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Aldo Leopold was the leading voice in the conservation community until his death in 1948. He first gained prominence in 1920, when he promoted the then-novel idea of protecting the remaining wild lands in the US. Given the rising economic pressures that were bringing in automobiles and new roads, Leopold saw an urgent need for legal protection to keep the lands wild. What is remarkable about Leopold is his keen understanding of the broad cultural and economic contexts of land use and conservation. He saw that scientific and technical fixes were not enough to address the problem of land degradation and that a change in human behavior was necessary. It was in the late 1930s when Leopold's idea of land health began to take shape and became a constant presence in his writings. He believed that a cultural transformation was necessary to restore land health, beginning with wilderness preservation.

This chapter looks at how conservationists seemed more and more optimistic about their influence and accomplishments. By 1910, it had become common for conservationists to use the word “movement” in both their public announcements and, unselfconsciously, in their private correspondence. The word “movement” clearly conveyed the idea that conservation involved a wide range of policies, attracted a diverse set of passionate supporters, and was converting the dubious and inspiring the apathetic. In national politics, conservation reached its height during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–9). With the help of his trusted adviser Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt made conservation one of his leading causes.

This chapter examines the relationship between the animal protection and conservation movements. It suggests that these movements are natural allies despite their purported differences, and that members of these movements must work together to achieve their goals. The relationship of the animal movement to the conservation movement is framed in terms of three questions. First, why is the animal movement important to the worldwide conservation movement? Second, why has the animal protection movement proceeded at a different pace and in different ways than has the conservation movement? Third, what are the most relevant features of the animal protection movement to the conservation movement?

This chapter discusses the seven major attributes of successful movements for major change, drawing upon lessons from conservation history and from the successes and failures of other movements. These are (i) a clear, bold vision; (ii) combining insider and outsider strategies; (iii) creating a strong community; (iv) uncompromising on goals but flexible means; (v) perseverance; (vi) exploiting divisions within elites and crises; and (vii) understanding power.

This chapter discusses land conservation's core tasks. The land conservation movement needs to clarify its goal, its overall vision of harmoniously living on the land. The goal needs to be one that plainly promotes good land use, broadly defined, and which portrays people as having a rightful place on the land, and not as aliens. Once formulated, a sound goal could provide guidance for making decisions about individual land parcels, without dictating precise uses, and could also provide guidelines for mixing land uses on larger spatial scales. A variant on land health is the idea of ecological integrity, which ecologists have crafted as a way to describe intact natural communities; natural commodities that retain their natural composition and key ways of functioning.

This introductory chapter talks about a more comprehensive and balanced portrayal of conservation, exploring how it maintained race and class hierarchies, and how the movement laid the basis for real and lasting environmental improvements. Several spectators realized that conservation had a lot to do with Progressivism, as environmental measures were among the most important legacies of the Progressive era. The chapter thus introduces three goals for conducting this research. First, it aims to offer a more expansive synthesis of conservationist thinking and doing, one that stresses the movement's complexity, heterogeneity, ambition, and breadth. Second, it means to show how deeply tied this movement was to the larger course of Progressivism. And finally, it argues for the relevance of conservation for contemporary environmental reform.

This chapter presents the views of Aldo Leopold on land conservation. As a lover of the entire land community, Leopold belonged to a minority strand of American culture, and is remembered chiefly for his land ethic, summed up in his essay by that name. One of Leopold's chief complaints was the fragmentation that characterized the conservation movement of his day. Leopold's worries about conflicts within conservation soon merged with his ideas about land as a community. To coordinate efforts, conservation needed an overall goal, a common target at which all conservationists could aim. Given that land worked as an integrated system, the logical aim was one linked to the ability of the system as such to function over time.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between science and human values in public land policy. It discusses the science–values conflict that has its origins in the early twentieth-century progressive conservation movement, which introduced the idea of scientific management and professional resource management agencies. One tangible dimension of the science–values conflict is the tension that persists between ecology and economics in establishing public land policy. Another is the persistent question of the technical expert's role in defining resource priorities. The chapter also discusses ecological restoration, which is emerging as an important new policy objective on the public lands, rekindling the debate over whether and how to intervene on nature's behalf. It finds that the issue is being framed in terms of active versus passive management strategies.

This chapter discusses modes of women’s leadership in the US environmental movement over the past one hundred years, expanding the definition of leadership beyond simply the formal head of large environmental organizations. During the early and mid-twentieth century, women-only organizations contributed to broadening the conservation movement, and a diverse set of women’s groups engaged in creating healthier environments in urban areas. Women’s leadership in contemporary environmentalism helped expand the movement by pushing gender, racial, ethnic, and class boundaries. Women became leaders of mainstream environmental groups, led efforts for environmental justice, developed ecofeminism, and participated in direct-action environmentalism. The chapter concludes that examining women’s environmental leadership reveals similarities and differences in women’s leadership over time, women’s ongoing struggles against traditional gender norms, the broad diversity of women leading in the movement, and women’s significant influence on the environmentalism and the environment itself.

This chapter lays out the principal aims of the book and its contribution. It shows that business drove unprecedented wealth creation over the last two hundred years but the cost was unprecedented environmental pollution resulting in new geological era known as the Anthropocene Age. Already in the nineteenth century there was resistance which mostly took the form of elite conservation movements. Overlooked has been the advent of green entrepreneurs who sought to create new firms to facilitate sustainability. Today there is much discussion about green entrepreneurship, but these figures predate today’s green entrepreneurs by a century. The book breaks new ground in business history by looking at these many small and marginal entrepreneurial figures, who were often highly unconventional. The book will explore what has motivated green entrepreneurs in each generation, how they built businesses, and whether they achieved their goals.

As the previous chapters have shown, organic farming arose in an imperial setting and was actually part of a long history of environmental reforms initiated within the British Empire. Organic farming shared many similarities with, and even grew from, the empire forestry movement. Organic farming also played an important role in the growth of environmental consciousness around the world. It transmitted a deep suspicion of corporations and big-science into the broader environmental movement. It shows that, if we disconnect science from the needs of human culture (including spiritual values), science loses its impact on the public. Albert and Louise Howard both clearly understood this and recognized that theory and laboratory findings must produce results in the field, and in the hearts and minds of consumers. The organic farming movement made precisely such a connection and that is one of the ways to explain its remarkable success.