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This chapter discusses the attempt to adopt the concept of conservation as a central tenet of land and resource use. This concept of conservation is broadly conceived as the sustained use and regeneration of natural resource through the efficient, scientific management of their protection, cultivation, and use. Environmental protection and regulation established conservation as an essentially economic proposition which was designed to establish game preserves and state parks for capitalist interests. Conservation therefore was not an environmentalist reproach of business, industry, or capitalism, rather it was a move to serve economic purposes. These conservation movements and programs showed neither an ecological appreciation for the ecosystem they affected nor the greater concern for communal solidarity. The conservation of forest and swamp through the purchase of these lands and the scientific management of these lands was a proposition devoid of sensitivity towards the complexity and diversity of natural and human community alike. Instead, these conservation movements reflected the endeavours of capitalists whose advocacy for capitalist conservation clashed with other local practices and beliefs, especially with those traditional methods of sustenance and land-clearing reform. The perceived need for resource conservation toward proper use in the face of intensified multiple uses and alleged abuses led to the legislation of laws and policies. These bodies of laws which local proponents and their allies advanced demonized traditional forest practices and restricted petty user's access to resources while diminishing the diversity of ecosystems and communities to legible and manageable grids of usefulness. Rather than achieving the progress they perceived, they inscribed their understanding of the local community on broader visions of environmental and economic development.

This chapter discusses the Southern Pacific's interest in conservation, particularly the preservation of the wilderness. It examines the effect of the construction and operation of these rail lines on the natural ecological systems present in California and the western regions. The chapter shows the participation of Southern Pacific leaders in resource conservation programs and the environmental policies of the Southern Pacific. It then moves on to examine the partnership of the Southern Pacific with John Muir, in order to build the Yosemite National Park. The discussion considers the various obstacles they faced, as well as the other national parks that they built, such as the Sequoia National Park.

This chapter studies the resource conservation efforts of the Southern Pacific. It starts with their early resource policies, before moving on to the company's influence on the development of forestry. The chapter looks at the management of national forests by the Southern Pacific while it developed its forestry program, and the differences between the company and federal foresters. The pine-bark-beetle campaign and modern fire-prevention are introduced. The chapter then shows the Southern Pacific as an environmental mediator and its involvement in many environmental and resource issues. Rangeland management and the formation of livestock drive-trails are also discussed. The chapter ends with a review of the evolution of the Southern Pacific in terms of corporate interests and the personal identification of the Southern Pacific officials with the broader public welfare of the regions where they lived.

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 investigates how the marine ecosystem came to be the central object of conservation in the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources of 1980. This was a novel move in international law, because the protection of an entire ecosystem had never before been enshrined in a treaty. In the 1960s the Soviet Union began to investigate the potential of krill and other fisheries in the Antarctic. This worried other treaty parties and environmentalists because over-exploitation of krill would have flow-on effects on its predators. While the Soviet Union, joined by Japan and others, was resolutely pro-exploitation, other nations, led by the United States and Britain, were more pro-conservation, particularly focusing on protecting the ecosystem as a whole. The eventual codification of ecosystem protection demonstrated the power of the pro-conservation states at that time.

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) initiatives aim to link socioeconomic development with sustainable natural resource use and the conservation of biodiversity of natural resources. CBNRM relies on the concept that rights, responsibilities, and authority for natural resource management decisions should rest with local communities; the decentralization of natural resource management is central to a rights-based sustainable development approach. Despite a global push to decentralize natural resource governance over the past two decades, many initiatives have failed to reach their intended goals. Much research has focused on identifying the kinds of enabling conditions and accompanying institutional arrangements needed to promote collective action (investing) and reduce free riding (exploitation) to bring about more sustainable and equitable management of shared resources. This chapter reviews the theory and conditions thought to aid and allow communities collectively to manage resources more equitably and sustainably. Management of community forests is used to explore current knowledge gaps and what these represent for sustainable development interventions.

The 13,000-acre Weaverville Community Forest in northern California is on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service and managed through stewardship agreements (one with each agency) by the Trinity County Resource Conservation District (TCRCD). Stewardship agreements provide for the joint accomplishment of work by an agency and its partner organization for the benefit of both. In the Weaverville example, the agreement is being used to improve forest health and reduce fire risk, create local jobs, and form strong local partnerships between the community and federal agencies. The TCRCD is responsible for developing and overseeing a comprehensive management plan for the forest; a steering committee ensures community representation with respect to project implementation, management policy, and strategic planning.

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.

This chapter focuses on crop diversity and explains how human ecology came to the study of it. The diversity of crops is testimony to individual and collective creativity. The myriad forms of simple grains, fruits, and tubers are a singular human accomplishment and measure of social identity. The chapter reveals that the issue of crop diversity has emerged as an important policy area with implications for agricultural development, environmental protection, resource conservation, and the rights of cultural minorities and poor farmers. It also reveals that crop diversity is now perceived as a fundamental resource for crop improvement in modern agriculture, one which has become more valuable because of record population numbers, the exodus from agriculture, and the threat of climate change.

This chapter discusses the environmental justice issues that arise in the context of standard-setting. Specifically, the chapter evaluates the degree to which the EPA has effectively considered distributional issues in its rulemaking. The author begins the chapter by examining the set of policy instruments (command-and-control regulation, market-based mechanisms, and information-based approaches) that the EPA can pursue to achieve its goals under the statutes it implements, and how instrument choice can create different types of distributive and procedural justice concerns. The chapter then explores a variety of equity concerns that have arisen in EPA rulemaking in practice under a variety of pollution control laws including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and argues that the EPA has largely fallen short of incorporating equity considerations as part of standard-setting. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some recent progress, but notes that much is left to be accomplished.

This chapter investigates how the foundational tension of Antarctic geopolitics over sovereignty and territory fared in the context of discussions on mineral and marine living resources in the 1970s. It investigates how the Antarctic Treaty parties fought off concerted interests from forums and states outside the treaty, including the Non-Aligned Movement within the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea and the Food and Agriculture Organization, and growing international environmentalist organizations. It also investigates how the Antarctic Treaty parties tried to shift the balance of power among themselves, especially between the claimant and nonclaimant states. In the end, the Antarctic Treaty parties as a whole secured the treaty from outside forces, and the claimant states successfully perpetuated their ideas about sovereignty and territory in the changing context of the UN Law of the Sea against the acquiescent nonclaimants.

This chapter considers waste disposal in the Pacific islands. Except for some local resources such as timber and food, every item needed for warfare had to be brought into the islands. In perilous times few questioned the necessity of this long ecological shadow. To homeland populations and their economies making their sacrifices, however, intimations of waste of resources at the front could be demoralizing. While American industry turned from a peace to a war economy, military planners saw resource conservation as significant for civilian morale and waging war. As the front moved on, but particularly when peace came, the disposal of war's vast matériel posed as many difficulties as had its assemblage. Environmental factors remained pivotal agents and pressed heavily on colonial administrations as much as the military in their endeavors to dispose of war's vast apparatus.

This chapter analyzes the difficult challenges that arise when considering the environmental justice effects of federal rules and regulations. It complements the discussion in Chapter 4 by examining a different part of the rulemaking process. Specifically, the authors identify five issues as being important in any analysis of distributional implications of a new environmental standard: the geographic scope of the analysis, the identification of potentially affected populations, the selection of a comparison group, how to spatially identify effects on population groups, and how exposure or risk is measured in an analysis. For each issue, the authors consider how it has been addressed in the academic literature, as well as in practice by the EPA as part of five recent proposed or final rulemakings completed under various pollution control statutes. The chapter concludes that, even though there has been a substantial uptick in the number of rules that consider environmental justice issues in their accompanying economic analysis, there remain significant analytical issues to resolve before this becomes a routinized practice.

The chapter frames Willa Cather’s 1922 novel One of Ours within the context of the US government’s concern about wartime production’s depletion of American forests. Government rehabilitationists and foresters alike sought to place disabled soldiers in forestry-related vocations, which would provide employment and spiritual renewal in nature. These concerns mirror those of Cather’s protagonist Claude Wheeler, who suffers a spiritual amputation at age five when his father cuts down a tree with which Claude had developed an Emersonian kinship. In war he finds spiritual wholeness by offering himself as the prosthetic limbs for those intellectually and artistically superior individuals whom the war has physically and spiritually amputated. Claude’s wholeness comes, ironically, in seeing himself as the trees being cut down for the matériel needed to win the war and civilization to the western world. This self-conceptualization puts him in close company with Italian Futurism, which praises both human mechanization and violence.

This chapter describes the wartime colonial administrations' efforts to protect the interests of their people and their metropolitan governments to ensure that resource exports were maintained equitably. While before the war, the southern Pacific Islands were rarely major global primary producers, the loss of production and access elsewhere during the conflict gave increased significance to what their environments could offer. Islanders, the human resource, needed recompense for their labor, and so the goods they valued had to be supplied. Wartime colonial administrations thus had a double mission: to assist the military to obtain resources such as timber, fresh food, and labor while looking to the future.

This chapter describes the extent of the labors rendered by the Pacific islanders for the war effort. Local laborers reduced expenditure for transport, training, upkeep, and pensions. Though colonial governments understood the military's need for labor, this did not constrain their long view of sustaining the islands' populations—many just recovering from considerable loss to introduced diseases in the previous 80 to 150 years. Thus, they sometimes competed with the military for directing labor though usually retaining responsibility for them. Several administrations perforce became recruiters, a role in peacetime that most eschewed. How labor was recruited and utilized varied, and was most contested in the operational area. How the parties involved viewed this also varied. Unlike other local resources exploited by the Allies, the human resources were less predictable and attached their own meaning to their experiences. That meaning remains diverse, but not immutable.

Chapter 9 provides an overview of the availability and applicability of exceptions that could potentially save aspects of emissions trading schemes that otherwise violate international economic law. Drawing on the justifications set out in respect of those impugned aspects of emissions trading schemes in Chapter 8, Chapter 9 explains which of those justifications might be permissible under international economic law, and the kind of evidence that would be required to make out a successful defence. This chapter finds that justifications that are rationally connected to the goal of mitigating climate change or safeguarding financial markets, and which deploy the least trade-restrictive means possible, could form the basis of a defence in many instances. However, justifications that are grounded in other economic or social policy goals, or for which there is a less trade-restrictive means of achieving that end, will be less likely to save a measure that is otherwise a violation of international economic law.