Conservationist ideas carried into environmentalism through an urbanized land ethic

Evidence

Though the environmental movement differed in some key respects from the conservation movement, the ideas of the conservationists nevertheless shaped environmentalist thought well into the 1960s. The conservation movement was devoted to efficient use of productive resources, Samuel Hays argues in Beauty, Health, and Permanence, whereas environmentalism was a consumer movement keen to secure and protect a more satisfying environment. That contrast is overdrawn. The conservationist “gospel of efficiency” called for both restraint of private resource exploitation and promotion of wise public development. The environmental movement certainly challenged the second element of the conservation creed. To environmentalists, the conservationists took a terribly narrow view of the nonhuman world, seeing only raw materials and power sources to be used in the long-term interest of the nation. Yet environmentalists continued to draw on many of the conservationists’ insights into the costs of unregulated private exploitation of the land. Indeed, The Bulldozer in the Countryside describes the urbanization of conservation – the recognition, over the course of two decades, that a range of problems once identified only with forests and farms also plagued the nation’s metropolitan areas. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 44

Categorization

• XREF: Ties the definitional conservation-environmentalism contrast directly to the reader’s Legal Systems course, where wise-use and resource doctrine meet property and regulation. — connects to: Republican leaders endorsed a land ethic treating misuse as pollution by 1973 — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 535; Solving environmental problems requires an ethic for the home landscape, not just remote wilderness — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 67; Environmental history scholarship overlooked the suburban origins of environmentalism — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 13 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Preservationist defense of nature was a negative stance unfit for the urban growth challenge #complicates (0.78) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 711
• Environmentalists’ rural ideal of nature hindered building an urban land-use vision #qualifies (0.75) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 987
• Immediate dependence on local habitat once made conservation self-interested #expands (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2527
• Living in constructed urban environments severs people from ecological consequences #qualifies (0.72)