued to publish during the first part of this period. And many continued to fight the good fight. However, the 1920s in particular saw many national conservation organizations, the National Association of Audubon Societies chief amongst them, become complacent at best and complicit at worst in efforts by industry and other special interests to prevent common-sense conservation measures. Added to that, many of the governmental agencies nominally charged with environmental stewardship fell prey to some combination of corruption, inertia, complacency, bad science and bad leadership, thus exacerbating many of the issues - these particularly included the US Biological Survey, the US Forest Service, and even the new National Park Service.

A number of prominent conservationists from the Progressive Era, often serving in leadership roles at these organizations, fell into this trap. Happily, most found their way back, thanks to a kick in the ass from Willard Van Name and Rosalie Edge and their organization, the Emergency Conservation Committee. Van Name and Edge are little known today but their influence and unique militancy had a major impact not only at the time but on many of the key eco-warriors of the subsequent generations. However, before we get there, let's explore some isolated high points in conservation literature from the period from WWI to the Depression.

In terms of organization, in this first section I discuss some key authors and books from the late teens and 1920s. This period began with the formation of the National Park Service - many of the books discussed immediately below are specifically about the NPs. This is followed by separate subsections on each of a) Edge, Van Name and the ECC; b) FDR and the Great Depression, and c) Ansel Adams, whose career extended from the early 1920s to the mid-1980s. There was much else brewing in the 1916-45 period - many of these issues, such as the budding fight for wilderness protection, approaches to wildlife management, and the debates about predator and fire control, intersected with the career of Aldo Leopold and are addressed in the 1945-1962 section.

The Post-WWI Years to the Great Depression

Neatly opening the time period covered by this chapter, the National Park Service was formed in 1916 as a separate agency within the Interior Department to oversee all of the national parks, monuments and reservations then overseen directly by Interior. Later, in 1933, the remaining national monuments and historic military sites overseen by the Forest Service and War Department were transferred by executive order to the NPS, creating for the first time a unified system of national parks.

The creation of the NPS in 1916 was an important step in systematizing the protection and stewardship of the National Parks - a step taken at least partly in response to the damming of Hetch-Hetchy in the Yosemite NP area, a controversy discussed at length in the chapter on John Muir. The other driver in the creation of the NPS was the lobbying by various folks, most notably Stephen Mather, who was serving as assistant secretary of the Interior before becoming the first head of the NPS. Franklin Lane, then head of Interior, also supported the creation of the NPS.

Mather was a wealthy industrialist (he was in borax) who hired, and personally paid, Robert Sterling Yard to help him with the lobbying campaign supporting the creation of a separate NPS - after formation, Yard became the NPS Director of Education, working successfully with Mather to foster greater awareness of and appreciation for the natural beauty of the federal park system. As part of the lobbying campaign to support formation of the NPS, Yard produced a National Parks Portfolio (1916), an impressive and professional set of eight brochures, each describing a separate park or monument, plus an Introductory brochure containing pieces by both Mather and Lane. The set of brochures was (and is) housed in a custom slipcase and was distributed to legislators and influential leaders to promote the NPS idea - the Catalogue contains a lengthy description of this important and interesting work [Link]. Yard later published a book on the NPs, Our National Parks (1919), also contained in the Collection. Per Brinkley: "Roosevelt considered his longtime friend [Robert Sterling Yard] the most effective publicist for protecting America's parklands." (RH 238)

Stephen Mather had some mental health issues and was forced to take an extended leave from the NPS, during which time Horace Albright stepped in to run the NPS - he also took over the role officially from 1929-33. Albright was not only the second head of the NPS but also served at various times as superintendent of both Yellowstone and Yosemite NPs. Albright's account of his time with the NPS is recounted in his The Birth of the National Park Service: The Founding Years 1913-33 (published in 1985 but Catalogued in the 1916-62 section). The copy in the Collection is inscribed by Albright to Marion Sulzberger Heiskill, herself an important environmental advocate nationally and particularly in the New York metropolitan area. Additionally, the Collection's copy of Hans Huth's early historic overview of the conservation movement, Nature and the American (1957 - Reference section) is inscribed by Huth to Albright, who Huth credits in the Acknowledgements as his most critical primary source.

When Albright initially took over the NPS, Robert Sterling Yard left and formed the National Parks Association - with Mather's financial backing - creating essentially a private park advocacy and oversight body. Over time, Yard became increasingly convinced that wilderness protection was perhaps the most critical role of federal land management generally, a position which often put him at odds with the very promotional Mather. Eventually, Yard moved away from the NPA and became a pioneer in the nascent wilderness preservation movement, as discussed further below in the Aldo Leopold subsection.

The inter-agency battles between the NPS and the USFS were an important subtext to this entire period. Both had their faults - at times the USFS was effectively an ally of the timber industry, while NPS was sometimes overly promotional in their approach to NP management (think dancing bear shows). Given the increased interest in conservation and recreational use, the USFS stood up a recreation division and began designating wilderness areas in national forests, efforts which effectively launched or furthered the careers of Arthur Carhart, Bob Marshall and Aldo Leopold, all discussed in the next section.

Mary Rolfe's Our National Parks books (1927 and 1928), the former inscribed and with an Intro by Mather, are written for a young adult audience and follows a family on a cross-country trip with a visit to each NP, with a detailed description of each. Rolfe was a trained scientist, and the contents of the book reflect that training.

Another outdoor book for youth was Everyday Adventures (1920) by the lawyer, naturalist and prolific youth author Samuel Scoville, Jr. What makes the copy in the Collection particularly notable is that it is inscribed: "To Miss Marguerite E. Howe/ From Rachel Louise Carson/ August 23, 1921." Carson was fourteen years old at the time.

Isabelle Story joined the National Park Service at its inception in 1916, having worked at its predecessor for two years at the Department of the Interior, and the USGS for three years before that. She worked at the NPS until her retirement in 1955. She represents an important but obscure conservation figure in a period where females struggled to achieve status and influence.

Story was unusual for her time in that she had a college-level business education. While she started at the NPS as Horace Albright’s secretary, her scope of responsibilities increased rapidly. She was instrumental in preparing critical reports and publications, earning a medal from the French government for her booklet for the 1931 Paris Exposition. She became Interior’s first division chief when she took over the Department of Publications in 1930. Per Wikipedia, in a 1934 photo of NPS administrators, of the 79 people she is the only woman.

Story traveled extensively across the NPS system, spearheaded the Department’s foray into radio by writing and producing 39 radio programs on recently created parks, and wrote pieces for other major periodicals including the NYT. She was the first woman awarded Interior Department’s Distinguished Service Award. She is represented in the Collection by two NPS publications, The National Parks and Emergency Conservation (1933) and Glimpses of our National Parks (1934), the latter an update of a 1916 publication authored by Robert Sterling Yard. [Link]

Charles Sheldon is considered the "father of Denali National Park," having used his personal influence and that of the Boone & Crockett Club to move the 1917 bill approving the park through Congress. He hand-delivered the bill to President Wilson for signing. Sheldon, who died in 1928, is represented in the Collection with his The Wilderness of Denali (1930). He was considered to be the premier big game hunter of his time and spent extensive time in the area. The book was edited by our friend C. Hart Merriam, brother of Florence Bailey. Sheldon's career is also described in the EC History chapter on the Progressive Era. His legacy is somewhat tarnished however, as he was the anonymous author of the National Association of Audubon Societies' infamous Bulletin No. 6 (not in Collection), which was written at a time when the Society had lost its way in its mission to promote conservation. Bulletin No. 6 opposed various common-sense measures such as bag limits designed to help arrest the alarming decline in wildlife populations nationally.

Parenthetically, it's amazing how many NPs had "fathers" from this era. Sheldon-Denali, Mills-Rocky Mountain, Grinnell-Glacier, Muir-Yosemite, Steel-Crater Lake, etc. I'm happy to say that Minerva Hamilton Hoyt is considered to be the "mother of Joshua Tree NP."

Fritiof Fryxell is not described as the father of Grand Teton NP but he was instrumental in its creation in 1928. In addition to being a geologist and professor, Fryxell was a notable early mountaineer with a number of first ascents. He spent his summers in the Tetons and published The Tetons: Interpretations of a Mountain Landscape (1938), acknowledged as a classic of Western nature literature. The copy in the Collection is inscribed by Fryxell to the president of Augustana College, where he taught for over 50 years.

Walter Fry, co-author of Big Trees (1930) with John R. White, has a great story. Native to Kansas, he moved to CA to seek economic opportunity. He took a job logging giant Sequoias - after five days of five men sawing a single tree, he counted the rings. He found he had just helped kill a 3,266-year-old tree. He quit - and two years later his signature was the third on a petition to create Sequoia NP, which Congress did in 1890.

Fry moved to the outskirts of the park permanently in 1895, staying for the balance of his life. He began working at the park in 1901 as foreman of a road crew. It is unclear from the NPS History from which this is taken [https://www.nps.gov/seki/learn/historyculture/fry.htm] how long this particular role continued. However, it is possible that in 1903 he worked for Captain Charles Young, who at the time became the first black superintendent of a NP (the NPs were then overseen by the Army) and whose principal task was road construction. Young's is an extraordinary, inspiring and often heartbreaking story in its own right - beyond the scope of this site but well worth a side trip to his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Young_(United_States_Army_officer). He was clearly a remarkable man.

In 1905, Fry became a civilian park ranger, assisting the army. He became head ranger in 1912 and, when the army gave up park caretaking duties in 1914, became the superintendent, a position he held for six years. He was succeeded by his co-author John R. White, who served for another 25 years in the role. Fry became the federal magistrate judge (US Commissioner) of the parks, serving for 22 years. As the magistrate role was not time consuming, he started the first nature guide service at the park, which became "the foundation of the ranger programs and talks that millions of visitors have participated in at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks over the decades" per the NPS history.

[FWIW, George Stewart, editor of the Visalia Delta, a nearby local newspaper, is credited as the "Father of Sequoia NP" in light of his early preservation efforts. Kings Canyon NP was created later, over much opposition, in 1940. It incorporated General Grant NP and includes the extensive lands near Sequoia which Stewart originally sought to have included. As discussed below, Rosalie Edge and the ECC were instrumental in that battle.]

As discussed in the EC History chapter covering 1850-1890, the Collection contains a number of books on and guides to Yosemite NP in particular. Two notable ones from this period are Doing Yosemite (circa 1917-18), published by the "Tourist Office" at the park, and the second is Guide to Yosemite (1920) by Ansel F. Hall. Hall was an educational leader in the early days of the NPS, serving as the NPS' first chief naturalist among other positions.

Portfolio on the National Park and Monument System is a beautiful set of four booklets published around 1938 by the American Planning and Civic Association (which had been founded by the excellent Horace McFarland, discussed in a prior chapter). The set, Catalogued in the Guidebook section, can be seen here.

Finally, it is impossible to talk about National Parks in the 20th century without mentioning John D. Rockefeller, Jr., along with his son Laurence and Laurence's wife Mary French Rockefeller. John D. was particularly impactful, with his work and philanthropy contributing to the creation and/or expansion of Acadia, Great Smoky Mountains, Shenendoah, Grand Teton, Yosemite, and Virgin Island NPs. A handsome quarto photocentric book celebrating John D.'s conservation contributions, entitled A Contribution to the Heritage of Every American, was published in 1957 with text by Nancy Newhall, a Prologue by Fairfield Osborn and an Epilogue by Horace Albright. It is Catalogued under Rockefeller's name. I suspect the irony of such good works being the fruits of an oil fortune are lost on nobody.

Moving away from the National Parks, William Beebe published three books during the 1920s that are contained in the Collection. Beebe was one of the first "professional" naturalists (vs. the "gentleman" naturalists of the 17th and 18th centuries) and, notably, was an unusually popular and widely known figure in his day. I have written extensively about Beebe in the Catalogue [Link] and in a Nov 2023 blog post. Either or both is worth a diversion now, I shan't rehash it here.

Henry Beston's 1928 classic The Outermost House is one of those books that I learned about in the course of this journey, and which I read and loved. The Outermost House is widely considered to be one of the great works of literary nature writing, and Beston is esteemed as one of the progenitors of the modern environmental movement. The book, which has never been out of print, was critical to the establishment of the Cape Cod National Seashore by JFK over three decades later. The book was frequently quoted in the report of the Interior Department representatives sent in the 1950s to assess the area for federal protection.

Beston spent his life as a writer and college lecturer, but during WWI he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French Army and later became a press representative for the U.S. Navy. Shaken by his experiences during the war, he spent a year living in a cabin which he built in a remote area on the Cape Cod dunes, near Eastham, about one-third of the way north from Chatham to Provincetown, where he wrote the book. Beston donated the cabin to the National Audubon Society in 1959 and in 1964 it became a National Literary Landmark. Sadly, it was swept away during a winter hurricane in 1978.

"The Outermost House is considered to be one of the seminal works of today's environmental movement and 'is one of the reasons that the Cape Cod National Seashore exists today,' in the words of the governor of Massachusetts, Endicott Peabody, in 1964. The governor's words were echoed by representatives of the National Park Service. Rachel Carson said it was the only book that ever influenced her writing." [From the website of The Henry Beston Society]. Per Brinkley (citing Linda Lear's bio of Carson, Carson and her companion Dorothy Freeman visited Beston and his wife in 1954. "The Outermost House, Rachel told the sixty-five-year-old Beston, was a treasured, almost sacred text to her." (SSR p. 73).

Beston writes in The Outermost House: "Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity."

The first edition copy of The Outermost House in the Collection is both warmly inscribed by Beston to a Cape Cod neighbor, and has a separate inscribed drawing by him of the house itself. The Collection also contains a first edition copy of Beston's 1942 book The St. Lawrence River from the popular Rivers of Americas series, a series which we will encounter again when we get to Marjory Stoneman Douglas' seminal River of Grass (1947), below.

Rockwell Kent's Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (1920) is a singular, somewhat unusual addition to the Collection. Kent himself is not thought of as an important conservationist, but he is a monumental figure in the world of art and popular culture, the latter in part because of his socialism and support of Soviet Russia. His art was certainly strongly influenced by the natural world. Wilderness is an account of an extended period which Kent spent with his son on an Alaskan island and is reckoned to be a classic about both the state of Alaska and the state of mind wilderness engenders. I am happy to have not one but three copies in the Collection, all signed or inscribed (see Catalogue for more [Link]).

George Washington Carver is another unusual and singular (albeit most worthy) individual represented in the Collection. Carver was a southern agricultural scientist who developed and promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion, both through the agricultural extension program at Tuskegee Institute, which he founded (the program, not the Institute). He headed the modern organic movement in the southern agricultural system, identifying nitrogen-rich crops that regenerated soil depleted by cotton farming. He developed and promoted uses for those crops, particularly peanuts and sweet potatoes. He also worked to pioneer organic fertilizers and natural fodder for farm animals. And he supported woodland preservation in order to help improve the quality of topsoil. Notably, his is the first contribution in the Collection by a person of color.

Carver was born at the tail end of slavery - his father died before he was born and he, his sister and mother were kidnapped by raiders when he was a baby - only he was recovered by his owner, who raised him and his brother. He pursued his own education (he was not allowed to attend school where he was raised). Ultimately, he got his bachelor's and master's degrees at Iowa State, where he was the first black student and later the first black faculty member. Booker T. Washington lured him to Tuskegee, where he taught for 47 years. He became among the best-known Black Americans of his day, one of a handful of Americans to be made a member of the Royal Society of Arts in England, and consulted by presidents including Teddy Roosevelt, Coolidge and FDR.

Ever since I read a "Landmark" series biography of GWC as a boy he has been a particular hero. Part of what is unusual about Carver's contribution to the Collection is that it consists of two hand-written letters to a protege, along with some other ephemera. See the Catalogue for details [Link].

The last of the really singular, unusual books in the Collection from this period is perhaps the oddest and most entertaining of all, Charles Kellogg's The Nature Singer (1929), a signed limited first edition. Kellogg was a traveling vaudeville entertainer known for his uncanny ability to reproduce animal and bird calls and to extinguish flames using vocal tones. He was passionate about redwood trees and is credited with having helped save many. He was seemingly acquainted with both John Muir and John Burroughs. He was also a skilled craftsman and inventor and built a mobile log home using a single redwood trunk mounted on a chassis, which he drove around to publicize the plight of redwoods. The "Travel Log" is now displayed at a SP in California, where I had the pleasure of viewing it. The Catalogue entry on the book is well worth reading - most interesting! [Link]

Rosalie Edge, Willard Van Name and the Emergency Conservation Committee

Two of the most intriguing characters I've come across in all of my research on the EC movement are Rosalie Edge and Willard G. Van Name, whose Emergency Conservation Committee had a tremendous impact on many conservation issues, particularly from the late 1920s into the 1930s. Edge's militant, confrontational style, and her indomitable spirit, along with Van Name's uncompromising drive, had an incalculable impact on not just their contemporaries but on the entire conservation movement for decades to come.

Edge and Van Name, aided by a large number of conservation and scientific luminaries, had a major impact on many of the key conservation issues of the time, particularly during the 1930s: Edge, Van Name and the ECC:

1. Successfully battled to turn national conservation organizations (particularly the Audubon Society), which had grown complacent and lost their commitment to the conservation mission, back to the path of righteousness.

2. Had a major impact on the formation of the Olympic and Kings Canyon NPs.

3. Fought encroachment efforts on various NPs, including Yellowstone.

4. Fought (mostly successfully) to save a number of significant forests and groves near existing NPs.

5. Established Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in eastern PA, the first raptor sanctuary in the US. Edge's model inspired Richard Pough to later found the Open Space Institute.

6. Fought for legislation regulating hunting, such as bag limits and prohibitions on live decoys and baiting.

7. Fought prevailing practices of exterminating "varmints" - predators and other animals considered not "useful," including by poisoning, which impacted entire ecosystems. The US Biological Survey was a particular target. An ECC pamphlet (not in the Collection) was key in persuading FDR to protect bald eagles.

8. Saved the trumpeter swan from possible extinction by persuading FDR to order the removal of the 10th Mountain Division's training facility from Henry Lake, a key swan flyway close to Yellowstone NP, in 1941. Roosevelt's action "sent a broad message: protected public lands and species weren't open to the military...." (Brinkley RH p. 515).

9. Intangibly, but perhaps most importantly, woke the nation up to the need to fight for the environment. The militancy and drive they brought to their efforts have been cited as a major impact on the conservation movement throughout the balance of the 20th century, including by such eco-warriors as David Brower.

The 1920s in general saw significant environmental degradation, as discussed above. The nascent environmental movement described in prior Chapters saw real progress, but when you break it down, much of that progress came down to governmental actions impacting governmentally controlled land. The focus was on preserving landscapes, forests, water sources, etc. Land controlled by private individuals and corporations was generally used or mis-used according to the owners' whims. As much of the country, and virtually all of the agriculturally productive property, was in private hands, this led to practices which denuded the land and decimated wildlife habitat, with the result being the Dust Bowl years and plummeting wildlife stocks.

The governing philosophy of the time did not readily contemplate laws or regulations restricting private action. As discussed in the preceding Chapter, there was initial efforts to control some of the most egregious hunting practices, but even those were limited. Exacerbating the situation, a number of national conservation organizations - often led by the very same men (not women) whose good works are discussed in the prior Chapter - became at best complacent and at worst corrupted by industrial interests. This extended to some of the federal agencies whose brief at least nominally included oversight of conservation efforts, including the Forest Service and the Biological Survey.

In a September 2024 blog post, I discuss the importance of the environmental organizations in the development of the EC movement during this period. And in numerous contexts, I discuss the importance of wealthy sportsmen to early conservation efforts. However, in the 1920s and into the 1930s, the sporting arms industry succeeded at least partially co-opting many of these organizations. They succeeded in getting them to oppose common-sense regulations - addressing issues like bag limits, live decoys, baiting, and more, that would have helped stem the calamitous decline in wildlife stocks throughout the period. They supported eradication efforts, including bounties, on predators including wolves, foxes, hawks, eagles and other raptors. Highlighting the move away from sound conservation was the practice at the time by the National Association of Audubon Societies to allow steel-trapping and hunting of fur bearers in the NAAS' Rainey "wildlife refuge” in Louisiana, a practice which resulted in the killing of over 300,000 animals and which netted the Audubon Society over $150,000 in proceeds during the period.

Irving Brant in Adventures in Conservation with Franklin D. Roosevelt (1988) writes that "almost every nationally organized conservation body was in the paralyzing grip of wealthy sportsmen, gun companies, or lumbermen who were devastating whole states with their 'cut and run' methods of operation. Usually there was a potential or actual conflict in such organizations between a deluded or dissatisfied membership and subversive [interlocking] directorates." (p. 17)

In June 1929, Dr. W. DeWitt Miller and Dr. Willard G. Van Name of the AMNH, along with a younger man named Davis Quinn, published a pamphlet called A Crisis in Conservation (not in the Collection yet) which decried the institutional support for practices which were leading to wildlife decimation, particularly by the NAAS. In the same year, Van Name published a book entitled Vanishing Forest Reserves (1929) which focused on the negligence of the Forestry Service and other governmental agencies in their stewardship of the nation's forests.

There were two important effects from Van Name’s publications. First, the pamphlet was read by a society matron named Rosalie Edge. Second, the AMNH told Van Name that if he wished to remain employed there, he would need to stop publishing incendiary attacks such as these. These two effects were not unrelated.

Rosalie Edge was incensed by the accusations made in the pamphlet and reached out to both Van Name and the journalist Irving Brant, who was already challenging NAAS practices and was later to become a key conservation advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes. Coming out of that conversation was the formation of the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC), which was mostly funded by Van Name, despite his not being a wealthy man.

The ECC was primarily the work of Rosalie Edge and, until they had a falling out, Van Name, buttressed by Brant and other prominent scientists and conservationists, many sympathetic to the cause but unwilling or unable to support it publicly. It was really Edge's drive, spirit and anger which made the ECC perhaps the most important non-governmental conservation organization in America during the 1930s. The ECC succeeded in driving public opinion in favor of important conservation measures. It combined Edge's uniquely urgent style of communications through pamphlets, articles and letters with the voice of many prominent scientists and conservationists, most of whom were not in a position to publicly challenge the institutional status quo. In fact, many of these figures who initially opposed what they perceived as her gadfly efforts ultimately became amongst her greatest supporters.

At this point, I will pause to recommend Dyana Z. Furmansky's wonderful and absolutely essential biography of Edge entitled Rosalie Edge: Hawk of Mercy (2009 - in References). This section is largely drawn from that book along with Brant's Adventures in Conservation and selected other sources.

Rosalie Edge (nee Barrow) enjoyed a privileged upbringing in NYC society. In the ordinary course of events she got married, spent an active three years in the Far East, where her husband Charles worked for a railroad company seeking to develop lines there. Upon their return, Charles became a successful stockbroker while Rosalie Edge had two children.

During a trip home from Europe, Edge had lengthy conversation with a British suffragette which changed the course of her life. Upon her return to NYC Edge became active in the American suffragette movement, rising to a leadership position in the NY chapter of the Woman Suffrage Party, the pre-cursor of the League of Women Voters. There she penned passionate pamphlets supporting the suffragette cause. Edge was fortunate to be part of a sophisticated, well-run advocacy organization which achieved its primary goal, the vote for women nationally, in 1920.

Following that success, Edge reverted to her former life but developed over the ensuing years a passionate interest in birdwatching. In 1929, again in Europe, she received and read a copy of Van Name’s aforementioned A Crisis in Conservation pamphlet. She returned to the US and contacted Van Name. The two teamed up, with Rosalie becoming the public face and driving force of the Emergency Conservation Committee, which over the next decades published over 100 pamphlets, mainly in the 1930s, written by either Edge, Van Name, Irving Brant or other prominent conservationists and ornithologists, most of whom did not wish or could not be identified as the authors. The pamphlets were "essential reading" for those interested in environmental conservation.

[INSERT DETAILS ON PAMPHLETS ONCE CATALOGUED]

Edge rose to a position of real influence. FDR's Interior Secretary, the indomitable Harold Ickes, consulted with Edge regularly, and she also corresponded directly with FDR at times. Her ally Irving Brant, a member of the ECC, was one of FDR's chief conservation advisors.

Edge started her conservation efforts with a crusade to reform the NAAS, of which she was a life member. She attended the annual meeting of the group and brazenly challenged the leadership about its lack of support for common-sense conservation measures. She successfully sued NAAS to get its membership list, she sent the ECC pamphlets to its members. NAAS was run at the time by ornithologist Thomas Gilbert Pearson, who's autobiography Adventures in Bird Protection (1937) is in the Collection with an inscribed first edition - see the Catalogue entry for his book for more detail about him [Link].

NAAS and Pearson opposed what Edge et al considered to be common sense conservation measures such as bag limits, prohibition against baiting and live decoys, and the like. It also initially refused to oppose the US Biological Survey's program to eradicate predators, and opposed legislation banning the killing of raptors. NAAS allowed extensive steel trapping in its LA wildlife refuge. Pearson arranged a donation of $125,000 to NAAS from the sporting arms manufacturers, initially supported by the NAAS board but later rejected - as NAAS president, part of Pearson's compensation came in the form of commissions on contributions received by NAAS, a practice that was undisclosed and ultimately ended in the wake of Edge's campaign.

After four years, Pearson resigned as the president of NAAS - eventually the organization again became a force for conservation. However, it was not until near the end of her life that Edge became reconciled with the group. There is no doubt that Pearson, who started the NC chapter of the Audubon Society, had significant conservation accomplishments - but he appears to have lost his way.

In her quest Edge was advised and helped by, among others, such luminaries as William Hornaday, who remained an uncompromising (intransigent even) wildlife conservationist until the end of his days, FDR conservation adviser Irving Brant (one of the few in the early days who was willing to allow his name to be used by the ECC), a young Roger Tory Peterson and W.L. McAtee. McAtee was the author of the pamphlet Community Bird Refuges (1923) published by the US Biological Survey and Catalogued in the Government Publications section [Link]. Notably, the Biological Survey was one of the primary targets of Edge’s vitriol, making McAtee's desire to remain anonymous quite understandable. Per Furmansky, many of the most prominent scientists and conservationists of the day anonymously worked with Edge to get their views into the public eye.

Hornaday was a wildlife conservation giant discussed in the preceding chapter, but his continued influence merits further discussion. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he continued his crusade throughout his life. He was a key ally of Rosalie Edge and the Emergency Conservation Committee and a regular correspondent of Aldo Leopold early in the latter's career.

Hornada is described by Brinkley as "the grand old man of the wildlife protection movement." (RH 346). His efforts continued into the 1930s, when he was well into his 80s. His mantle was later picked up by Aldo Leopold - Leopold at the time was a US Forest Service agent who had graduated from Yale Forestry School, and he was tasked with driving the USFS's new game protection programs. Leopold essentially took the reins from Hornaday, with whom he corresponded for years, and his work helped shape the massive New Deal wildlife conservation programs of FDR, Ding Darling, John Clark Salyer, Ira Gabrielson and others described below. Leopold was one of the handful of people I consider to be in the pantheon as among the most important in conservation history, and he gets a separate section (along with Arthur Carhart and Bob Marshall) further along.

Hornaday's best known books, Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913) and Wild Life Conservation (1914) are discussed in the preceding chapter. But even at age 77 he was still at it, publishing Thirty Years War for Wild Life (1931), a screed decrying the lack of common-sense regulations on hunting, and the complaisance of NAAS and other national conservation organizations in opposition to those regulations. The copy in the Collection [Link] is part of an edition specially bound for distribution to Congress members and is inscribed to a fellow conservationist.

Through Brant, Edge established a regular dialogue and correspondence with FDR's Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, about whom more below. Writes Brinkley of Edge and the ECC: "Its hard-hitting campaigns were deservedly effective. Ickes turned to Edge for regular counsel on wildlife protection issues; he was tired of dealing with special interest sportsmen's clubs that prioritized hunting over everything else.... No battle over conservation ever fazed her." (RH pp. 471-2)

Even some of the establishment figures who had drifted with the NAAS, such as Frank Chapman and a young Robert Cushman Murphy, became supporters of Edge's agenda over time. At various times, she corresponded with William Colby from the Sierra Club, Ira Gabrielson of the USFWS, Bob Marshall of The Wilderness Society - an early ECC supporter and friend, and many other luminaries.

Edge is perhaps best-known today for founding Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is situated along a ridge in SE Pennsylvania where, due to a confluence of meteorological and geographical factors, thousands of raptors closely overfly each fall during a period of a few weeks in the course of their annual migration. For many years, hundreds of shooters would line up on the ridge and shoot countless numbers of the birds, littering the forest floor with the dead and wounded. The photographic images of this carnage are sickening.

In 1932, the estimable Richard Pough (of whom more below) found himself on the ridge observing the “hunt.” He documented it and sought help from various organizations, including NAAS, to help stop it. Eventually he turned to Rosalie Edge, who with the financial support of Van Name promptly leased and ultimately purchased the ridge and created the nation's first raptor sanctuary, which remains active today. Per Michael Harwood's history The View from Hawk Mountain (1973), the rent on the initial one-year lease was $500, and the subsequent purchase price was for $3000.

Edge hired a caretaker to enforce the no-shooting rules. That caretaker, a precocious, gifted, idealistic ornithologist and conservationist named Maurice Broun (nee Morris Brownstein), at Edge's insistence kept detailed records on migratory data at the sanctuary from day one, data that proved invaluable to Rachel Carson when she was doing her research on the impact of DDT on bird populations for Silent Spring (1962). Broun's story of the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, Hawks Aloft (1949), with an Intro by Roger Tory Peterson (of whom more below), is represented in the Collection. Broun, who at a young age assisted Edward Forbush in writing the third and last volume of Birds of Massachusetts (1925-9), is discussed in more detail in the Catalogue entry for his book [Link]. Hawk Mountain Sanctuary is a wonderful place and organization. Find more at www.hawkmountain.org

Back to Van Name. During the 1920s, Rosalie Edge’s husband Charles had left her for a younger woman - she had means, but not extravagant ones. Willard Van Name was also not wealthy, but he dedicated essentially his entire disposable income to fighting for conservation. It was he who financed virtually all of the Emergency Conservation Committee’s activities. And it was he who provided much of the money for the lease and purchase of Hawk Mountain.

Willard Gibbs Van Name was by all accounts a misanthropic fellow - a loner whose anti-sociality undoubtedly stemmed in large part from the fact that he was gay at a time when it was not acceptable. Van Name was a biologist at the AMNH specializing in marine invertebrates. He came from a prominent academic family. His father Addison was a scholar who ran the Yale library for four decades. Willard somehow does not merit a Wikipedia entry at the time of this writing - Addison does.

Van Name had begun his mostly solitary war on environmental enemies earlier in the 1920s, well before A Crisis in Conservation was published. The NYT digital archive contains sixteen letters to the editor from Van Name (one with coauthors) published from 1923 through 1954. All deal with conservation issues, most opposing legislative and other efforts to weaken protections for National Park and Adirondack Reserve properties.

Van Name was recognized in a brief NYT obituary in 1959, a short piece of 250 words which mentions neither the ECC nor the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. The obituary is based primarily on his letters to the editor. The best remembrance of Van Name in the NYT came in a 5/24/1959 letter written by Irving Brant, recounted here in its entirety (although one senses the time edited it down before printing):

When great and lifelong service to the public is combined with self-effacement, it is possible for a man to depart from this earth so quietly that hardly anybody knows what he has done for those who remain behind. So it has been with Dr. Willard G. Van Name of the American Museum of Natural History, who died recently in Connecticut at the age of 87.

Few of those who knew Dr. Van Name as a scientist were aware that for a great part of his adult life he devoted the major share of his income and much of his time and energy to a ceaseless campaign against commercial raids on the national park system, to the preservation of scenic areas threatened with destruction, and in behalf of the menaced wildlife of the United States.

In 1924, through pamphlets written and published by himself, he combated a territorial raid on Sequoia National Park and started the enlargement movement that culminated sixteen years later in creation of the Kings Canyon National Park. His 1924 and 1926 pamphlets against lumbering in Yosemite National Park stirred up the campaign that led to the great Rockefeller purchase of privately owned sugar pines within the park.

Preservation of Forests

Later Van Name initiated the movements that resulted in the Government purchase and preservation of the Carl Inn sugar pines in Yosemite and the Redwood Mountain Sequoia Grove - third largest in the world - on the edge of Sequoia Park. He was a leader in the final drive, carried to success by Franklin D. Roosevelt, to establish the Olympic National Park, thus saving the wonderful rain forests on the western slope of the mountains.

Dr. Van Name both suggested and paid the cost of my 1942 pamphlet, published by the Emergency Conservation Committee of New York, urging joint state and Federal action to preserve the South Calaveras Sequoia Grove and the Beaver Creek Sugar Pines in California.

Several years later he enlisted the support of John P. Elliott, retired Los Angeles oilman, who spent more than $75,000 fighting lumber company and Forest Service opposition and stimulating the State of California and the Department of Agriculture to joint action. Another great Rockefeller gift, combined with the affirmative stand of President Truman and Secretary Brannan (who overruled departmental subordinates), saved both of these scenic forests. But in the jubilant official announcements in California not a word was said about Elliott or Van Name.

In other fields, Van Name was principal author and sponsor of the 1930 [actually 1929] pamphlet, "A Crisis in Conservation," which helped arouse wildlife protective organizations from lethargy. He attacked the insect and predator poisoning activities of the old Biological Survey a quarter of a century before the mass of scientists began their outcry against the creation of a wildlife desert.

Not all of Van Name's efforts were successful. If, at the end, he could have had his choice of the fulfillment of any object for which he worked in vain, I am sure it would be the establishment of a sanctuary for the Alaska brown bear on the new state's Admiralty Island.

Irving Brant.

A digital 366-page Administrative History of Olympic National Park by Hal K. Rothman [Link] posted to the NPS website in July 2006 acknowledges the contributions of the ECC and Van Name, as well as those of Irving Brant, in the formation of the park. The fight to create and set the boundaries of the Olympic NP was amongst the most rancorous in our nation's history, and is a great example of the ECC's impact, and the reaction to it from the establishment. The battle over the Olympic Peninsula started during the Wilson administration, involving such luminaries as Henry Graves, Franklin Lane, Stephen Mather and Horace Albright. From Rothman's work:

By the mid-1920s, the peninsula's ancient forests had attracted a national constituency that developed its own strategy. Grassroots leadership in support of the nation's vanishing forests came from Willard Van Name, an eccentric and reclusive bachelor 'whose love for wild creatures compensated for his distrust of human beings,' one chronicler wrote.... 'Experience bred a touch of bitterness in him, along with a tendency to mistake blindness and self-interest for malevolence,' observed his friend and peer in conservation, newspaper editor Irving Brant.... He understood the idea of national parks in a very narrow way, seeing them exclusively as agents of preservation. Van Name believed the Forest Service and National Park Service colluded to the detriment of national parks, a perspective that bordered on preposterous as the two agencies battled for the position as chief land management agency.... [Note the "preposterous" appears to refer to the "colluded," not the "detriment"].

A quixotic and even desperate air wafted about Van Name. A quiet man in his fifties who was a loner, he jumped to life with a pen in his hand. Life many later advocates, he saw only the moral rightness of his cause and failed to appreciate the complicated steps that national park management required. Nor did Van Name correctly assess the National Park Serice's mission. The agency was never, as Van Name assumed, an organization devoted solely to preservation. Instead, it was a federal bureau with a bifurcated mission and the need for both a powerful political constituency and the support of Congress. Van Name represented one element of the agency's constituency, the powerful elites whose position led them to assume that their desires were not only widely shared, but based in morality as well." [pp. 56-7].

After an aside which discusses, among other things, Aldo Leopold's "near conversion" to becoming a prophet of wilderness preservation, Rothman continues:

The most strident calls came from the furthest distance. Acting largely alone, Van Name continued to call for forest preservation. His 1928 monograph, Vanishing Forest Reserves [actually 1929], rebuked the Forest Service for permitting timber cutting on the Olympic Peninsula and attacked the [NPS], which had no standing on the Olympic Peninsula, for passively accepting this policy.... Van Name concluded that, 'There will be little left of nature in the United States if we do not do something to protect it.'

Van Name's pamphlet [book] contributed to spurring the larger conservation community to action.... Letters poured into the Department of the Interior daily but without any standing on the Olympic Peninsula, the [NPS] had no effective way to respond.... Later form letters from the [NPS] concerning the Olympic issue began, "It is a very beautiful region, but thus far it has not been demonstrated that it comes up to the standards set for national parks.' This tacit acceptance of the status quo reflected the [NPS's] unwillingness to take on the Forest Service in the Olympics as well as a common strategy for deflecting overzealous members of the public. This reticence dogged national park efforts for a decade." [pp. 60-1]

The efforts nevertheless bore fruit. Again, per Rothman:

Ickes' appearance as head of the Department of the Interior energized conservationists, who renewed their campaign for the Olympic Peninsula park. The Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC) mobilized widespread support. Led by New York Audubon Society member Rosalie Edge, the ECC added Van Name in 1930. [In fact, Van Name and Edge formed the ECC together.]. Irving Brant, with his direct connection to Roosevelt, later joined the effort.... In 1934, after four years of attacks on the U.S. Biological Survey's wildlife policies, the ECC published an anonymous pamphlet, The Proposed Olympic National Park [not yet in the Collection], a direct response to Olympic's gory open hunting season on elk in 1933. Authored by Van Name, the pamphlet drew a direct line between the preservation of old-growth timber and protecting the Roosevelt Elk. [pp. 65-6]

In early 1935, the ECC again exerted its influence. Irving Brant...introduced Van Name to the Department of the Interior staff. Van Name...worked with Ickes and [NPS head] Cammerer to redraw the park. Ickes supported Van Name's idea, and the boundaries that emerged from the [NPS] headquarters were almost identical to the ones outlined in Van Name's pamphlet.... Rosalie Edge

who visited Olympic Peninsula in August 1935, wrote... "I feel we have not asked for one rod of ground or one tree too much." [pp. 69-70]

The Forest Service actively supported opponents of the proposed park, but Ickes was amongst the most powerful men in Washington. Ickes unsuccessfully tried to get a new government agency created, a Department of Conservation, which would include the entire department of Agriculture, of which the Forest Service was a part. "The battle that ensued nearly ripped the New Deal apart, and the struggle for Olympic National Park was its centerpiece." [p. 72].

The battle continued into 1937. In hopes of stemming the tide, the Forest Service appointed Bob Marshall as the head of its Recreation department. Marshall supported reserving much of the land from cutting, even if it remained under Forest Service jurisdiction. However, Edge, Van Name and Brant knew that what could be done by administrative fiat could be undone by it at any time in the future. "In January 1938, the [ECC] distributed 11,000 copies of The Olympic Forests for a National Park [not yet in the Collection] across the nation.... Brant saved his toughest salvos for the timber industry." [p. 85].

The park was finally created, with expansive boundaries as favored by Edge, Van Name, Brant, Ickes and, ultimately, FDR, later in 1938.

Dr. Willard Van Name was a true conservation hero, to whom our nation owes much. The dichotomy between the man's contributions on the one hand and his obscurity on the other is as great as anybody represented in the Collection, in my opinion.

Rosalie Edge also deserves more recognition that she has received, notwithstanding Furmansky's outstanding biography. As environmentalist Roland C. Clement writes in his two-page Afterword to Furmansky's book, "...Rosalie Edge had been sounding educated warnings for years about how we were harming the natural world, and until the end of her life she dedicated herself to saving that world. Many of us paid heed to her warnings. Many of us built our environmental career with her work at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary and the national parks as models." (DF p. 254). Writes Bill McKibben in his two-page Foreword to Furmansky's book: "Edge is one of the people who made Rachel Carson and David Brower possible." (DF p. xi). Brower "would recall that Rosalie Edge had been the leading model of conservation advocacy of his youth." (DF p. 228).

FDR and the Great Depression

Notwithstanding that the period 1916-1945 saw two world wars, perhaps the single most important factor from an environmental conservation perspective was the Great Depression and the FDR administration's New Deal in response. The president with arguably the greatest conservation legacy to date (2025) not named Theodore Roosevelt is...Franklin Roosevelt (Nixon perhaps comes in third?). This notwithstanding FDR's propensity for building dams, roads and, many would argue, nukes.

In a way, FDR seems to me to be the president best defined as a working conservationist, particularly in the way he actively stewarded his Hyde Park property on the Hudson River. His physical disabilities perhaps made him sensitive to the quality of his surroundings in a way others were not. He grew up within a family that was in the circle of the Eastern conservation elite - family friends and acquaintances included C. Hart Merriam, Henry Fairfield Osborn, George Bird Grinnell and Frank Chapman. And of course, Theodore Roosevelt himself.

FDR had both the inclination to pursue conservation efforts and an unparalleled opportunity to do so. The Great Depression created mass unemployment. Vast government programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration employed millions of unemployed men. The CCC in particular largely focused on conservation work and the construction of parks and recreation facilities that are still in use today.

BRIEF SUMMARY OF FDR CONSERVATION LEGACY

-140 National Wildlife Refuges established.

-276 National Forests created and/or expanded.

-Eight National Parks were created - Everglades, Great Smoky Mountains, Big Bend, Shenendoah, Olympic, Isle Royale, Monmouth Cave and King's Canyon

-First National Seashore - Cape Hatteras in 1937.

-"FDR had done more to protect America's coastlines, marine sanctuaries, and barrier islands than all of his White House predecessors combined." (RH 388)

-Vast increase in State Parks, most built by or with the help of the CCC. For example, Texas State Park lands expanded from 800 acres to 60,000 acres during FDR's presidency (RH 371).

-The Reorganization Act of 1933 placed all national monuments, Civil War battlefields, most national cemeteries, and public facilities in Washington DC under the jurisdiction of the NPS, affecting 64 major sites nationwide. Previously, most had been administered by either the War Department or the USDA.

This list pales in comparison to what was accomplished, given for example the amount of reclamation work on degraded land done by the CCC, the amount of forest restoration and planting, and the amount of marginal, denuded agricultural land that was remediated and repurposed.

It is worth noting that the conservation record of the FDR administration is not beyond reproach. In the opinion of many, the focus on building infrastructure generally and dams and other water control projects particularly, was way overdone. Notwithstanding Okefenokee and other Georgia forest successes, "much of what he accomplished in the name of applied science in the Deep South was, in hindsight, environmental folly." Ecosystems could not survive "the hyperindustrialization offered by the Corps of Engineers...fertile southern lands were segregated from the Mississippi River by New Deal land improvers." (RH 234)

The CCC accomplishments from its inception in 1933 to its dismantling as WWII was beginning are staggering. The CCC ultimately employed nearly 3.5 million men in six-month stints, working across the nation in 4,500 camps. Per Brinkley, the CCC developed 800 state parks, revegetated some 814,000 acres of range, installed erosion control protection over 154 million square miles of farmland, planted between 2 and 3 billion trees, built 13,000 miles of trails and 125,000 miles of roads, developed 52,000 acres of public campgrounds, and restored some four thousand historic structures.

"Encouraged by the availability of CCC labor and funds, eleven states acquired their first [state] parks because of Roosevelt's commitment to the cause. In a masterstroke, Roosevelt, by having the National Park Service oversee the development of the state park movement, ushered in one of the most successful programs in U.S. environmental history." (RH pp 217-8). [Having grown up spending summer vacations camping in State Parks throughout the Northeast, SP development is particularly near and dear to my heart.]

"What made the CCC more than just a dazzling work-relief program was the professional expertise...brought to land reclamation. Skilled young [professionals] learned about conservation in a tangible, hands-on way. If not for the Great Depression, these workers would have found themselves engaged in upwardly mobile jobs. But by a twist of fate, as many of their diaries and letters home make clear, [they] were indoctrinated in New Deal land stewardship principles. Later in life, after World War II, many became environmental warriors, challenging developers who polluted aquifers, and unregulated factories that befouled the air." (RH 172). [A counterpoint to this argument is Aldo Leopold's general distaste for the CCC, caused by his personal observation of them often working at cross purposes.]

An interesting artifact in the Collection is a pamphlet entitled President Roosevelt's Emergency Conservation Work Program (catalogued in Government Publications), published in 1933, the year the CCC was established. The pamphlet is a fairly lengthy informational and promotional piece which focuses as much or more on the benefits of the program for the participants as on the conservation goals of the program.

The issue of balancing protection vs. recreation in National Parks and other preserves has been an ongoing debate for over a century and continues today. In 1933, a remarkable woman named Isabel F. Story wrote The National Parks and Emergency Conservation, a lengthy booklet exploring the issue. Story joined the National Park Service at its inception in 1916, having worked at its predecessor for two years at the Department of the Interior, and the USGS for three years before that. She worked at the NPS until her retirement in 1955. She represents an important but obscure conservation figure in a period where females struggled to achieve status and influence.

FDR's most important conservation advisor and the man who implemented much of the New Deal was his Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes. Ickes was "the most powerful secretary of the interior in American history...." (RH 393). A Republican from Illinois, Ickes was combative and incorruptible - he was known as "Honest Harold." In addition to serving as Interior Secretary for the entire length of FDR's administration (and thus serving the longest tenure in that seat to date), he also directed the Public Works Administration. It is the PWA's massive projects for which Ickes is perhaps best remembered (think the Grand Coulee Dam, the Key West Highway, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the Triborough Bridge). However, he was an indefatigable fighter for all of the major conservation efforts of the time. "Ickes, who was amazed at Roosevelt's 'wide information' on the natural world, had clearly become the president's indispensable man on everything related to public lands and conservation of natural resources." (RH 320)

[Interesting sidenote about Ickes. He stayed on in Truman's cabinet after FDR's death. In 1946, Truman nominated former Democratic Party national treasurer Edwin W. Pauley to be Secretary of the Navy. Ickes testified during Pauley's Senate confirmation hearings that Pauley had once suggested to Ickes that $300k in campaign funds could be raised if Ickes would drop his fight for title to oil-rich offshore lands. Truman fired Ickes. Pauley declined the nomination. Why is this interesting? The Collection's copy of Robert Jay Wilder's Listening to the Sea (1998) is inscribed to Pauley's son Stephen. As described in the Catalogue entry for the book [Link], Edwin Pauley did end up taking some important steps in favor of conservation, a legacy continued by his son.]

In 1943, Ickes published The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon. As Ickes was still serving as Interior Secretary at the time, it has little about his role in conservation. In fact, the chapter nominally dedicated to that time period is mostly redacted - in a joking fashion seemingly mocking the necessity. The copy of the book in the Collection is inscribed by Ickes to Joaquin M. Elizalde, a prominent Filipino diplomat.

Another Republican with a key conservation role in FDR's administration was Ding Darling. Darling was an editorial cartoonist by profession, once judged the best in America. But as Douglas Brinkley puts it, "his consuming passion was to protect the upper Mississippi River ecosystem from wanton destruction." (RH p269). During the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, Darling had lobbied for the creation of the US Forest Service and worked to systematize scientific management of federal bird preserves. He served as president of the Izaak Walton League in Iowa and as chair of the state Fish and Game Commission.

In January 1934, FDR appointed Darling to the Committee on Wildlife Restoration, along with Collier's editor Thomas Beck and Aldo Leopold. The committee issued the "Beck Report," which, due to Darling and Beck's public prominence, garnered significant national attention. It recommended $50 million be dedicated to acquiring and restoring wetlands and marshes, 75% of which had been destroyed in the preceding years for agriculture or other development. FDR cut the amount to a more realistic $8.5 million and appointed Darling to be the head of the US Biological Survey in 1934-35, where he in turn hired wildlife biologist John Clark Salyer II. Together, Darling and Salyer worked to acquire hundreds of thousands of acres of land, often denuded from short-sighted agricultural practices, to be rehabilitated and converted to federal wildlife refuges. These efforts were the foundation in the growth of migratory waterfowl populations from 30 million in 1933 to over 100 million by the onset of WWII.

"Throughout 1935, Darling paid keen attention to Aldo Leopold's writings.... Both Darling and Leopold understood that no longer could American conservation be only about 'monumentalism', that is saving the largest mountains, sequoias, or rock formations. A new caretaking ethic, for all land...had to be the ecological basis for the future. To Roosevelt the reclamation of rural lands was the heart and soul of the environmental New Deal." (RH p 310).

The J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island in FL is part of the largest undeveloped mangrove ecosystem in the US. Darling worked to block the sale of environmentally sensitive land there to developers and urged President Truman to create a wildlife refuge there, which he did in 1945.

Darling did not publish any books on conservation, but he is represented in the Collection by Ding's Half Century (1962), published the year of his death, containing a greatest hits of his editorial cartoons. The copy in the Collection contains signed presentation materials by conservationist Max McGraw, who also financed the first of the Sierra Club's famous exhibit format books, as discussed elsewhere.

One of Darling's lasting impacts was the hiring of Salyer, who became "the father of the National Refuge System," as his second in command. Salyer eventually ran the National Refuge System, building it from 1.5 million to 29 million acres at his retirement in 1961. Salyer wrote no books but happily is represented in the Collection as co-author of the USFWS "Conservation in Action" booklet Okefenokee: a National Wildlife Refuge (1948).

The Okefenokee refuge, incidentally, is the largest in the East. FDR was spurred to protect it by, among others, his friends Francis and Jean Sherwood Harper, represented in the Collection with a piece in New York State Museum Handbook 8 (1929 - Anthologies).

Another key conservation advisor to both Ickes and FDR himself was the estimable Irving Brant. A journalist from St. Louis, Brant mostly served FDR in an informal, advisory capacity. Brant was a force for good during this period and in fact was one of the only publicly identified members of Rosalie Edge's Emergency Conservation Committee, as discussed above. After WWII, Brant wrote a highly regarded multi-volume biography of James Madison. Before he died in 1976, Brant wrote an account of his time working on conservation during the FDR years. The book was published some years later by his daughters. The copy of the book in the Collection, Adventures in Conservation with Franklin D. Roosevelt (1988) was owned by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. It is a great read.

Hugh H. Bennett is considered the "father of soil conservation" in the US and received many high conservation honors in his lifetime. He sounded an unheeded alarm in advance of the Dust Bowl years and was tapped to head the new Soil Erosion Service under the USDA in 1933, heading it until 1951. He wrote This Land We Defend (1942) with William C. Pryor, one of his subordinates at the SES.

Perhaps the most prominent expert of the time on the ecology of the desertification which caused the Dust Bowl was Paul B. Sears, whose Deserts on the March (1935) was both prescient in predicting the Dust Bowl and in being among the first to present ecological principals to a general audience. The book was widely read and exceedingly influential.

Ira Gabrielson became head of the US Biological Survey in 1935. He continued in the role for another six years at the US Fish and Wildlife Service when it was created in 1940 through the merger of the Biological Survey and the Bureau of Fisheries. Gabrielson was a key player in FDR's wildlife refuge efforts. His Wildlife Refuges (1943), described as "indispensable" in a review by Howard Zahniser, is represented in the Collection with a signed first. Gabrielson shows up again in the context of the pivotal Echo Park dam fight in the mid-1950s, discussed in Part II below.

Referred to as "the grand old man of New England wildlife conservation" (Meine p. 311), John C. Phillips was a sportsman, ornithologist and scientist who traveled widely, from Greenland with Peary to Japan and southern China to the Blue Nile. His work originally focused on hunting but later gravitated towards genetic issues in wild animals, species protection and environmentalism. He is represented in the Collection with copies of American Waterfowl (1930), co-authored by Frederick C. Lincoln, and Great Wenham Pond (1938), the latter public posthumously. (Frederick Lincoln himself was a prominent ornithologist who directed the Biological Survey's bird banding program.)

According to one of the obituaries tipped into the latter volume, Phillips was associate curator of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, president of the Peabody Academy of Sciences, chair of the Massachusetts Conservation Council, a trustee on a Council for Public Reservations and, for six years, president of the Massachusetts Fish and Game Association. "Dr. Phillips gave wide tracts of land in Boxford, Wenham and Rockport [Massachusetts] in recent years to the state for conservation areas and for preservation of wild birdlife." Phillips lived in Wenham - he clearly loved the pond and the area - in the forward he discusses an apparent controversy over a proposal to provide drinking water to local municipalities from the pond, which he opposed. Today the J.C. Phillips Nature Reserve sits on the west side of Wenham Lake, which is about 25 miles north of Boston. Phillips also had a distinguished war record, serving in the medical corps and ultimately commanding a field hospital with the rank of Major.

Another notable resident of the Boston area, William Brewster, has been described as "the Gilbert White of the Concord River." He founded the nation's first ornithological club, the Nuttall Club, in 1876. More on Brewster and his books October Farm and Concord River (both 1937) are here.

Senator Harry Bartow Hawes of MI "goaded Congress throughout the 1930s into prioritizing the restoration of essential wildfowl nesting areas in the North, and vast marsh areas along the age-old flyways and wintering resorts in the South.... [H]e offered Roosevelt counsel on ways to rescue North American wildlife from the vicious ravages of the Dust Bowl and from overhunting. For the first time since [TR], two powerful politicians - FDR and Hawes, had adopted nonvoting North American wildlife as a constituency." (RH pp. 225-6). Another perspective on Hawes, however, comes from Irving Brant, who describes Hawes in his book as being at times in the pocket of the sporting arms and ammo industry, for which he went to work after leaving Congress. Hawes is represented in the Collection with a generically inscribed first of his Fish and Game: Now or Never (1935).

Prominent international conservationist, forester and author Sir Richard St. Barbe Baker, author of many books including Green Glory: The Story of the Forests of the World (1948), claimed that he gave FDR the idea for the CCC at a 1932 dinner. As further discussed in the Catalogue entry for the book [Link], Hans Huth rebuts this claim, but Brinkley credits Baker with being at least instrumental in its conception.

Among the most impactful individuals of this period was Bob Marshall (1901-39), who despite his tragically short life was a major driver in the budding fight for wilderness protection. Though this fight started during the 1920s and 30s, it took decades to get a national wilderness protection law passed. Marshall, along with early wilderness advocates Aldo Leopold, Arthur Carhart and others, is discussed in the next section.

Another of my favorites among the authors in the Collection is Alice Hamilton. I was researching Barry Commoner and came across a quote listing her (along with Commoner) as among the five most important American environmental figures of the 20th century. Perhaps hyperbolic but irrespective, I had never heard of Hamilton. Trained as a physician in the 1890s, she went back to school to study bacteriology and pathology before becoming a professor at Northwestern University in 1897. She also volunteered and lived at Jane Addams' Hull House where exposure to its poor, sick clientele led to her to begin the study of the impact industrial toxins have on humans. She pioneered the field of occupational health in America and became the first female professor at Harvard in 1919. She is more properly placed perhaps in an earlier chapter, but she "only" wrote a textbook and, in 1943, a memoir, an inscribed copy of which is a valued Collection item. For a bit more detail about Hamilton, go to the Catalogue entry for the book. [Link]

To close out this section on FDR and the Great Depression, we come to the president himself. Ironically, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not publish books on conservation - he was a working conservationist. However, given his importance to the movement, he is represented in the Collection through a collection of presidential speeches, Nothing to Fear: The Selected Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1932-45 (1946). What is particularly interesting about this copy (which, sadly, contains little on conservation) is that it is personally inscribed in German by "K.A." - believed to be Konrad Adenhauer, the great German post-war statesman who served as the first chancellor of West Germany, from 1949-1963. Which is pretty cool.

Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams was among the most influential American photographers of the 20th century, while also being a life-long conservationist - indeed, his art embraced and advanced his environmental beliefs.

As a photographer he was at the vanguard of a new approach to photography, he developed new methods of development, his use and study of light as subject was revolutionary, he helped found the photography magazine Aperture, he co-founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and he was a key advisor in the establishment of the photography department at MoMA in New York, which was a turning point in establishing photography's institutional acceptance as a fine art form.

Adams began taking photographs as a teenager, when he was given his first camera during his first trip to Yosemite NP. He kept coming back to the park, but also needed a place to practice piano, as he was moving in the direction of pursuing classical music as a profession. He was introduced to landscape painter Harry Best, who maintained a seasonal studio home in Yosemite, which is where Adams' first photos were sold while he was 20. He later married Best's daughter Virginia.

Adams joined the Sierra Club at age 17 and a year later was hired as the summer caretaker of the club's visitor center in the valley, a position he held for four years. He was a lifelong member of the club, serving on its board of directors for 37 years, and acting as official photographer for club trips.

One of the most impressive books in the entire Collection on multiple levels, The John Muir Trail (1938) was critical in persuading FDR to establish Kings Canyon National Park. According to anseladams.com, the photographer brought his photos to Washington DC and met with over 40 members of Congress while lobbying passage of a 1936 bill to establish the park. When that effort failed, he published this book:

Though the bill to create the park failed in 1936, Ansel’s fight was not over. In 1938, he published his Kings Canyon images as a book, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail. The book itself was impressive—17 inches tall, 13 inches wide, and nearly two inches thick. [And very heavy!]. The large photoengraved images—of Kings Canyon’s soaring peaks, sunlit cliffs, and stoic sequoias—were trimmed and individually glued onto the pages. So exquisitely were they reproduced that they have, in the years since, often been mistaken for actual photographic prints. The effect was arresting.

For Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who received a copy from the Director of the National Park Service, it was more than a book of photographs, it was an argument: Kings Canyon must be protected. So convinced was Ickes that he took a copy to the White House, and set it in front of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Finally, as the President of the United States looked at this stunning book, capturing the full grandeur of Kings Canyon, Ansel’s argument found purchase. Just two years later, in 1940, Kings Canyon National Park was founded, and today it sees over 600,000 visitors a year.

Ickes never did get his book back. Roosevelt kept it, and when the President wants something, you let him have it. Of course, as befitting a masterpiece, Ickes immediately asked Ansel for another copy.

Per Adams' Wikipedia entry, the book was "part of the Sierra Club's efforts to secure the designation of Kings Canyon as a national park." The Sierra Club Bulletin is indeed one of the acknowledgees in the book. In his two-page introduction, Adams does not reference an explicit conservation goal, but waxes lyrical on the unique attractions of the Sierra, noting that "[a]s a region of recreation it is unequaled." He describes the photos as "my best work with the camera in the Sierra, they attempt to convey the experiences and the moods derived from a close association with the mountains.... This work, then, is a transmission of emotional experience - personal, it is true, as any work of art must be, - but inclusive in the sense that others have enjoyed similar experiences so that they will understand this interpretation of the intimate and intense beauty of the Sierra Nevada."

The first edition copy of The John Muir Trail is one of 500 copies published. Each copy was signed by Adams - this copy was separately inscribed by him as well. There are a relative handful of books in the Collection whose very existence drove a discrete, significant development in the conservation movement - this is one of them.

Adams' was also an important voice in the debate over how the NPs should be managed. In the 1950s the NPS began projects to facilitate increased visitation to already stressed parks including, especially, Yosemite. Adams was a loud voice protesting the work in Yosemite in particular - albeit unsuccessfully - and even tendered his resignation to the Sierra Club board in protest of what he perceived to be its acquiescence.

In 1955, Adams and his close friend and collaborator Nancy Newhall organized an exhibit entitled This is the American Earth. It toured nationally and abroad to widespread acclaim. In 1960, with the help of the Sierra Club's David Brower it was made into a book of the same title, the first of the Sierra Club's exhibit format series, which had a profound and lasting influence on public perception regarding wilderness and wilderness preservation. The Collection contains a first edition of that book, along with several subsequent books from the series. Per anseladams.com, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (about whom more below) called the book "one of the great statements in the history of conservation."

Adams later became active in conservation issues affecting Alaska and the Big Sur coastline of California, where he lived for his last couple of decades, among other issues. He said "I believe the approach of the artist and the approach of the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive degree, concerned with the 'affirmation of life'.... Response to natural beauty is one of the foundations of the environmental movement." [Quote from a March 1980 article by Robert Turnage on anseladams.com, from which prior cites from the site are also taken.]

Adams continued as a working photographer, and a passionate conservationist, his entire life. Among many other honors, he received honorary doctorates from both Harvard and Yale - not bad for a man with an eighth grade education. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civil honor, in 1980. The Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society each have awards named for him.

In addition to the books discussed above, the Collection has a signed first edition of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada (1948), inscribed by Adams to a protege, and a signed first of Yosemite and the Range of Light (1979), amongst his last books and published five years before his death. There is also a copy of a 1950 edition of Mary Austin's classic The Land of Little Rain (orig pub 1903) illustrated with Adams' photographs, signed by him and inscribed to friends by his wife Virginia.

PART TWO - 1945-62

If John Muir is the prophet of the EC movement, then Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson respectively represent the movement's philosopher-king and queen. Leopold and Carson each published a book during this latter period which I would characterize as amongst the most seminal of the American environmental movement. Aldo Leopold's career took place primarily in the 1916-45 period - he died in 1947 - A Sand County Almanac (1949) was published posthumously. Rachel Carson's career also began in the 1930s, and her first book was published in 1941. But it was Silent Spring, published in 1962, which arguably launched the modern environmental movement. Both Leopold and Carson are listed chronologically and Catalogued on this site based on those books.

This period saw old guard New Deal conservationists such as Ickes, Gabrielson, Albright and Sayler continue the conservation fight, albeit less successfully than in the past. But it also saw the maturation and emergence of a coming vanguard - most of whom had come of age during the New Deal era and were destined to have a major impact on the modern environmental movement.

Douglas Brinkley in his book Silent Spring Revolution describes this post-war vanguard as the "proto-environmentalists." These were some of the most famous names in the American conservation movement since Muir, TR, FDR, Pinchot and Ickes. Some of these continued to be active well beyond what I (and Brinkley) define as the onset modern environmental conservation movement - the publication of Silent Spring. Some of these luminary names include Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Fairfield Osborn, William Vogt, Bernard DeVoto, Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adans, Sigurd Olson, Richard Pough, Jacques Cousteau, Roger Tory Peterson, David Brower, Howard Zahniser, Arthur Carhart, William O. Douglas, and Mardy and Olaus Murie. And, of course, Rachel Carson. All are discussed below and/or in the next chapter of this history.

The 20th century also saw the continuation of the traditional role of the literary naturalists that was so influential in the 19th century. Writers such as Donald Culross Peattie, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edwin Way Teale, Louis J. Halle, Jr., Sally Carrigher, Wallace Grange, Leonard Dubkin, Olive Goin, John Hay, Hal Borland and even the great Loren Eiseley (whose work transcended categorization), kept alive the spirit and legacy of Thoreau, Burroughs and the like. That said, given the volume of works, I'll touch on only a handful of these naturalist authors below. All of course are in the Catalogue.

Presidents Truman and Eisenhower collectively occupied the office of president from the end of WWII through the entire decade of the 1950s. Neither could be described as being particularly interested in prioritizing environmental protection - instead their policies supported the growth of the "military-industrial complex" to support a burgeoning population and consumer demand, and to offset the perceived threat represented by the expansionist ambitions of Soviet Russia. Notwithstanding the achievement of a critical win in the preservation of Dinosaur National Monument in the mid-1950s, discussed in more detail below, the period after the war was one of great promise for a country coming out of depression and war - and a bleak period for the environment.

This was a time when the potential uses of new technologies - from chemicals to household appliances to nuclear power - were viewed as providing limitless promise with little thought to negative environmental or other societal ramifications. Both the policy makers and the scientific and technical "experts" driving these priorities generally ignored or were ignorant of the environmental implications of their decisions. The best example of this is the proliferation of nuclear testing, much of it above-ground in places like Nevada, which had horrible long-term impacts not just on the beautiful ecosystems directly impacted by the tests, but also on the people and fauna exposed to the radiation. This included the soldiers charged with monitoring test results. To date (2025) there have been over 2000 nuclear bomb tests worldwide, with the peak in background radiation attributable to those tests occurring in 1963.

This period also saw the beginning of the baby boom as soldiers returned home and began to start families. The boom is commonly defined as having lasted from 1946-64. It is perhaps the most pronounced demographic anomaly in American history and as this is being written (2025) the first boomers are turning 80 years old. The rapid increase in the population of 80+ residents will have its own implications.

As discussed above, the modern environmental movement as I and others have defined it began with Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. Her book was about the invisible impacts of chemical pesticides, but the growing awareness of the impacts of many dangerous but difficult-to-see pollutants, such as pesticides, nuclear fallout, water pollution, and air pollution, also drove the environmental awakening of the 1960s. A sad but important awakening call was the smog disaster in Donora, PA in 1948, when an atmospheric inversion trapped the air pollution from the area's mills for several days at ground level, killing 20 and sickening thousands more. Industry argued it was an act of God, but it drove public awareness and launched a campaign that ultimately got the first national clean air legislation passed... in 1963.

The most impactful environmental episode and book of the 1950s involved the fight over federal governmental efforts to build a massive dam in Dinosaur National Monument as part of the Upper Colorado water project. Some commentators credit that controversy, which predated Silent Spring by seven years, with launching the modern environmental movement. Irrespective of one's views on the matter (which is really semantics), it is of a sufficient immediate and lasting importance as to merit its own section below.

In terms of organization, the first subsection below discusses the career and impact of Aldo Leopold generally and the fight for wilderness protection specifically - the latter involving also Bob Marshall, Arthur Carhart, David Brower, Howard Zahniser and our old friend, Robert Sterling Yard, among others. (This discussion takes us to 1964, when the Wilderness Act was approved). We then go back to a broader discussion of the proto-environmentalists and literary naturalists listed above, as well as several other key authors of the period. There is a section specifically on the Dinosaur NM battle. Finally, we get to Rachel Carson and the end of this chapter.

Before we begin however, I'd like to introduce Bernard DeVoto, who until his death in 1955 was the most widely read, consistent and strident voice for the environment of his time. He comes up several times in the discussions below. DeVoto had a regular column in Harper's, "The Easy Chair," for many years, from which he wrote frequently and trenchantly on attacks on the environment which he loved, particularly in the West. Paul Brooks writes that he "may well have been the most potent one-man force for the conservation of nature in the mid-twentieth century.... As Wallace Stegner has pointed out, DeVoto was a highly vocal champion of environmental conservation long before it became a mass movement." [pp. 247-8].

DeVoto was exceptionally accomplished, as an historian, commentator, fiction writer, and speechwriter. His work earning him a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and one of the inaugural Bancroft Prizes for history, among other honors. While there are a very limited number of magazines in the Collection, of those that are two containing seminal articles by Devoto, both discussed below. There is also an inscribed copy of a book of his essays, entitled The Easy Chair, published in 1955, the year he died. In 1974, Wallace Stegner wrote The Uneasy Chair, a biography of DeVoto, a signed copy of which is also in the Collection.

Aldo Leopold and the Fight for Wilderness Protection

A discussion of Aldo Leopold requires us to go back in time. His career, which started in 1909 with the US Forestry Service and ended with his death in 1947, mostly took place during the period covered in the preceding section. But as his magnum opus was not published until 1949, I've waited until this period to tackle him.

Aldo Leopold grew up in Iowa on the banks of the Mississippi River as an avid hunter, one whose father practiced a voluntary form of responsible sportsmanship, adhering to self-imposed bag limits at a time when official regulations and limitations did not exist. Leopold absorbed these lessons and built upon them throughout his career. He studied forestry at Yale and upon graduation went to work at the USFS, where he advanced in terms of scope of responsibility and visibility within the profession (he did leave for a year and a half, but rejoined thereafter). When he finally left the USFS in 1928, he worked independently for some years, then spent the balance of his career as the first professor of game management at University of Wisconsin.

Leopold is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which remains a classic touchstone of the environmental movement today. The book was nearly finished when Leopold died suddenly at age 61 while helping to fight a fire on a neighbor's land - it was published posthumously. The copy in the Collection is a first edition inscribed by his daughter Estella to neighbors and family friends "the Rogers." Included with the book is a copy of an email from Estella confirming that the inscription is by her, not her mom.

Curt Meine's 1988 biography Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work [Link] is a long but fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of the environmental conservation movement in general and Leopold in particular. Perhaps reflecting the fact that the book was (quite remarkably) written as a PhD thesis, Meine brings an abundance of outstanding context and interpretation to the book, more than one sees in most bios. I've read a lot of biographies; this is one of the best. I read the paperback 2010 edition, with a new appreciation of Leopold by Wendell Berry and a new Preface. The Collection contains an inscribed first of Meine's book, catalogued in the Reference section.

Leopold influenced many areas of conservation but at its core, he challenged the prevailing notion that economic expediency should govern humankind's relationship to the land. Conservation of habitat, both human and not, is the only way forward, he argued. Leopold's greatest strength was his willingness to evolve and change his views, in areas such as wilderness conservation, predator control, controlled burning, and others.

Leopold was a practitioner, and he wrote for a like audience. During his lifetime it seems very unlikely that he was anything approaching a household name. Unlike many of the authors described on this website, he did not write much for a general audience - many of his most influential essays were published in The Journal of Forestry, for example. While he was universally known and respected in his areas of practice, one has to believe that It was not until A Sand County Almanac was published that he became more widely known.

Leopold started his career as a Pinchovian acolyte in his views (as befits a graduate of a forestry school essentially founded by the Pinchot family), but over the course of time his conservation philosophy evolved and matured. As a practicing conservationist he addressed himself to many of the critical issues of the time, including fire control, soil erosion, game management, and wilderness conservation. He made important theoretical and practical contributions in all of these areas. Most critically, he developed an overarching conservation philosophy, grounded in ecological science, that remains a touchstone today.

Interestingly, Leopold was not a fan of the New Deal drive to transfer huge tracts of land into government ownership and control. Leopold's views were colored by his experience of often seeing New Deal agencies working at cross purposes, which in my opinion was not surprising given the speed and scope of the efforts. Governmental land preservation efforts and its champions are celebrated throughout this site, and Leopold certainly supported and indeed initiated certain of these measures, but overall he felt that for conservation to be truly effective, it needed to be an effort by all landowners, particularly private landowners.

"A new issue on the minds of those at the [1947 North American Wildlife Conference] was the plan being perpetrated by business interests to wrest control of federal lands.... Hoping to take advantage of the postwar atmosphere, a group of western...interests was endeavoring to have the federal holdings of the West transferred to the states for easier pickings. Bernard DeVoto had just broken the story of the land grab in Harper's, and his expose had the conference electrified." The article is "The West Against Itself" from the January 1947 issue of Harper's Magazine [Link].

Leopold brought the issue "to the main rostrum," arguing that a) this was a major issue; b) If it happens in the West it will happen elsewhere; c) "Disrupt the public domain, and the National Forests will follow; disrupt the National Forests and the National Parks will follow."; d) Neither the states nor private owners have shown the ability to responsibly steward this land; and e) The panoply of federal land bureaus merited a complete analysis.

Meine concludes: "There was no stronger advocate of private conservation efforts than Leopold, but neither was there anyone more willing to defend the public lands against the short-sighted efforts of private interests. Federal regulations may not have been the preferred route to conservation, but under circumstances such as these, where the motives of the perpetrators was clear, it was the only route." (The quotes in each of the immediately preceding paragraphs graphs from Meine p. 494).

Leopold became interested in the then nascent concept of wilderness preservation while at the USFS. Working with a young man named Arthur Carhart, he proposed that the headwaters of the Gila River in the Carson National Forest be maintained as wilderness, excluding roads and denying use permits such as timber harvesting, mining, and grazing. In 1924, Gila became the first recognized wilderness area in the world.

Arthur Carhart had been hired in 1919 by the Forest Service as "recreation engineer" - the NPS had been established in 1916, and the Forest Service felt compelled to compete in providing recreation activities and facilities. The competition was so heated in fact that the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation in 1924 criticized both agencies for over-development of their recreation programs and specifically castigated the NPS for abandoning the idea of preserving natural wonders altogether in its attempt to create a "people's playground."

The "over-development" was not due to Carhart's efforts. In fact, among his first tasks for the Forest Service was to lay out plans for the building of a road and summer cabins around Trapper's Lake in the White River National Forest in Colorado. Instead, after surveying the area, Carhart returned to Denver and persuaded his superiors to leave the area undeveloped - the first action of its kind by the Forest Service.

In December 1919, Leopold and Carhart spent a full day together, "a meeting of kindred concerns, destined to assume an important place in the history of the American wilderness" per Meine (p. 177).

Following that meeting, Carhart submitted a memorandum to Leopold - noting it supplemented the recent conversation between the two men - advocating for preservation throughout the National Forests:

There is a limit to the number of lands of shorelines on the lakes; there is a limit to the number of lakes in existence; there is a limit to the mountainous areas of the world, and in each one of these situations there are portions of natural scenic beauty which are God-made, and the beauties of which of a right should be the property of all people....

There are great values of this type to be found in the several forests of the Nation, which in order to return the greatest total value to the people, not only of the Nation, but of the world should be preserved and protected from the marring features of man made constructions. These areas can never be restored to the original condition after man has invaded them, and the great value lying as it does in natural scenic beauty should be available, not for the small group, but for the greatest population. Time will come when these scenic spots, where nature has been allowed to remain unmarred, will be some of the most highly prized scenic features of the country, and unless the Forest Service has thoroughly exerted all influences possible to preserve these areas, severe criticism will some day be meted out by the collective owners of this territory, the public.... There will ever be a demand on the part of the people of the United States to be able to get into a part of the country which is undeveloped. There is no place particularly suited for such territory than is in the possession of the National Forest. [The entire three-page letter is worth a read at: http://ppolinks.com/forestservicemuseum/2016_5_25a.pdf]

Meine describes this as "the starting point of Leopold's lifelong battles on behalf of wilderness." (p. 178).

Carhart's crowning work for the Forest Service occurred when he was sent to the Superior National Forest to devise a recreation development plan. After weeks of canoeing through the area, and discussing merits of development with both sides, he recommended that the money to build roads into the area be withdrawn and the region remain accessible only by boat - that area is now the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Leopold continued to develop and articulate his wilderness preservation philosophy. He argued that while Pinchot's argument for the "greatest good to the greatest number" must ultimately govern national resource management, the recreational, cultural and aesthetic values of wilderness made its preservation the "greatest good."

In 1935 Leopold was one of eight founders of The Wilderness Society, along with Bob Marshall, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye (father of the Appalachian Trail), Ernest Oberholtzer, Harvey Broome, Bernard Frank, and Harold C. Anderson. Marshall was the initial driver of the organization. Interestingly, Marshall and Leopold had diametrically opposing philosophical views on many subjects. Marshall was a socialist who supported widespread governmental intervention in conservation issues, but the two men worked together on wilderness preservation.

Bob Marshall inherited great wealth when his father (who was instrumental in the creation of the Adirondack Preserve in NYS) died in 1929. Marshall funded The Wilderness Society during its first years and when he tragically died of heart failure in 1939 at the age of 38, his will provided ongoing funds for the organization. "Today, Marshall is considered largely responsible for the wilderness preservation movement" per his Wikipedia entry. This might be a bit of an overstatement but reflects his influence and importance.

Marshall's seminal article "The Problem of the Wilderness" published in the Feb 1930 issue of Scientific Monthly (see Catalogue - [Link]) anticipated the founding of The Wilderness Society in its robust defense of the inherent values of wilderness and the need for its supporters to unite in its defense.

Marshall was a an academic in addition to being an outdoorsman. He earned a doctorate in plant physiology from Johns Hopkins, after having earned bachelor's and master's degrees in forestry from the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University and Harvard, respectively.

In 1933, Marshall became chief of forestry at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, publishing his book The People's Forests that same year. He served in that position for four years before becoming head of recreation management at the Forest Service (where he had previously worked for three years before earning his doctorate) from 1937-9. This was the position essentially initiated by Carhart. Marshall pushed hard for regulations protecting wilderness areas on federal land - resulting in the signing of the "U-Regulations" banning road building, logging, hotels and the like from designated wilderness areas. Notably, he also pushed to expand national forest recreational opportunities to people with lower incomes and to remove discriminatory policies against ethnic minorities.

Marshall decided that his job presented too much potential for conflict for him to serve as head of The Wilderness Society. While he continued to provide overall direction, Robert Sterling Yard (see above) took over as administrative head and editor of the society's periodical, The Living Wilderness.

One of Leopold's early influential addresses was, in some respect, a rebuttal of Marshall's The People's Forests (1934). Leopold argued in his essay "Conservation Economics" (1934 - not in Collection) that governmental ownership of land could not make up for irresponsible private stewardship. "The thing to be prevented is destructive private land use of any and all kinds." (Quoted in Meine p. 321). Of the address, Meine writes that "[a]nother influence, in a reverse way, may have been Bob Marshall. Marshall, an out-and-out socialist, had stirred up a good deal of dust with his recent book The People's Forests, in which he made the case for vastly increased government involvement in administration of the nation's forest lands." (Meine p. 322).

Marshall spent a meaningful amount of time in Alaska. The Collection contains his privately published missives about two of those trips which he sent to friends, Doonerak or Bust (1938) and North Doonerak (1939), as well as a second printing of Arctic Wilderness, published posthumously in 1956 with a Foreword by A. Starker Leopold, Aldo's son. Tragically, Marshall died in 1939 at the age of 38. Bob Marshall died too early, but his legacy lives on. The Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana is the fifth largest in the lower 48 states.

The fight for wilderness protection was taken up new warriors, led by Sigurd Olson, Howard Zahniser, Olaus and Mardy Murie, and the Wilderness Society, along with David Brower and the Sierra Club.

Sigurd Olson was a critical and beloved (and beloathed) wilderness advocate and author who helped Howard Zahniser draft the Wilderness Act of 1964 and was a key figure in the protection of the Boundary Waters, Voyageurs NP, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and Point Reyes National Seashore in CA. Jim Klobuchar in a tribute to Olson describes him as "the flint and the soul of the conservation movement in America, both warrior and missionary. He was revered by millions who read his works and...they were aroused by his summons to save that fragile treasure." [Klobuchar was the father of Senator Amy - is quote is from a newspaper clipping laid into the book.]

Olson was VP of The Wilderness Society from 1963-7 and president from 1968-71. He was also VP and then president of the National Parks Association from 1951-9. He served as a consultant to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall on wilderness and environmental issues. He was a wilderness ecologist for the Izaak Walton League from 1948 until his death. Four of the five largest conservation organizations in the US gave Olson its highest award, the three aforementioned and the Sierra Club.

Olson was a professional canoe guide in the Boundary Waters region, in addition to being a teacher of biology, ecology and natural history. The publisher's description on his first book describes him as "quite possibly the most famous woodsman of our day." He lived most of his adult life in Ely, Minnesota near the edge of the Boundary Waters. At times he was jeered or hanged in effigy there on account of his environmental advocacy, which residents of the historically iron-mining town blamed for local economic woes.

"Sigurd's large and at times almost worshipful following derives in part from personal charisma, but especially from the humanistic philosophy that he professed in nine popular books.... He had a way of writing and speaking about the natural world that touched deep emotions in his audience, and many responded with heartfelt letters.... Sigurd Olson believed that the psychic, as well as physical, needs of humanity were rooted in the Pleistocene environment that dominated the evolutionary history of our species. This, combined with his single-minded focus on spiritual values, distinguished him from other leading philosophers of the wilderness preservation movement." [Olson's biographer David Backes, from listeningpointfoundation.org].

The Collection has three of Olson's books, all signed or inscribed, including his first, The Singing Wilderness (1956), as well as Open Horizons (1969) and Wilderness Days (1972).

Howard Zahniser was not an outdoorsman, but he loved the outdoors. He was most at home in the halls of power, in Washington DC, where he served first as executive secretary and then as executive director of The Wilderness Society. He was a leader in the fight against the Echo Park Dam, described in a separate subsection below. He was also the leader of the fight for wilderness protection, drafting the original bill in 1956 and fighting for eight years until its passage in 1964. Tragically, he died months before it was signed. Zahniser wrote no books, but he is represented in several places in the Collection with essays in anthologies and Forewords to other authors' books. He was a great conservationist and a great man.

[Per an excellent interview with premier Adirondack conservationist Paul Schaefer in the Adirondack Almanac, Zahniser's devotion to the wilderness cause was sparked by a 1946 visit with his friend Schaefer to the Adirondack High Peaks. Schaefer's gift inscription is on Frank Graham, Jr.'s The Adirondack Park: A Political History (1978). [www.adirondackalmanack/2022/06/a-conversation-with-wilderness-champion-paul-schaefer.html].

Olaus and Mardy Murie were, individually and collectively, environmental heroes. Olaus was a field biologist for the US Biological Survey (the predecessor of the FWS) who as a naturalist was among the first to reexamine the predator-prey relationship and call for the end of official predator extermination practices. He is called the "father of modern elk management" for his pioneering research, as well as being an expert in Arctic fauna. In 1924 he married Margaret (Mardy) Murie, who was the first female graduate of what is now the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Together they traveled extensively, doing major large-scale research projects in Canada, Alaska and Wyoming. Their Wyoming ranch was a hub of conservation leaders.

Olaus was an early council member of the Wilderness Society, where he lobbied against large dam construction in several federal parks, including Glacier NP and in Dinosaur NM, described below. He was instrumental in the expansion of Olympia NP and was highly influential in the creation of Jackson Hole NM (later an NP which was merged into Grand Teton NP). He was among those who persuaded John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to purchase the land for the park, as described way above in the book about Rockefeller's legacy. The new park was a key elk refuge. Murie became head of the Wildlife Management Division of the NPS.

In 1950, Olaus became president of the Wilderness Society, where he served for years. He also served as president of the Wildlife Society and as a director of the Isaak Walton League. He and Mardy recruited William O. Douglas and together they persuaded President Eisenhower to create the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, now the largest in the country. Sadly, like Zahniser, Murie died in 1963, shortly before the Wilderness Act passed. Olaus was a talented artist in addition to his other skills - he illustrated Wallace Grange's Those of the Forest (1953).

After Olaus died, Mardy Murie continued the conservation work that she and Olaus had begun. She wrote and lectured extensively, serving as a consultant to the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and the NPS, among others. She testified in favor of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which was signed into law by President Carter in 1980. Mardy is often referred to as "the grandmother of the conservation movement."

Both Olaus and Mardy were recipients of the Audubon Medal and the John Muir Award. In addition, Mardy received the National Wildlife Federation's highest honor, the Ding Darling Conservationist of the Year Award. In 1988, President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the country. The Collection has Olaus and Mardy's Wapiti Wilderness (1966), with a gift inscription from Mardy. It also has Mardy's Two in the Far North (1962), her account of their travels and research work in the arctic. There are also several anthologies with pieces by one of the two, including one by Olaus in This is Dinosaur, discussed in a separate subsection below.

Wallace Stegner was also a conservationist (who put together This is Dinosaur), although he is best known as the dean of writers about the American West, both fiction and non-fiction. He is discussed elsewhere in connection with his books on John Wesley Powell and Bernard DeVoto. However, it would be an incomplete history indeed to not mention his Wilderness Letter, written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission in 1960. The letter acknowledges the recreational and genetic reserve values of wilderness but urges the commission to focus on wilderness as an idea, as something that "has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. It has no more to do with recreation than churches have to do with recreation, or than the strenuousness and optimism and expansiveness of what historians call the 'American Dream' have to do with recreation."

Addressing a somewhat hostile (due to his support for dam construction) 1961 wilderness conference, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall discarded his prepared remarks and read Stegner's six-page letter in its entirety, to a standing ovation. The address was broadcast on radio, and the letter published in various periodicals. Per a July 2021 article in Stanford Magazine by Daniel Arnold: "The letter quickly became celebrated as the essential explanation and defense of wilderness, not just of its usefulness, but of its philosophical necessity to the character of the American land and people." [https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-the-wilderness-letter-wrought]. Stegner included the letter in his love-letter to the West, The Sound of Mountain Water (1969), a rare first state of which [will soon be] in the Collection].

An important capstone of the fight for wilderness protection is the anthology Tomorrow's Wilderness (1963). It was published by the Sierra Club a year before the passage of the Wilderness Act and includes contributions from many of the most important environmentalists of the day, including Ansel Adams, Paul Brooks, David Brower, Fairfield Osborn, Wallace Stegner, Stewart Udall and Howard Zahniser. (Also, Caspar Weinberger (!?))

The Wilderness Act of 1964 was passed a year later. Alice Zahniser and Mardy Murie stood beside President Johnson when he signed the bill.

Returning to the storied career of Aldo Leopold. While at the USFS, Leopold made contributions to the agency's policies on fire control and soil erosion. But his major passion was wildlife management and, following his career at the USFS, he founded in 1933 the University of Wisconsin's Game Management department. Leopold was already an established authority in the field, having published in 1931 the Report on a Game Survey of the North Central States (inscribed to fellow conservationist Sam G. Anderson) followed in 1933 by Game Management, which became the standard work in the field.

Per Meine: "[Leopold's] partner...was Herbert L. Stoddard, on loan from the Biological Survey. It was an important meeting for Leopold. Leopold has been inevitably dubbed the "Father of Wildlife Management" but he personally held that Stoddard was the true pioneer.... In Stoddard, Leopold found one of his closest professional colleagues and personal friends." (p. 264). Stoddard was also a pioneer in advocating for the importance of fire and controlled burns in ecosystems, converting Leopold to his views.

Stoddard is represented in the Collection indirectly - Wallace Grange's Those of the Forest (1953) is inscribed by Stoddard to a fellow ornithologist, and New York State Museum Handbook 8 (1929 - Anthologies) is a presentation copy from museum director Charles C. Adams (an important conservation figure in his own right) to Stoddard. Wallace Grange was, not incidentally, at one point supervised in his field work by Leopold, and he remained a friend and correspondent thereafter. Grange was an important wildlife biologist and conservationist who was inducted into the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame in 1993.

Leopold's Game Survey (1931) was published by The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute, which commissioned the study. It would be interesting to know Rosalie Edge's reaction to the book, if any. Neither Meine's bio of Leopold nor Furmansky's bio of Edge mentions the other person. However, it is clear from the discussion regarding Bob Marshall above that Edge and Leopold would likely not have seen eye-to-eye in their respective approaches to conservation.

Leopold sought to teach farmers the benefits of managing their farms to maximize the ecological value of the land, for their own sakes and for the sakes of society. In general, Leopold's conservation philosophy arose from his work as a practicing naturalist, ecologist and academic. Importantly, he evolved and was not afraid to change his mind. For example, like most wildlife managers of the day he initially supported predator eradication efforts. However, the resulting overpopulation of deer, ultimately a disaster for the environment and the deer themselves, caused him to rethink his stance. His classic essay "Thinking Like a Mountain" in A Sand County Almanac drives the point home beautifully and memorably.

The culminating essay in A Sand County Almanac is entitled "The Land Ethic," and it represents a capstone to Leopold's development of an environmental ethic. In short, the land is part of the community, and the community is of the land and a mutuality of respect and stewardship is necessary for the community to perpetuate and prosper. As discussed in the Catalogue in connection with the copy of Leopold's 1947 address entitled "The Ecological Conscience," in writing "The Land Ethic" Leopold drew principally from four prior pieces, of which "The Ecological Conscience" was the last. Leopold's most frequently quoted and heavily analyzed passage first appeared in a slightly different form in that 1947 address. See the Catalogue for more [Link].

The word "ecology" was coined by Ernest Haeckel in 1866 but did not develop into a recognized, respected, separate subject until the mid-20th century. The term was introduced into the US by the remarkable Ellen Swallow. The father of modern ecology is considered to be Eugene Odum, who wrote the first (and for many years only) textbook on the subject. Biographies of Swallow and Odum are [here] and [here]. But it was Leopold who merged the concepts of ecology and conservation.

Leopold was a working scientist, teacher, forester, wildlife manager and, ultimately, among the most important philosophers of the movement. Meine notes that A Sand County Almanac was published around the same time as two other "landmarks in conservation history" (p. 495) - Fairfield Osborn's Our Plundered Planet (1948) and William Vogt's Road to Survival (1948). "Vogt's and Osborn's books had opened people's eyes. Leopold's Almanac did not sell nearly so widely as these at first, but for conservationists looking for a respite from unleavened gloom,...reminding them that a love of nature was still the impulse behind their work.... Out of this triumvirate of premonitory postwar books, A Sand County Almanac would...emerge as the one with the broadest influence." (Meine p.524).

As a teacher, Leopold supervised a number of the authors represented in the Collection, including Wallace Grange and Frances Hamerstrom. Grange is represented in the Collection with Those of the Forest (1953), notable in its own right given Grange's contributions to conservation, principally in Wisconsin, but also because it is inscribed by pioneering wildlife management ecologist Herbert L. Stoddard to ornithologist Alex Sprunt. Frances Hamerstrom's is a great story. Born to wealth and privilege in Boston, she married Frederick Hamerstrom and went to the Midwest to perform a lifetime of pioneering research into prairie chickens and other birds. Stoddard, Grange and Hamerstrom were all friends with Leopold and one another.

Regarding Leopold himself, Meine sums things up as follows:

"His influence on conservation in America remains pervasive. As a forester, he gave to the profession a standard of wise stewardship, a balance of the visionary and the pragmatic, that still stands. As a defender of wild lands, he framed his concern in terms that struck to the roots of the nation's historical and philosophical development; he helped make the respect for wilderness a matter of national priority, and national pride. The science of wildlife ecology and the practice of wildlife management would have developed without him, but not with the same degree of integrity or sense of direction. As a teacher, he inspired hundreds of students to see and understand land, to study it rigorously, and to care for it. As a thinker, he gave the conservation movement philosophical definition. As a poet, he enriched the nation's bookshelf of nature writing. (p. 526)

Getting back to Arthur Carhart - he left the Forest Service after only three years - he was a victim of the aforementioned competition with the NPS over recreation resources. He butted heads with NPS chief Stephen Mather, who had used his political influence to reduce the Forest Service's requested allocation for recreation from $45,000 to $900. Carhart left soon after.

Carhart joined a landscape architecture firm where he stayed for eight years, during which time he wrote numerous magazine articles and two novels, most with explicit or implicit conservation themes. [His 1929 book about extirpating the wolves of Colorado, The Last of the Pack (not in Collection), argued the necessity for the killing. According to wilderness.net: "Perhaps repentant about his unfortunate portrayal of the wolf slaughter, Carhart never again attempted to justify predatory animal control, arguing later for sharp regulations and containment of [as?] animal control policies."]

In 1930, he left the architecture firm to write full time, ultimately publishing over 4,000 articles and many books, including several novels under different pen names. He opposed grazing on public lands, wrote about the dangers of pesticides (work that Rachel Carson read in her research of Silent Spring - she also corresponded with Carhart), took on entrenched private interests and the government agencies he felt were doing their bidding, and wrote and worked extensively to reconcile hunters with the environmental community, two groups whose common interests and conservation heritage (as discussed extensively elsewhere herein) had grown attenuated.

Importantly, Carhart was a prominent and important opponent of the Echo Park dam - it is notable that DeVoto wrote the Intro to Carhart's Timber in Your Life (1954) around the time of that controversy - see DeVoto's article against the dam (1950) and the Stegner anthology This is Dinosaur (1955) for more [Link]. [Incidentally, DeVoto's 12-page Introduction is outstanding. It opens, deliciously: "It is no more permitted to speak disrespectfully of The Pioneer than of American Womanhood." He continues farther along: "In no respect did the Pioneer more truly express the American character than in his wholesale dissipation of the land and its products." He goes along in like vein for the full 12 pages, articulate and clearly mad as hell.]

Carhart himself considered his greatest conservation accomplishment to be the establishment of the Conservation Library Center at the Denver Public Library, which was established in 1960 with Carhart's private library and now consists of over 2,500 linear feet of material. Per one writer, it is "the historic core for anyone doing conservation research." It is the repository of the archives of the Nature Conservancy, Izaak Walton League, American Bison Society, American Rivers and American Farmland Trust, it also has papers from Aldo Leopold, Olaus Murie and Howard Zahniser, among others.

The federal inter-agency national wilderness training center is named for Carhart. He was awarded many other honors as well, including the Izaak Walton League's Founders Award and the first Outdoor Writers Association of America's Conservation Award. In 2000, the National Audubon Society recognized Carhart as one of the world's most important conservationists, along with Leopold and Theodore Roosevelt.

Carhart is represented in the Collection by a copy of Fresh Water Fishing (1949) inscribed to prominent conservationist Seth E. Gordon; Timber in Your Life (1954); The National Forests (1959, with an Intro by Izaak Walton League conservation director Joseph W. Penfold); and Planning for America's Wildlands (1961, with an Intro by Zahniser). [Link to Carhart Catalogue entry]

Mid-20th Century "Proto-Environmentalists" and Literary Naturalists

As discussed in the Intro above, the mid-20th century saw the maturity of some of the true lions of the conservation movement - some of whom had their biggest impact then, but many of whom were among the most prominent warriors of the modern environmental movement which (also as discussed), we date to 1962 and the publication of Silent Spring.

The late 1940s saw the publication of four environmental classics: Marjory Stoneman Douglas' Rivers of Grass (1947), Fairfield Osborn's Our Plundered Planet (1948), William Vogt's Road to Survival (1948), and A Sand County Almanac (1949). But despite this promising start, in general the 17 years after WWII were pretty grim environmentally, despite some progress made, seeds planted, and battles won. Arguably, the cumulative scope of environmental abuse during this period might be said to account for the unprecedented strength, popularity and vehemence of the EC movement during the subsequent two decades in particular.

Fairfield Osborn was the son of the illustrious and notorious (as a eugenicist) Henry Fairfield Osborn, who is covered in the preceding chapter. The younger Osborn was a successful businessperson who retired at 48 in order to dedicate himself to environmental causes. He served as the head of the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society) for 28 years. Our Plundered Planet is a classic, highly influential in kick-starting the conservation movement after the war.

In the years following publication of the book, Osborn, with the assistance of WCS staff member George Brewer (to whom Francis Farquhar's History of the Sierra Nevada (1965) is inscribed), started the Conservation Foundation with the counsel of Aldo Leopold, William Vogt and others. The Conservation Foundation was headed by Osborn for years before it merged into the World Wildlife Fund. [Osborn and the Conservation Foundation were the drivers behind the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. tribute book discussed above].

Osborn's earliest contribution to the Collection was an unusual one - The Pacific World (1944 - Anthologies), which he edited. The info from the book was designed to be distributed in handbook form to service members posted to the Pacific theater in hopes of promoting conservation-focused behavior while serving there. This copy is inscribed by Osborn to a contributor. The book was the idea of two members of the American Committee for International Wildlife Protection, one of whom, Childs Frick, is also the recipient of an inscribed copy of Osborn's later book, The Limits of the Earth (1953).

William Vogt was an ecologist and ornithologist best known for Road to Survival, which was an "influential best seller. It had a big impact on a Malthusian revival in the 1950s and 60s." [Wikipedia entry on Vogt]. Vogt had served in a number of positions including as Chief of the Conservation Section of the Pan American Union, where he studied the relationship between climate, population and resources in Latin American countries. He argued that expanding populations and economic growth were driving environmental destruction that would take a huge toll on future generations. The book was published in the same year as Osborn's Our Plundered Planet, which explored similar terrain.

Brooks writes that Road to Survival "would shock millions of readers all over the world....[it] is subversive in the best sense of the word. It calls for nothing less than a radical change in our attitude toward the natural world." According to Brooks, Bernard DeVoto (see above) considered the book to be "by far the best book so far in this literature. It is more basic, more comprehensive, more thorough-going than any of its predecessors...and it is written with marked brilliance and drama." [pp. 245-7].

Writes Charles C. Mann in the March 2018 issue of The Atlantic magazine: "Vogt...laid out the basic ideas for the modern environmental movement. In particular, he founded...'apocalyptic environmentalism' - the belief that unless humankind drastically reduces consumption and limits population, it will ravage global ecosystems.... Vogt argued that affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem. If we continue to take more than the Earth can give, he said, the unavoidable result will be devastation on a global scale. Cut back! Cut back! was his mantra."

There was a fourth environmental classic published in the immediate post-war years. Marjory Stoneman Douglas spent a (very long) lifetime fighting to save the Everglades from development. The Everglades: River of Grass (1947) "redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's...Silent Spring." [Wikipedia].

Douglas was a journalist, free-lance writer, suffragette and human rights activist. She was introduced to the Everglades fight by her mentor Ernest Coe. Coe (who authored no books) was an irascible and uncompromising advocate who gets the lion's share of credit for the designation of the Everglades NP in 1934. He headed the Everglades National Park Commission, upon which Douglas served. Despite the designation, the park itself was not created until 1947, one month after Douglas' book was released, due to controversies over the range of the park and the challenge of acquiring the necessary land. The original park was considerably smaller than Coe and Douglas proposed - and flood control and irrigation work by the Army Corps of Engineers had major negative impacts on the park and surrounding areas. It was only over decades that many of the areas originally proposed were added to the park, and negative impacts from flood control efforts remediated.

The fight to save the Everglades consumed much of Douglas' 108 year life. She founded the Friends of the Everglades at the age of 79. Before that, she was a charter member of the first ACLU chapter organized in the south, she testified in favor of the ERA, she supported organizations seeking to help migrant farm workers. She was a giant - one of less than twenty people inducted into the National Wildlife Federation's Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Pres. Clinton at age 103, among many other honors.

Said Florida Governor Lawton Chiles: "Marjory was the first voice to really wake a lot of us up to what we were doing to our quality of life. She was not just a pioneer of the environmental movement, she was a prophet, calling out to us to save the environment for our children and our grandchildren." The citation for the Presidential Medal of Freedom reads: "Marjory Stoneman Douglas personifies passionate commitment. Her crusade to preserve and restore the Everglades has enhanced our Nation's respect for our precious environment, reminding all of us of nature's delicate balance. Grateful Americans honor the 'Grandmother of the Glades' by following her splendid example in safeguarding America's beauty and splendor for generations to come."

The Collection contains three copies of Rivers of Grass - a first printing, an inscribed second printing, and a personally inscribed later printing of the first edition. There is also an inscribed first of her 1967 book Florida: The Long Frontier.

As described above, a young Roger Tory Peterson was one of Rosalie Edge's acolytes and helpers in pressing the mission of the Emergency Conservation Committee. Peterson of course went on to become perhaps the most recognized American ornithologist of the 20th century, and a driver of the modern environmental movement. His field guides using his Peterson Identification System, first published in the 1930s, remain the standard today.

In 1955, Peterson and British naturalist James Fisher published Wild America, an account of 30,000-mile trip around the coast of most of North America. The book is still considered such a classic that a number of books describing copycat journeys have been published over the years. Two of these books are in the Collection, described in the Catalogue entry for Wild America and individually under their authors' names. Roger Tory Peterson: The Art and Photography of the World's Foremost Birder (1994), inscribed to Peter Matthiessen, is also an item in the Collection. A [link] to the Catalogue entries.

Another well-regarded bird guide, the Audubon Society's Eastern Land Birds (1946) was authored by Richard Pough. Pough is also associated with Rosalie Edge, having brought the slaughter of raptors to her attention directly leading to her preservation of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. Pough was among the major conservationists of the 20th century, later founding the Open Space Institute and serving as founding president of the Nature Conservancy. "Pough persuaded Lila Acheson Wallace, a cofounder of Reader's Digest, to seed TNC with $100,000." (SSR. p. 112). Katherine Ordway, the daughter of the MMM principal owner, was the TNC ongoing most important benefactor, ultimately donating some $64 million. (SSR p. 112-3)

Pough was a pioneer in the practice of using conservation easements on private land to protect it in perpetuity. The Collection also contains a first edition of Stewardship (1965), authorship of which is credited to the Open Space Action Committee (the predecessor to OSI) but which was largely written by Pough and Charles Little (about whom more in a subsequent chapter). Stewardship was a guide for landowners, principally in the NY metropolitan area, who were interested in donating or using easements to preserve their open space property. Notably, Pough also wrote the Intro to Peter Matthiessen's first book, Wildlife in America (1959). PM will also be discussed in the next chapter.

Nancy Newhall is mentioned a couple times above, having written the text to the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. tribute book and, more importantly, collaborated with Ansel Adams on This is the American Earth (1960), the first of the Sierra Club "exhibit format" books. She was a pioneer of the large format photo book generally. Newhall became a Sierra Club member and vocal conservationist following her collaboration with Adams (which is discussed further in the Catalogue entry for the book [Link]), and she wrote extensively on other contemporary cultural issues. However, she is best known primarily for her work as a photography critic, where in addition to Adams she championed such photographers as Edward Weston.

William O. Douglas was a fascinating man who had myriad impacts on the EC movement - directly as a conservationist, as an author, as a jurist, and as a mentor on the subject to a young JFK, whom Douglas knew from boyhood. Douglas was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939 by FDR and is the longest serving justice in history as of this writing, at over 36 years. Douglas was a progressive, often libertarian jurist, who is considered among the most liberal in the court's history. He was also a life-long outdoorsman and active conservationist in his own right. Douglas grew up in poverty in Washington State, went to college and law school, became a law professor at Columbia shortly after graduating, went into government service (including chairing the SEC under FDR), and ultimately was nominated to the court in 1939. He was also a strong contender for the vice presidency in 1944 - fascinating to speculate on what it would have meant had he, not Truman, become president when FDR died. Douglas was a close friend of the Kennedy family, mentoring the younger JFK in environmental issues, which had a major impact on environmental history.

As an environmental activist, Douglas led very public advocacy hikes of many miles or days over endangered territory in order to publicize the dangers to it - in this way he saved the C&O Canal towpath along the Potomac River. He served on the board of the Sierra Club for two years while also serving as a SCOTUS justice. He persuaded the court to save the Red River Gorge in KY in a case about a proposed dam which would have flooded the gorge. And he was instrumental in having the free-flowing Buffalo River in Arkansas declared the first National River. Douglas was friends and/or allied with many of the key environmentalists of the day, including Louis Halle, Roger Tory Peterson, Sigurd Olson, Rachel Carson and, critically, Mardy and Olaus Murie. "It would be impossible to exaggerate how beneficial Douglas's alliance with the Muries would prove to be in the late 1950s and early 1960s." (SSR p. 78)

Douglas was a lifelong mountaineer, adventurer and traveler. He is said to have hiked every mile of the Appalachian Trail. He published some 31 books, including many focused upon travel and/or conservation, a surprising number of which were published while he was serving on the court. The Collection contains three of these, My Wilderness: The Pacific West (1960), My Wilderness: East to Katahdin (1961), and The Three Hundred Year War: A Chronicle of Ecological Disaster (1972) - the first two signed.

Douglas was an unusual judge in that he often relied more on his own philosophy than on precedent. In 1972 in a dissenting opinion, he argued in a case involving the Sierra Club that inanimate "environmental" objects such as trees should have legal standing to sue. Per Brinkley, "Douglas considered public wild lands an American birthright.... [H]e encouraged fellow protoenvironmentalists to use lawsuits as a weapon against the Forest Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and extraction companies in the American West.... Douglas would help both the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society acquire pro bono attorneys for their preservationist crusades. Seemingly unafraid of conflict-of-interest charges, Douglas had essentially turned his Supreme Court office into a wilderness lobby way station...." (SSR p. 75)

Douglas was a genius, a workaholic, and seemingly often an asshole - per his Wikipedia page, his law clerks called him "shithead" behind his back. I may not have wanted to work for the man, but it would've been awesome to meet and spend some time with him.

Jacques Cousteau was probably the most influential marine explorer of all time - and it's hard to imagine him ever being supplanted from that throne. William Beebe and Sylvia Earle of course both get high marks as well. [Interestingly, I'd argue that Rachel Carson was the most influential marine biologist of all time - but perhaps not for her work in marine biology]. Cousteau basically invented, along with Emile Gagnan, the modern scuba apparatus, making extended underwater exploration possible. He published more than 50 books and 120 documentaries and founded an environmental protection foundation with over 300,000 members.

From 1966 through 1982, Cousteau hosted two separate documentary series on U.S. and U.K. television which were quite popular - introducing countless people to the wonders of the undersea world. I grew up on those documentaries. My mom was generally not a TV watcher (with the exception of the Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett shows on Thursday night). But she loved the Cousteau specials, and we watched every single one. They were an event in my house. Those shows, along with Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (with Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler) on Sunday nights, had a huge impact on me - probably more so as my sister and I were generally not allowed to watch much other TV. But I digress....

Cousteau's interest in environmental conservation developed organically over the course of his career. Starting from a time and place where environmental awareness was negligible (and he had his faux pas' early in his career), his love of the natural (undersea) world led him to an awareness and a leadership role on the issue. He was an early warner on climate issues and led a protest which prevented the dumping of large amounts of nuclear waste into the Mediterranean in the 1960's. He became a champion of the cause, and I am pleased he is represented in the Collection with a signed copy of his first book, The Silent World (1953), co-written with Federic Dumas.

Cousteau's honors included, among many others, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Geographic Society's Special Gold Medal (presented by JFK), election to the Academie Francaise, Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, and Commander of the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre - the last two for his work as a French naval gunnery officer and member of the French Resistance during WWII.

The tradition of the literary naturalist - writing beautifully and insightfully about nature, in such a way as to inspire the reader to value and explore the natural world, did not end with John Burroughs and his contemporaries. Indeed, William Brewster and Henry Beston, both discussed above, fall into that category. The number of notable authors seems to have fallen during the Depression, unsurprisingly given the discretionary nature of the books. But the mid-20th century brought some notable practitioners of the art, a tradition which happily continues to this day.

Donald Culross Peattie did start his publishing during the Depression, which speaks to his popularity. He was a botanist, naturalist and author who was described by Joseph Wood Krutch as “perhaps the most widely read of all contemporary American nature writers” during his career. He was known for being scientifically precise in his writings, while still being poetically and philosophically minded. He wrote nearly 40 books, including some travel books and books for children.

Peattie worked as a botanist with the U.S. Dept of Agriculture and then as a nature columnist, before turning to writing full time. He was active in efforts to protect the Indiana Dunes, an area in northwest Indiana on Lake Michigan that in 2019 became a national park, the first in the state.

Peattie has been accused of harboring racist views, based in part on the following quote from An Almanac for Moderns: “Every species of ant has its racial characteristics. This one seems to me to be the negro of ants, and not alone from the circumstance that he is all black, but because he is the commonest victim of slavery, and seems especially susceptible to a submissive estate. He is easily impressed by the superior organization or the menacing tactics of his raiders and drivers, and, as I know him, he is relatively lazy or at least disorganized, random, feckless and witless when free in the bush, while for his masters he will work faithfully." [p. 114 - which ironically enough is the entry for July 4th].

Peattie later campaigned vigorously against Japanese internment during WWII.

From a 2014 article in the Christian Science Monitor by Danny Heitman:

But soon after his death, Peattie’s writing faded from public view. These days, few people know about him. His style, sometimes self-consciously poetic and a little florid, can seem faintly antiquarian to the contemporary ear.

“There is always a quality in Peattie’s prose that it might be tempting to call formality,” Verlyn Klinkenbourg, one of today’s best commentators on the natural world, observed not long ago. “Really, it is a kind of honorific poetry, a sense of rising to his subject.... We do not write like this any longer.”

But more recent writers have learned from Peattie’s deeply attentive vision of nature. Michael Pollan and Bill McKibben count him as an influence. “Peattie,” said Robert Hass, “is one of the classic American nature writers of the mid-twentieth century.”

Peattie is represented in the Collection with three signed or inscribed books, An Almanac for Moderns (1935), Flowering Earth (1939), and American Heartwood (1949).

Joseph Wood Krutch was professor and professional critic who wrote an acclaimed and popular 1948 biography of Thoreau (the copy in the Collection was once owned by Eleanor Roosevelt, with her bookplate). The biography had a major impact on reintroducing Thoreau to the 20th century reader, sparking new interest in and interpretations of his work. Inspired by his work on the book, Krutch published the first of his own acclaimed nature books, The Twelve Seasons, in 1949. (Signed copy). He moved to the Tucson for health reasons in 1952 and published several books about the Grand Canyon and the desert, including The Desert Year (1952 - signed).

Krutch was greatly influenced by Aldo Leopold and continued spreading his philosophy that purely human-centric "conservation" and slavery to economic imperatives must give way to a true appreciation for nature for its own sake.

Edwin Way Teale was a prominent literary naturalist and photographer - perhaps the most prominent of his time (which lasted some 50+ years). He reportedly declared himself to be a naturalist at age nine and changed his middle name to Way from Alfred at age 12. Teale was a staff writer for Popular Science early in his career, before leaving to become a freelance photographer and full-time nature writer. His best-known work is a series of four books documenting his travel by car following and documenting the change of seasons. Per the Wikipedia entry on Teale, his works are used as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930-1980.

Teale was a prolific author, with more than 35 books to his credit. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 in the General Non-fiction category, for one of the four season-chasing books, as well as a John Burroughs Association Medal and many other awards throughout his career. He was at various times president of the New York Entomological Society and Thoreau Society.

Among the Teale books in the Collection is a later printing of his once-classic Dune Boy (1943), an account of his childhood summers in the Indiana Dunes, which became a National Park in 2019. Peattie is also tied to the area, doing his Harvard fieldwork there, with the results being published in the 1922 and 1930.

Less prolific than Peattie, Krutch and Teale, but no less respected, was Sally Carrighar. Carrighar spent years observing her subject areas, then in her books compressed the time. For example, her book Icebound Summer (1953 - inscribed second printing) was written after ten years spent in the Arctic. She was known for the scientific precision of her descriptions, delivered in a lively prose. Carrighar's books are considered classics of the genre.

Loren Eiseley was among the preeminent of the mid-century literary naturalists. A brilliant man with a wide range of interests and expertise, he was the most honored member of Univ of Pennsylvania since Ben Franklin. He is best known for his first book, The Immense Journey (1957 - stated first). Eiseley, who has been described as a "modern Thoreau," had a unique ability as a writer to combine a scientific approach with a poetic touch. The Immense Journey sold over one million copies in at least 16 languages. He is also represented in the Collection with a signed first of his autobiography All the Strange Hours (1975).

E. Laurence Palmer is today not widely heralded but was a prominent science educator whose chief contribution was in advancing conservation education before the topic became embedded. His Fieldbook of Natural History (1949 - signed) [Link] remains a classic reference, with over 2000 entries on a wide variety of natural subjects. Not a literary naturalist per se - but too worthy of a mention to leave out of this history.

The Fight to Save Dinosaur NM and the Integrity of the National Park System

In the late 1940s, the federal government under the auspices of the Upper Colorado Storage Project proposed building a huge dam within the borders of Dinosaur National Monument in NW CO at the junction of the Green and Yampa Rivers. The proliferation of dam building in the West by the Bureau of Reclamation, along with the water control projects of the Army Corps of Engineers in the East, was starting to arouse some opposition, given the huge negative impacts of the projects on surrounding and downstream ecosystems. The Dinosaur NM proposal was an extension of this, while also raising the specter of continued attacks on the sanctity of the National Park system generally.

To my way of thinking, this battle along with the fight for the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 collectively represented a culmination of the government land and park protection strand of conservationism that grew out of the National Parks movement and the move to preserve areas such as Adirondack Park and Niagara Falls in New York State. Not that there were not many more battles around issues such as park encroachment and new areas for protection. But these particular events were critical milestones and the Dinosaur success in particular ensured the inviolate nature of the national park system and helped assuage the ghosts of Hetch-Hetchy. That said - it came with a huge asterisk.

The threat to Dinosaur was first made public by Bernard DeVoto in an article entitled "Shall We Let Them Ruin Our National Parks" in the July 22,1950 issue of The Saturday Evening Post (an original copy of which is in the Collection). As discussed above, DeVoto's was the one consistent national voice of the time raised in opposition to attacks on the environment, especially attempts of private interests to plunder federal landholdings in the West.

As Brinkley points out, "the White House had other federal dam projects within National Park Service sites queued up behind the Echo Park project. Sensing that precedent was at stake...Brower turned pugilist." (SSR pp. 99-100)

A national coalition of conservation organizations, spearheaded by David Brower and the Sierra Club, Howard Zahniser and The Wilderness Society, Sigurd Olson and the National Parks Association, and Ira Gabrielson and the Wildlife Management Institute (WMI), formed to oppose the project. Zahniser worked in Washington - per Brinkley, he personally persuaded 120 legislators to support legislation codifying the sanctity of the National Park System.

According to Mark Harvey's article on the controversy on the coloradoencylopedia.org website, Brower enlisted Wallace Stegner to compile and edit the book This is Dinosaur (1955), which was published by Knopf (himself an ardent conservationist and member of the National Parks Advisory Board) "just as the controversy peaked." In November 1955, sadly shortly after DeVoto's death, the dam proposal was withdrawn from the UCSP. According to some accounts, Stegner compiled the book in just two months. In addition to Stegner and Knopf, contributors included Olaus Murie and Joseph W. Penfold.

Harvey writes: "The controversy over Echo Park dam provided a milestone in US environmental history, revealing the gathering strength of the wilderness movement in the postwar era." He also notes: "In their [conservationists'] minds, rejection of the project by Congress demonstrated Americans' growing devotion to maintain the sanctity of parks and wild areas throughout the United States. Soon after the controversy ended, Howard Zahniser and The Wilderness Society launched a campaign to establish a national wilderness preservation system, capitalizing on the confidence and muscle of the coalition that blocked the Echo Park dam." [www.coloradoencylopedia.org/article/echo-park-dam-controversy].

The campaign to save Dinosaur has been characterized as helping to launch the modern environmental movement. Per Brinkley: "The Dinosaur battle turned out to be the test case for the preservation of the noneconomic value of wilderness in public land-use policy." (SSR p. 102)

The copy of This is Dinosaur in the Collection is signed by Stegner and contains several other substantial promotional items laid in, advocacy pieces for both the dam and the book. There are also two rare pamphlets on the proposal - one for and one against (the latter by Gabrielson's WMI).

The asterisk - the UCSP did result in the construction of the damming of Glen Canyon to create Lake Powell. Per the Wikipedia entry on the Echo Park Dam, "the Sierra Club, focused on the fight to keep water development out of established parks, failed to realize until it was too late that Glen Canyon possessed scenic and wilderness value even greater than Dinosaur.... Brower's assent to a suggestion that the proposed Glen Canyon Dam be raised led Brower's critics to argue that he effectively sacrificed Glen Canyon to save Dinosaur. Brower considered the trade to be his biggest mistake." Edward Abbey's great classic Desert Solitaire describes the canyon before the dam was constructed, as does Eliot Porter's photo book about the Canyon [both of which are in the Collection].

David Brower may have been the best-known environmental activist of the 20th century. Longtime head of the Sierra Club, he grew the organization's membership ten-fold and made it into the largest, best known and most influential American environmental policy advocate of the time. (Greenpeace was at various times perhaps more notorious, but the Sierra Club was more consistently effective). As head of Sierra Club publications, Brower introduced the influential exhibit format photo books discussed above in the context of Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall and in the next chapter. Brower will be discussed throughout the next chapter - he is ubiquitous in the Collection, having published, authored, or otherwise contributed to many books in the Collection published in the 1960s-90s.

The successful fight for Dinosaur was followed by a seminal conference in 1955 organized by Lewis Mumford, Carl O. Sauer, William L. Thomas, Jr., and Marston Bates. The seminar resulted in publication of a massive, influential report, Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1956 - Anthologies), edited by Thomas. The book is beautifully dedicated to George Perkins Marsh.

Per the website of the Wenner-Glen Foundation’s website, ‘Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth’ was an interdisciplinary symposium was held in Princeton, New Jersey in 1955. It brought together 70 scholars from across the world with specializations ranging “from anthropology to zoology” who were selected “for their common interest and curiosity about what man has been doing to and with his habitat.” In addition to the organizers, the lengthy participant list includes Fairfield Osborn, Paul Sears and Luna Leopold. (Per the paper cited below, the conference was Sauer’s and Thomas’ idea). The list of 70 participants includes nobody with an identifiably female name, although a dozen or so are identified with first initials or sport names unusual enough that I cannot be certain as to the gender.

From a 1987 academic paper entitled “Sauer and ‘Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth’” by Michael Williams:

Thinking on a global scale in an integrative fashion about mankind's effects of his occupance [sic] on the earth is commonplace and second nature in the 1980s. But it was not always so. The shift from a local to a global viewpoint through the intermediate regional and continental scales has been slow and halting. One of the first and most influential examples of a holistic, integrative interpretation of the past, present, and future was "Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth," a collection of essays published thirty-one years ago.' The volume validated the interdisciplinary approach, heightened the environmental consciousness of the English-speaking world, and exerted an unprecedented influence on the development of a unified approach to environmental issues. Since 1956, more than 10,000 copies of this seminal volume have been sold, a fact that attests to its continued influence and freshness as "one of the most impressive contributions to the man/nature theme produced in the United States.” [https://www.jstor.org/stable/214982]

“A pioneering publication in the field of environmental research, the work has steadily contributed to ecological studies, and is now considered a classic” per Amazon’s description.

Lewis Mumford was a hugely influential public intellectual - an historian, philosopher of technology and critic. His excellent book The Brown Decades (1931) is Catalogued in the Reference section.

Luna Leopold (1915-2006) was a son of Aldo Leopold and a leading geomorphologist and hydrologist who argued for improved water management practices.

Carl O. Sauer (1889-1975) was a highly influential geographer whose work had a strong environmentalist influence and impact. Per Curt Meine's bio, Aldo Leopold was particularly influenced by Sauer's work.

Rachel Carson and the Birth of the Modern Environmental Movement

To come......