Realization I: Stepping-Stones

Abstract

What some have called a “movement” eventually grew up around practices first tried out in places such as Broken Hill, Lumley Park, and the Holden, Cowling, and UW–Madison arboreta, but that was a long way off at midcentury. Certainly, resource conservation efforts pioneered in the half century since the era of Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt continued, promoted by agencies such as the Soil Conservation Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Forest Service, and an array of state conservation departments, all supported by emerging professions such as forestry and game management. But management was understood to be about resources—soil, water, timber, scenery, and fish and game. Preservation, which gained prominence as a concern among environmentalists in the 1960s, was another matter. Farm fields and woodlots, rangelands, public hunting grounds, and even fishable lakes might be managed for maximum yield of one resource or another. Land set aside as preserves in places such as national parks or on holdings of organizations such as The Nature Conservancy were understood to be just that: preserves. They were understood to be primal, even “original,” ecologically pristine, or undisturbed—relics of an edenic past, models of ecological health and repositories of a kind of existential purity that could only be compromised by even the best intentioned management, including attempts at restoration.