Organic cosmology directly seeded the modern conservation and preservation movements

Evidence

Organismic thought contributed the rudimentary philosophical framework out of which ecological science and the conservation of natural resources developed. The Romantics of the early nineteenth century, reacting against the mechanism of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, turned back to the organismic idea of a vital animating principle binding together the whole created world. American Romantics such as Emerson looked to wildness as a source of spiritual insight, while Thoreau found evidence of a vital life permeating the rocks, ponds, and mountains in pagan and American Indian animism. Such influences were an inspiration to the preservation movement led by John Muir in the late nineteenth century, and to such early ecologists as Frederick Clements, whose theory of plant succession held that a plant community grew, developed, and matured much like an individual organism. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 439

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the polyad’s land/place and eco-justice threads — Thoreau, Muir, and American Indian animism as the genealogy of preservation; also connects to the ‘trees as infrastructure’ article’s discussion of living systems as underused models. — connects to: Emerson and Thoreau jointly seeded preservationist and interpretive practice — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 812; Open-space preservation seeded the local grassroots activism of the postwar environmental movement — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 559

Broader Connections

• Open-space preservation seeded the local grassroots activism of the postwar environmental movement #corroborates (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 559