The Conservation movement was a driving force at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a time during which Americans were coming to terms with their wasteful ways, and learning to conserve what they quickly realized to be limited resources. In the article from the Ladies’ Home Journal, the author points out that in times past, Americans took advantage of what they thought of as inexhaustible resources. For example, "if they wanted lumber for their houses, rails for their fences, fuel for their stoves, they would cut down half a forest at a time; and whatever they could not use or sell they would leave to rot on the ground. They never bothered their heads to inquire where more wood was coming from when this was gone" (33). The twentieth century opened with a vision towards the future, towards preserving the land that had previously been taken for granted. The Conservation movement came along around the same time as one of the first major waves of the feminist movement. With the two struggles going on: one for the freedom of nature and the other for the freedom of women, it stands to follow that they coincided. As homemakers, activists, and citizens of the United States of America, women have had an important role in Conservation.
Women, particularly homemakers, had a special interest in conservation and keeping their environment clean. In the days in which laundry was done by hand, smoke in the air made such a task much more difficult than necessary. Keeping clothes and jewelry clean and food adequately protected was nearly impossible for housewives (76). Of course, women were already doing their part to conserve and not be wasteful, simply in order to save money. The article from the Ladies’ Home Journal points out that wives and mothers have unknowingly been doing their part to conserve Earth’s resources for generations (32-33). These are things such as saving paper and string from a package, gathering seeds, using rainwater for doing the laundry, and feeding table scraps to pets and other animals (32-33). Housewives were already practicing conservation on a small scale, and were virtually unaware that much the same thing was going on at a national level. Mothers teach their children not to be wasteful, and the same could be said of the government and environmentalist groups teaching their people not to be wasteful.
In Mark Fiege’s book “The Republic of Nature,” the author embarks on an elaborate, yet eloquent quest to chronicle pivotal points in American history from an environmental perspective. This scholarly work composed by Fiege details the environmental perspective of American history by focusing on nine key moments showing how nature is very much entrenched in the fibers that manifested this great nation. The author sheds light on the forces that shape the lands of America and humanities desire to master and manipulate nature, while the human individual experience is dictated by the cycles that govern nature. The story of the human experience unfolds in Mark Fiege’s book through history’s actors and their challenges amongst an array of environmental possibilities, which led to nature being the deciding factor on how
He delves into the history of the word “environmental” as well as the history of environmental activism. He pinpoints the beginning of the movement to Rachel Carson. According to Quammen, she began the revolution by publishing her book Silent Spring. He says the negative connotations of the word began with her book, pairing “environment” and “the survival of humankind” as if they go hand in hand. This played a major role in the distortion of the word and the intentions of environmentalists.
Theodore Roosevelt: The Great Environmentalist This Paper will outline President Theodore Roosevelt’s role in helping to conserve our environment during his administration (1901-1909). It will also examine his theory of a stronger American democracy through environmental conservationism. “The movement for the conservation of wildlife, and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources, are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.” (Roosevelt 274)
The first two acts of this film are truly inspiring because they capture the "fire" of the environmental movement. It chronologically begins by discussing the origins of conservative environmentalists, to documenting the details of successful environmental movements, and concluding by explaining the merging of civil rights with environmentalists. Ultimately, “A Fierce Green Fire “serves as a dynamic call for the continuing action of protecting and conserving our biosphere.
"Women, just like nature or the land, have been seen as something to be used,' says Smiley.'Feminists insist that women have intrinsic value, just as environmentalists believe that nature has its own worth, independent of its use to man'" (Duffy 92). Larry Cook, the senile, old power holder and father in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, is a prime example of a man who believes that women and land are nothing more than objects that exist on this earth only so that he can control them.
John Muir helped the development of the American conservation movement during the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The creation of the National Park Service, the creation of several major national parks, including Yosemite National Park and the creation of the Sierra Club were all because of John Muir. In the late nineteenth century America was in a stage of expansion and economic development that used as well as threatened much of the natural world. Much of the economic development was in the form of industrialization that took its toll of the environment with both its consumption of natural resources as well pollution. This expansion and economic development had adverse consequences on the environment of the United States. During this time of development many became aware of the damage being done to the natural world and attempted to prevent or limit this damage being done. It is during this time of both industrialization and spiritual awakening that the conservation movement arose with one of its most famous activists, John Muir.
It is generally agreed that modern environmentalism begins with ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’, the first chapter in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). The fairytale-like opening to the book begins with the words, ‘There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings’, painting a classic pastoral picture where she describes civilization far from modern ills coexisting with nature yet away from the perceived danger of the wild. However pastoral peace swiftly gives way to destruction- 'Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep
In Thinking Like a Mountain, the author, Aldo Leopold, writes of the importance of wildlife preservation through examples of the symbiotic relationship of animals and plant-life with a mountain. He asks the reader to perceive the processes of a mountainous environment in an unusual way. Aldo Leopold wants the reader to "think" like a mountain instead of thinking of only the immediate, or as the hunter did. Taking away one feature of an ecosystem may eventually destroy everything else that that environment is composed of. Nature and wildness is essential for the well being of life on this earth.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” The American Experience. Ed. Kate Kinsella. Boston, Massachusetts: Pearson Education, Inc., 2005. 388-390. Print.
Magoc, Chris J. Environmental Issues in American History: A Reference Guide with Primary Documents. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006. Print.
Since the rise of the American environmental romanticism the idea of preservation and conservation have been seen as competing ideologies. Literary scholars such as Thoreau and Muir have all spoke to the defense of our natural lands in a pristine, untouched form. These pro-preservation thinkers believed in the protecting of American lands to not only ensure that future generations will get to experiences these lands, but to protect the heavily rooted early American nationalism in our natural expanses. Muir was one of the most outspoken supports of the preservation ideology, yet his stylistic writing style and rhetoric resulted in conservation being an adopted practice in the early 20th century
Hawken writes that the movement, a collective gathering of nonconformists, is focused on three basic ambitions: environmental activism, social justice initiatives, and indigenous culture’s resistance to globalization. The principles of environmental activism being closely intertwined with social justice rallies. Hawken states how the fate of each individual on this planet depends on how we understand and treat what is left of the planet’s lands, oceans, species diversity, and people; and that the reason that there is a split between people and nature is because the social justice and environmental arms of the movement hav...
Leopold defends his position the advent of a new ethical development, one that deals with humans’ relations to the land and its necessity. This relationship is defined as the land ethic, this concept holds to a central component referred to as the ecological consciousness. The ecological consciousness is not a vague ideal, but one that is not recognized in modern society. It reflects a certainty of individual responsibility for the health and preservation of the land upon which we live, and all of its components. If the health of the land is upheld, its capacity of self-renewal and regeneration is maintained as well. To date, conservation has been our sole effort to understand and preserve this capacity. Leopold holds that if the mainstream embraces his ideals of a land ethic and an ecological consciousness, the beauty, stability and integrity of our world will be preserved.
Though in theory, ecological feminism has been around for a number of years, it emerged as a political movement in the 1970s. Francoise d’Eaubonne, a French feminist philosopher, coined the term “Ecofeminism” in 1974. Ecofeminism is a feminist approach to environmental ethics. Karen Warren, in her book Ecofeminist Philosophy, claims that feminist theorists question the source of the oppression of women, and seek to eliminate this oppression. Ecofeminists consider the oppression of women, (sexism) the oppression of other humans (racism, classism, ageism, colonialism), and the domination of nature (naturism) to be interconnected. In her book New Woman/New Earth, Rosemary Radford Reuther wrote, “Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of domination. They must unite the demands of the women’s movement with those of the ecological movement to envision a radical reshaping of the basic socioeconomic relations and the underlying values of this society (204).”
More and more women work outside and inside the home. The double demands shouldered by these women pose a threat to their physical health. Whether you are an overworked housewife or an exhausted working mother the chances are that you are always one step behind your schedule. No matter how hard women worked, they never ended up with clean homes. Housewives in these miserable circumstances often became hysterical cleaners. They wore their lives away in an endless round of scouring, scrubbing, and polishing. The increased strain in working women comes from the reality that they carry most of the child-rearing and household responsibilities. According to social trends (1996), women always or usually do the washing in 79 percent of cases and decide the menu 59 percent of the time. Picking up the children at school or doing grocery shopping are just a few of the many typical household-tasks a woman takes on every day.