54 CHAPTER 3 Environmental History, Politics, and Economicsconservation movement of the mid- to late 20th century
( Figure 3. 5 ). His textbook Game Management, published
in 1933, supported the passage of a 1937 act in which
new taxes on sporting weapons and ammunition funded
wildlife management and research. Leopold also wrote
about humanity’s relationship with nature and the need
to conserve wilderness areas in A Sand County Almanac,
published in 1949. Leopold argued for a land ethic and
the sacrifices that such an ethic requires.
Leopold profoundly influenced many American think-
ers and writers, including Wallace Stegner (1909–1993),
who penned his famous “Wilderness Essay” in 1962.
Stegner’s essay helped create support for the passage of
the Wilderness Act of 1964. Stegner wrote:Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever
let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the
last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic
cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the
wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last
clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved
roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will
Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the
exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste...
We simply need that wild country available to us, even if
we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can
be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures,
a part of the geography of hope.During the 1960s, public concern about pollution and
resource quality increased, in large part due to the work of
marine biologist Rachel Carson (1907–1964). Carson wrote
about interrelationships among living organisms, including
humans, and the natural environment (Figure 3. 6 ).
In her most famous work, Silent Spring, published
in 1962, Carson wrote against the indiscriminate use of
pesticides:Pesticide sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost
universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective
chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the “good”
and the “bad,” to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish
in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to
linger on in soil—all this though the intended target may be
only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to
lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth
without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called
“insecticides,” but “biocides.”Silent Spring heightened public awareness and
concern about the dangers of using DDT and other
pesticides, including poisoning birds and other wildlifewould “impair” it. This victory for conservation
established the “use without impairment” clause as the
firm backbone of legal protection afforded our national
parks and monuments.Conservation in the Mid-20th Century
During the Great Depression, the federal government
financed many conservation projects to provide jobs for
the unemployed. During his administration, Franklin
Roosevelt (1882–1945) established the Civilian Conser-
vation Corps, which employed 500,000 young men to
plant trees, make paths and roads in national parks and
forests, build dams to control flooding, and perform
other activities that protected natural resources.
During the droughts of the 1930s, windstorms
carried away much of the topsoil in parts of the Great
Plains, forcing many farmers to abandon their farms
and search for work elsewhere. The American Dust Bowl
alerted the United States to the need for soil conserva-
tion, and President Roosevelt formed the Soil Conserva-
tion Service in 1935.
Aldo Leopold (1886–1948), a wildlife biologist
and environmental visionary, greatly influenced theEverett Collection/Newscom
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Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is widely considered an
environmental classic.