Conservationism/Ecology

CONSERVATIONISM/ECOLOGY. A direct descendant of the older conservation movement, the radical ecology movements has redefined and expanded the traditional goals. A specifically left-wing movement—generally known as radical environmentalism or the “ecology movement,” influenced by the New Left, counterculture, and radical American Indian and women’s liberation movements—came into prominence in the mid-1970s and early in the next decade was recognized as an important force in the movement.

Conservationism could count an impressive number of poets, artists, and philosophers among its ancestors—including Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, and painters John James Audubon, Thomas Cole, and George Catlin—but its beginnings as an organized movement can be credited above all to the indefatigable efforts of the “Yosemite Prophet,” John Muir (1838–1914). Born in Scotland, Muir grew up in rural Wisconsin and lived most of his later life in California, much of it in the mountains. A highly original thinker as well as one of America’s most inspired and popular writers on nature—his books include A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, Travels in Alaska, and The Mountains of California—he led the successful struggle to protect the Yosemite Valley against mining, lumbering, and other exploitation by having it officially declared a national park in 1889. Three years later he helped cofound the Sierra Club and was elected its first president, an office he held for the rest of his life.

Though influenced to some extent by the esthetic socialism of John Ruskin and the single-tax theories of Henry George, Muir’s writings elaborated an indictment of industrial civilization that was almost wholly his own, based on his prolonged and profound experience of the American wilderness. Many of his most revolutionary pronouncements appeared in his journals and remained unpublished until long after his death—those, for example, touching on his rejection of Christianity (because of its supercilious disdain for nature), his militant antianthropocentrism, and his scorn for capitalism, which he called “the gobble-gobble school of economics”—but these fugitive jottings show that Muir was far more radical than the conservation movement he did so much to found. Not too surprisingly, these uncompromising private musings proved to be a powerful inspiration to later radical wilderness activists, especially since the mid-1970s.

In Muir’s view, the human experience of the natural beauty of wilderness was the decisive key to solving the ills of society; he regarded mountains and forests as sacred places of freedom, where alone people could learn not only the truths of nature writ large, but also the truth of their own nature, so suppressed and disfigured by the artifices of an acquisitive, exploitative civilization. “Pollution, defilement, squalor,” he wrote, “are words that never would have been created had man lived conformably to Nature.” The “hope of the world,” he was sure, lies in “the great, fresh, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness [where] the galling harness of civilization drops off, and the wounds heal ere we are aware.”

The “Muir tradition” of radical conservation—maintained through the years by small bands of devoted amateurs, ardent with the love of wildlife and wilderness for their own sake, independent of human use—contrasts starkly with the conservative, professionalized, much larger and better known wing of the movement, typified by Gifford Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forest Service and associate of Theodore Roosevelt. Pinchot’s concern was not the wonders of nature but the scientific “management of resources.” For him, a forest was “a manufacturing plant for the production of wood.” The goal of conservation, as he conceived it, was not to save wildlife or wilderness, as such, but rather to save these crops, or commodities—that is precisely how he saw them—for future exploitation. While Muir boldly challenged anthropocentrism and affirmed the equality of species (he championed especially those animals most feared and hated by modern society, such as wolves and grizzly bears), Pinchot upheld the Western world’s traditional notion that man is the “lord of creation” ordained by God to exercise stewardship over the planet and the creatures God made for his use. The task of conservationists, Pinchot argued, was to limit destructive excesses committed by overly rapacious, unscientific industrialists.

The glaring disparity between the two wings of the movement was not perceived by the broad public, and adherents of Muir and Pinchot were able to work together on many issues. The fact that both wings consisted almost entirely of white native-born Anglo-Saxon Protestant males made the movement as a whole vulnerable to the charge of “elitism” frequently leveled at it by opponents on the Right as well as the Left. In John Muir’s last great and unsuccessful crusade, to prevent the damming of California’s beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley, Pinchot took an emphatically pro-dam stand, but even the minor concessions he was willing to make to the Muir forces were too much for Texas congressman Martin Dies, who denounced Pinchot as a “radical.” (In the 1930s and 1940s, Dies would head a congressional committee notorious for its persecution of socialists and prolabor radicals.) Notwithstanding Pinchot’s demagogic, populist-tinged motto, The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number, his overall view reflected a conservative eastern mugwump Republicanism. After the collapse of the short-lived “Bull Moose” party, Pinchot’s closeness to Theodore Roosevelt—who himself, as president, enjoyed a largely undeserved reputation as a champion of conservation—bound the movement to the Republican Party to such an extent that it was not until the New Deal that the Democrats attracted any conservationist following.

Prior to the 1930s, a number of Left writers had attempted to develop a specifically socialist conservationism, or at least a socialist approach to the questions conservationism raised. As early as the 1890s Edward Bellamy, especially in his weekly, the New Nation, and in his last book, Equality (1897), laid bare the links between the triple exploitation of nature, women, and labor, positing a socialist Utopia in which humankind and nature were no longer at odds, and in which the massive restoration of wilderness was a central element. Ernest Thompson Seton, Bellamy-influenced socialist author of best-selling natural-history books for children; “single-taxer” and outdoorsman Dan Beard; Chicago socialist muckraker William Kent, an abolitionist’s son and associate of Jane Addams’s Hull House; and anarchist novelist. J. William Lloyd—to cite four very different figures, widely separated by ideology and temperament—also gave voice to a radical dimension in the conservationist cause, a voice heeded by many in the pre–World War I years, which witnessed the rise of a widespread “back to the land” movement.

The Marxist wing of the socialist movement in those years gave scant attention to this whole question, inhibited as its protagonists were by well-established social-democratic traditions supporting increased productivity and technological progress at all costs. But there were some notable exceptions. Articles urging forest preservation and other conservationist subjects could be found in the popular socialist monthly Wilshire’s and elsewhere in the Socialist Party press. Even more significant, International Socialist Review editor Algie M. Simons translated a treatise of radical ecology, Germs of Mind in Plants, by Austrian biologist Raoul Francé, illustrated by Ralph Chaplin—who, a few years later, would be a leading poet-artist-editor of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—and published in 1905 by Charles H. Kerr’s socialist cooperative in Chicago. This book, which has gone through numerous printings and has remained in print ever since, included a militant preface in which Simons avowed that it was because he was “both a socialist and a nature lover” that he translated it. Kerr also published The Universal Kinship and other works by socialist and vegetarian J. Howard Moore, whose conception of “earth-life as a single process … every part related and akin to every other part” and whose recognition that “all beings are ends [and] no creatures are means” made him an important precursor of the environmental ethics of the 1990s.

Conservation issues, however, remained tangential to the broad socialist movement, and not until the 1970s did such concerns figure significantly in any Left party platform. Ironically, the mainstream Marxists—the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Party, Communist Party, and Trotskyists—notwithstanding their voluble opposition to business-union bureaucrats and “robber barons,” shared the latter’s reified view of wildlife and wilderness to an astonishing degree. It was among the heterodox and libertarian Left, the anarchist movement, and above all the IWW that elements of a radical conservationism developed most freely in earlier years.

The Wobblies, in fact, often exceeded the limits of conservationism as such and took up the whole gamut of questions later subsumed under the heading “radical environmentalism.” The IWW press featured articles protesting the devastation of forests by the lumber industry—“strong conservational action” was demanded by IWW Lumber Workers’ Industrial Union 120—but also provided its readers with information on the problem of noise in American cities, on the use of poisons in manufacture (in hatmaking, for example), and other texts on capitalism’s destruction and pollution of the planet.
The IWW in its heyday was largely a union of the foreign-born, which may help explain its environmentalist tendency. While upper-class conservationists not infrequently blamed recent immigrants for “ruining” the American landscape, evidence suggests that the adoration of “Mother Nature” expressed, for example, by Italian immigrant anarchist martyr Nicola Sacco in his prison letters, reflected an attitude by no means uncommon among foreign-born radicals. Indeed, immigrant radicals, whose regular activities included picnics in the country and long hikes in the woods, tended to be much more conservation-conscious than their native-born comrades.

However tenuous the links between the socialist and conservation movements, the fact remains that they rose to prominence together during the 1910s and faded together in the 1920s. Significantly, the next major resurgence of militancy within the conservation movement itself—the formation of the Wilderness Society in 1935—was spearheaded by two longtime socialists: Benton MacKaye and Robert Marshall.

MacKaye (1880–1975) was a Connecticut Yankee, the son of actor/playwright Steele MacKaye (who had been a friend of Thoreau’s), and a classmate of John Reed’s at Harvard, where he went on to teach forestry for a few years before going to work for the U.S. Forest Service. An associate of Oscar Ameringer, “the Mark Twain of American Socialism,” MacKaye joined the Socialist Party in the heyday of Eugene Debs.

The much younger Bob Marshall (1901–1939), of New York, joined the much smaller Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, but was even more outspokenly radical than MacKaye, and considered himself a Marxist. Son of a founder/leader of the American Jewish Committee, Marshall, who had a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, was one of the first non-WASPs prominent in conservation. Passionately attracted since childhood to “blank places on the map,” he was a zealous mountain-climber and an eloquent defender of everything wild against the ravages of capitalist “development.” Finding the United States to be “a civilization remote from nature, artificial, dominated by the exploitation of man by man,” he affirmed the essential unity of working-class socialism—“production for use and not for profit”—and “the freedom of the wilderness.” His best-selling Arctic Village (1933) recounted a year’s sojourn in a small community in the mountains of Alaska, two hundred miles north of Fairbanks, where he found “the most complete liberty one can imagine” and “the happiest folk I had ever encountered.” In The People’s Forests, the first major work of socialist conservationism in the United States, also published in 1933, he called for the socialization of wilderness to assure its protection from the insatiable greed of private industry.

MacKaye and Marshall were two of the four men who conceived the Wilderness Society, and it was they who drew up its “Platform,” proclaiming that “the time has come, with the brutalizing pressure of a spreading metropolitan civilization, to recognize the wilderness environment as a serious human need rather than a luxury and a plaything.” The first real fusion of socialism and the Muir tradition, the society immediately attracted the most radical-minded conservationists in the country, including Aldo Leopold, whose classic Sand County Almanac (1949) would become the most influential conservationist text since Muir. (Although he was generally regarded as “apolitical” by his friends and commentators, it is notable that Leopold voted for Norman Thomas throughout the 1930s and 1940s.) Deliberately restricting its membership to unequivocal supporters of wilderness for wilderness’s sake—“We want no straddlers,” Marshall insisted—the Wilderness Society, and its journal, the Living Wilderness, represented the most radical wing of the conservation movement well into the 1970s.

Meanwhile, the radical insurgency of the Depression years affected older conservation groups as well, including the group widely regarded as the oldest: the Audubon Association, which, though its history had in fact been discontinuous, liked to trace its origins back to an earlier New York-based Audubon Society formed in 1886. Feminist Rosalie Edge, a one-time suffragist who became the foremost woman in conservation, led a spirited revolt against the association’s corrupt leadership, who had, among other things, rented the group’s Louisiana bird sanctuary to hunters and trappers. Largely as a result of her prolonged efforts, assisted by civil libertarian Roger Baldwin, a member of the association’s board of directors, the association was substantially reorganized in the mid-1930s. (In 1940 it changed its name to the National Audubon Society.)

President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal incorporated elements of conservation, provided jobs for conservationists, and did much to establish conservation as a respectable mainstream current. However, as with all movements for social betterment, conservation invariably declines during wartime, and the movement lapsed into quiescence in the first half of the 1940s. The 1945 publication of Lizzie Marsh Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Muir, Son of the Wilderness, which led to new editions and collections of Muir’s own writings, inspired a notable revival, but not for another decade and a half would a conservation-oriented mass movement emerge, for the first time, in the United States. Rachel Carson’s best-selling Silent Spring (1962), an exposé of the lethal dangers of pesticides, especially DDT, by a marine zoologist who had been one of the first women to hold an important position in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, provoked enormous controversy in the mass media and prompted a vast number of related studies—on smog, asbestos poisoning, black-lung disease, cancer-producing substances in food, and so on. Never before had so broad a public been confronted by such urgent life-and-death questions of health in a specifically conservationist context. Out of the widespread agitation sparked by Carson’s book, bolstered by the already large opposition to nuclear weapons-testing, the environmental movement was born.

From Upton Sinclair and Mary Marcy in the early 1900s to Linus Pauling and Barry Commoner half a century later, socialists had been leading spokespersons of public-health issues, but their efforts had not led to any broad-based ongoing organizations focused on such concerns. In the absence of such a grass-roots movement, the groundswell of popular protest aroused by Silent Spring found organizational expression in the existing conservation groups, which were willing to fill the breach. Of course, these groups were themselves changed in the process: they grew larger, their outlook broadened and, at least for a time, they tended to become more action-oriented. By implementing the aggressive strategies of David Brower, for example, the Sierra Club, which, during most of its existence, was a narrowly West Coast mountaineering group with a membership of 2,000 or 3,000, became a major social force, national in scope, with a membership of well over 100,000 by 1970 and nearly a half-million in the next decade. Wilderness preservation remained its prime focus, but its perspectives were enlarged to include the entire environment, the whole planet; together with the popular wilderness photo-albums by Ansel Adams and Elliot Porter, Sierra Club books took up the problems of overpopulation, air pollution, and nuclear power.

Central to the transformation of old-time conservationism into contemporary environmentalism was the concept of ecology, the science of the interrelations of the various components of the natural world. The word had been coined by German biologist Ernst Haeckel in the 1860s, popularized (albeit in a restricted sociological sense) by Robert E. Park and the “Chicago School” of sociology in the 1920s, and used in its current sense by Aldo Leopold and Robert Marshall in the 1920s and 1930s, but did not enter everyday usage until the 1960s, when the emerging environmental movement made it one of its watchwords and even a battle cry.

The new movement’s vociferous opposition to what its spokespersons called “corporate greed,” and its strong links to the antinuclear and antiwar movements, gave the impression that environmentalism was solidly on the Left. But in fact the alliance between social radicals and environmentalists began uneasily, with considerable mistrust on both sides. Old and New Left ideologists frequently accused environmentalism of being a “bourgeois” fad to divert public attention from other, supposedly more fundamental issues; for many, this charge seemed to be confirmed by President Richard Nixon’s adoption of environmentalist rhetoric and his administration’s support of “Earth Day” in 1970, a one-shot day of nationwide environment-related events largely sponsored by Coca-Cola and other multinational corporations that in fact had long-standing anticonservationist policies. Many environmentalists in turn found the Left quarrelsome, sectarian, and indifferent to wildlife/wilderness concerns. Nonetheless, many radicals recognized the revolutionary implications of the ecological critique, and many more environmentalists perceived that the enemies of their movement and of the environment itself were the traditional enemies of the Left. In the larger milieus beyond groups and factions—in the widespread if short-lived “underground” press, for example, and the broad “counterculture”—the New Left and the new environmentalism mingled and to a great extent fused.

All through the 1970s, as professionalization and bureaucratization diluted much of the militancy and impact of the 1960s environmentalist upsurge and steered the movement’s energies toward conventional electoral politics and lobbying, new and more radical revivals of the Muir tradition began to emerge. Pointing out that more wilderness was destroyed in the decade following the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act than in the preceding five decades, and that most of the funds collected by the established environmental groups went to the advertising agencies that conducted their fund-raising drives, younger eco-radicals developed a new and specifically environmentalist activism that increasingly expressed itself in civil disobedience and direct action. Even before the end of the 1960s ecotage (i.e., sabotage of equipment or property owned by industrial destroyers/polluters of the environment) was recognized as a major problem by industry trade-journals; many tens of thousands of rural billboards were destroyed, for example, by “ecoteurs” who regarded such advertising as a hideous disfigurement of the landscape. For several years the daring exploits of a Chicago-area masked man known only as the Fox repeatedly made headlines nationwide, as when he invaded the executive headquarters of U.S. Steel and poured on the office rug buckets of the same dangerous chemical waste the corporation was dumping into Lake Michigan. Greenpeace, founded in 1971, attained worldwide renown almost overnight as a result of its bold, brave interventions in defense of whales, dolphins, seals, and other species endangered by commercial exploitation. Such dramatic actions fired the imaginations of a broad public and contributed mightily to the development of a new surge, and a new “style,” of environmental radicalism from the mid-seventies on.

Activist first and foremost, the new radical environmentalism appreciably expanded and deepened conservationist theory. Muir, Thoreau, Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and David Brower remained the brightest stars in the new movement’s philosophical firmament, but the younger generation also found much to be learned in the works of a wide range of social critics not previously regarded from a conservationist perspective. Many loose ends of American radicalism—including strands of utopianism, anarchism, feminism, the IWW, and heterodox Marxism—have been picked up and developed by proponents of radical ecology. Ralph Borsodi’s and Lewis Mumford’s critiques of technology and urbanism, dating from the 1920s and 1930s, challenged the centralist assumptions of classical liberalism and Marxism, and stimulated a growing interest in decentralist solutions to social problems. This direction was also pursued, in his later years, by longtime socialist Scott Nearing, who linked his decentralist vision to vegetarianism and a new back-to-the-land movement, as well as by a former Trotskyist, Murray Bookchin, in several works relating ecology to anarchism, starting in the 1960s. Frederick Turner’s Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit against the Wilderness, Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, Gary Snyder’s The Old Ways, Ursula Le Guin’s ecotopian novel Always Coming Home, and the works of Paul Shepard, Peter Matthiessen, Bill Devall, and the Canadian Farley Mowat are only a few of the most influential contributions to radical environmentalist theory.

Perhaps the most representative of the new radical environmentalist groups, and certainly the purest contemporary expression of the Muir tradition, is the movement known as Earth First! (the exclamation point is an essential part of its name), whose motto is No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth! Founded in the Southwest in 1980, by the end of the decade it had locals all over the United States as well as in many other countries and had become by far the largest and most influential specifically radical environmentalist group in U.S. history. Not content with demanding the preservation of all existing wilderness, Earth First! calls for the vast re-creation of wilderness. Its avowedly extremist orientation and tactics—hammering spikes into trees, for example, as an “immunization against logging”—have sparked heated controversies in the environmental movement and broad Left. Like the old IWW that it has repeatedly acknowledged as its major “philosophical forebear,” Earth First!’s decentralized ranks include an impressive number of poets, artists, cartoonists, songwriters, and musicians—its Li’l Green Song Book, like its ecotage manual, Ecodefense, has gone through many editions—and its direct actions tend to be guerrilla theater strongly marked by humor. Earth First! has also been influenced by Kropotkinian anarchism, by anarchist-inclined novelist Edward Abbey, whose ecotage novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1976) provided the movement with much of its original style, and more recently by the theories of “Deep Ecology” advanced by Norwegian writer Arne Naess, author of studies on Spinoza and Gandhi.

Ideological diversity remains a hallmark not only of Earth First! but of the whole spectrum of radical environmentalism. New Left, IWW, anarchist, feminist, and even Marxist influences are discernible and, indeed, openly avowed, but so are the very different influences of Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and indigenous (so-called primitive) cultures, as well as a radical poets’ countertradition extending from William Blake and Emily Brontë to Robinson Jeffers and Philip Lamantia. These latter influences have helped inspire radical ecology’s deepening critique of the values and institutions of Western civilization, which in turn has been a growing influence on social radical thought in recent years, resulting in any number of ideological hybrids. Radical environmentalism today includes many distinct currents—it is a long way from the pragmatic Citizens’ Clearing House for Hazardous Waste to Keith Lampe’s visionary Green Hippie—and such tendencies as bioregionalism, ecofeminism, deep ecology, and antitechnological neoprimitivism, which only a decade ago appeared esoteric, now claim a substantial number of adherents. Notable, too, is the growing trend toward the involvement of organized labor in environmental struggles; the United Farm Workers union, for example, has been in the forefront of antipesticide agitation.

The continuing and, indeed, worsening problems of climate change --acid rain, pollution, fires and flooding--, overpopulation, toxic waste disposal, rainforest destruction, extinction of plant and animal species, and other calamities suffice to assure the vitality and growth of Left activism in the coming years. Efforts to import the ideology and style of the European “Green” movement to American shores have thus far met with small success, but cross-pollination between radical ecology and the more traditional forms of American conservationism will doubtless continue, and it does not require a prophet to predict that ecological concerns will be central to the Left of the future.

Devall, Bill. Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1988.

Foreman, Dave, and Bill Haywood, eds. Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. Tucson: Ned Ludd Books, 1987.

Fox, Stephen. The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

Merchant, Carolyn. Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. London: Routledge, 2005.
“Radical Environmentalism.” Special issue of Industrial Worker (May 1988).