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Throughout the United States, early Boy Scout officials relied heavily on highly-structured camping and hiking experiences like the Pine Tree Patrol method, Nature Study and its scientific classification system, and natural resource conservation activities to teach boy members modern manhood’s values and skills necessary to manage an urban-industrial society and its expert-led government. Administrators insisted that the most important use of natural areas and resources was the “conservation of boyhood,” which entailed managed development of the nation’s key asset (its most capable adolescent boys). By characterizing women and minority and farm boys as too sentimental, selfish, careless, and ignorant to conserve natural resources and interact with nature in other modern and scientific ways, early Boy Scout outdoor programming and imagery helped reinforce a masculine and racial hierarchy of character and citizenship.

This chapter examines the ground-level debates over pastoral land rights that lay outside the aerial camera’s frame in Serengeti Shall Not Die. When the British gazetted Serengeti National Park in 1951, Tanganyika’s colonial government had guaranteed the Maasai rights of occupancy because they did not traditionally hunt and were deemed part of the natural landscape. Yet a prolonged drought brought increasing numbers of Maasai into the parklands in search of better-watered highland grazing, causing conflict with park officials. Such movements, coupled with scientific and administrative misunderstanding of transhumance and savanna resilience, led the British to propose excising the Ngorongoro region from the park to accommodate local land use. The Grzimeks and a “green network” of international allies asserted that cattle herding and wildlife conservation were incompatible due to livestock’s overgrazing. They buttressed this ecological claim with fears of racial degeneration, claiming that there were no more “true-blooded” Maasai left in the Serengeti. The Grzimeks’ advocacy helped to transform a colonial debate about “native” rights into an international scandal. The green network had discredited British imperialism yet inherited many of its paternalist assumptions about traditional African land use and modernist development.