Preface
The Environmental Debate is a documentary history of how Americans have thought about
environmental issues from the colonial period to the present. The selections, excerpted from
legal and congressional documents, letters, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and
books, offer diverse perspectives on the issues. Among the authors are naturalists, conserva-
tionists ranging from forest managers to game hunters, biological as well as physical scientists,
philosophers and theologians, lawyers, politicians and grass-roots activists, farmers and indus-
trialists, journalists, historians, sociologists, economists, artists and architects, and poets and
novelists.
In choosing material for inclusion, I have sought writings and official documents that indi-
cate very early interest in particular environmental issues or indicate remarkable foresight into
problems that would later become serious environmental concerns, writings that had a major
impact on the development of environmental concern and policy, and writings that capture the
tenor of thinking of a particular period. I have also tried to show the evolution of both popular
attitudes and government policy concerning the environment and the use of natural resources.
The documents examine a large number of environmental issues including air and water
pollution, food production, waste disposal, endangered species, land development, resource
extraction and use, open space, toxic chemicals, wetlands, wilderness and wildlife, genetic
engineering, and climate change. In the process, they call attention to the essentials of life—
breathable air, clean water, adequate food—together with the fundamentals of human civiliza-
tion—agriculture, shelter construction, energy, and transportation. They give evidence of the
continuing interaction between environmental factors and the course of development in the
United States, and they detail the growth of concern about the connections among increasing
numbers of people, expanding industrialization, technological change, urbanization, pollution,
and resource depletion. Although only a few of the documents deal directly with technological