Century Of Ecology Movement
Misses True Environmentalists

By David Bowser

AMARILLO — "Aren't farmers and ranchers environmentalists? Can they really afford not to be?"

So asked Dr. John Carroll of the University of New Hampshire, speaking here recently to The Promised Land Network. His topic was the history of environmentalism in America over the past 100 years: those who started it, those who embraced and were embraced by it — and those it has mistakenly targeted for attack.

If they are good ranchers, Carroll said of today's stockmen, they should be good environmentalists.

"All of us are involved in agriculture regardless of where we live, regardless of our circumstances in life," Carroll continued. "All of us exist as part of a larger environment. In that respect, all of us are environmentalists."

He admitted that the word "environmentalist" has many implications and can make some ranchers uncomfortable.

Carroll cited Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and ecological philosopher, that the universe is composed not of a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects.

"Through objectification and commodification of all around us, we make a grave and costly mistake, a mistake that defies reality," Carroll said.

Quoting Wendell Berry, a poet and environmental philosopher, Carroll said if the purpose of agriculture is to produce food and that only, it will probably and ultimately fail. If, however, the purpose of agriculture for the farmer or rancher is to create meaning in life, that agriculture will succeed and will provide food as a by-product.

"The common treatment and interpretation of the history of the American conservation or environmental movement is one which is formed by conditions, realities, attitudes and values of an Anglo population in the Northeast United States, traditionally, with some subsequent spread to other geographical regions," Carroll said.

"It involves power structures and conflicts and political realities of people and institutions debating the course of economics and social development for a nation, but representative of less than a national base.

"It does not consider America's Hispanic heritage nor is it informed by Native people's values nor is it informed by our current understanding of nature, of ecology or of scientific development. So our common understanding of so-called conservation and environmental movements is narrower than it should be and it is misleading to that extent."

The area where Carroll now lives, New England, from whence so much of this thinking came, experienced the nation's earliest industrial development. Environmental historians describe the point in the early 19th Century when water and its hydro power capacity became a commodity to be bought, sold and controlled by powerful urban business interests for their own profits and at a cost to everyone else and the national ecosystem, Carroll said.

This provided a value system to support the rapid post-Civil War industrialization of the Northeast and later the Mid-West and West. That industrialization, in turn, resulted in ecological insensitivity that society rejected and which led to the progressive conservation movement of Teddy Roosevelt.

"This movement drew some of its philosophical force from New England's transcendental thought of Emerson and Thoreau and the pragmatic scientific approach of George Perkins Marsh of Vermont, developed in the mid-19th Century," Carroll said.

By the 1890s and early 1900s, the popular reaction of disgust at the devastation brought about by blind faith in the market also formed by a new attitude toward science, a popularization of science and notions of efficiency that would come to be known as the gospel of efficiency.

"Even then it had religious connotations," he noted.

Coming initially from Germany and Europe, it was championed in this country by Theodore Roosevelt.

"Thus was formed the highly popularized and publicized American conservation movement," Carroll said.

That led to numerous conservation organizations and government agencies on both the federal and state levels in forestry, water and wildlife.

"The idea of ulitarianism, multiple use, sustained yields, the great good for the greatest number over the longest period of time and scientific rationality in general emerged and gained ascendancy over the purer romanticism inherent in transcendentalism," Carroll said.

It replaced a romanticism popularized by naturalist John Muir.

"We are left with many tangible signs of all of these movements today," Carroll said. "Although somewhat simplistic and over-generalized, we could argue that the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the long-time Soil Conservation Service, now the National Resources Conservation Service, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, as well as similar land management and resource management agencies on the state level, all represented ulitarianism while the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service's Office of Endangered Species and the Wilderness movement all represented the romanticism and preservationism of John Muir and the New England transcendentalists."

Other groups, organizations and agencies represent a ulitarianistic aspect of conservation.

"In their way, both philosophies have endured to the present time, although the preservationists have generally been a weak sister in practice if not in rhetoric to the ulitarianists," Carroll said.

This dates to the defeat of preservationism and John Muir personally by the forces of ulitarianism in a water development controversy for San Francisco's municipal water supply at a dam site in Yosemite National Park.

"The forces of urban growth and economic development won a very highly publicized battle ensuring the lesser role of preservationism in years to come," Carroll explained.

But to avoid the tendency to oversimplify the ulitarian versus preservationist psychology, and to recognize that evolution can occur with an individual, Carroll spoke of Aldo Leopold, a confirmed scientific ulitarian for a long period early in his career, who experienced a "conversion."

"One day in 1909, although writing of this and admitting to this much later in life, on a predator control hunt in mountainous New Mexico, he shot a wolf," Carroll said. "As he approached her dying frame, he saw in her eyes a fierce green fire. Leopold wrote, 'I realized then and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then and full of trigger itch. I thought fewer wolves meant more deer. No wolves meant a hunter's paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.'"

"Green fire" has become a common image in the American environmental imagination, along with "thinking like a mountain," a way of seeing the world, Carroll said.

The First World War interrupted the concern over conservation and environmentalism, he continued, and led to a greater price to be paid in the 1920s and 1930s.

"From this price in the form of the Dust Bowl and rural poverty and transmigration grew a further reaction in support of ulitarian conservation ideas and development of further institutions of government to tackle the problem," Carroll said. "In soil, in water, in forests, in wildlife, in rangelands, the American conservation movement witnessed the second coming."

Following the Second World War and consequent interruption, the nation embarked on a path of blind commitment to unlimited economic growth regardless of the consequences.

Carroll said a greater amount of industrialization occurred in the 25 years since World War II than had occurred in all of human history prior to that time.

"Is it any wonder that there should be a strong and growing public reaction and response of the type we began to see in the late 1960s, in water pollution, in air pollution control, in land use control, in wildlife and especially endangered species protection and wilderness preservation?" Carroll asked.

The modern American environmental movement had begun.

"Bear in mind that the predecessor conservation movement and the Muir environmental movement were both products of elites in the population," Carroll said.

"Essentially, upper middle class and relatively wealthy male-dominated, college educated, somewhat regional in the Northeast and the larger population and university centers of the Midwest and West Coast. Initially the agenda of a segment of the white urban upper class alone, it gradually captured a portion of the white urban middle class, but it noticeably failed to include the life experience and value system of rural people, of family farmers and ranchers, of racial and ethnic minorities, of lower income people in general, earning the deserved epithet elitist.

"Ironically, these excluded categories of people have been the first to suffer from environmental degradation, since many are very vulnerable."

What the movement did include, however, was enough to make it a national movement with a strong impact on Washington and many of the states, he said.

"To its discredit, the early environmental movement did not have a strong social justice component," Carroll pointed out. In some quarters, in fact, it was and remains "anti-people."

He considers that a great mistake.

"Witness all the great wilderness photography inspiring the movement," Carroll noted, "Pictures with nary a human being present, never mind a human being with limited opportunities."

A better movement, Carroll argued, would have been an inclusive movement forming a coalition of population across all regions. The movement as it was resulted in a false dichotomy of agriculture versus environmentalism.

"How can true agriculture not have environmental values?" Carroll asked. "How can true environmentalism not encompass the best principles of good agricultural practice? Is not a farmer, is not a rancher by definition an applied biologist? Is not an applied biologist an environmentalist?

"It seems to me that the knowledge and commitment of an applied biologist, of a farmer or a rancher, when combined with any acceptable ethic or principle promulgated by any conceivable religious faith or philosophy or ecological principle — the central idea of protection and preservation for future generations — must inherently yield as a product an environmentalist."

A person committed to the goodness of the land, the goodness of creation and the goodness of future generations as yet unborn is an environmentalist pure and simple, Carroll said.