development, several of the more recent documents underline the need to recognize limits to our
ability to control nature.
Selections concerned with conservation focus on land and resource use and development
and record an overall change from the feeling that America’s resources were virtually unlimited
to an understanding that particular resources are finite and that how we use one resource can
affect the availability of other resources. The documents offer an overview of how Americans
have thought about their natural resources and how they have dealt with conflicts stemming
from the need to use these resources while ensuring their availability for future generations, as
well as conflicts stemming from the desire to exploit resources for economic gain while ignor-
ing competing interests. Selections relating to pollution focus on air and water quality, as well
as toxic chemicals and waste disposal and illustrate increasing concern about the effects of
pollution. They look at rising demand for people and the government to take action as well as
opposition to the costs of regulation in terms of both their economic effect and their limitation
on personal freedom. Selections centered on the human-nature relationship deal with the issues
of preserving open space and wilderness areas and protecting species from extinction. They
discuss the need of an increasingly urbanized population for a connection with nature and the
effects of population growth and technological innovation on the natural world.
The documents chronicle how environmental interests have evolved alongside changing
social and economic conditions and increasing technological development, and they recount
the evolution of environmental movements and environmental organizations. In addition, they
depict how shifting political attitudes can result in major reversals of environmental policy. As
the selections indicate, while environmental action generally stems from concern about a par-
ticular local issue—pollution in Plymouth Colony harbor, smog in Los Angeles, the decline in
the osprey population on Long Island, New York—since the nineteenth century, activists have
recognized that local remedies frequently are inadequate, and that they must generate state, fed-
eral, or even international change to obtain satisfactory solutions. Because environmental issues
are complex and intertwined with economic and social issues, resolving them often requires the
coming together of groups and governmental entities that have separate and sometimes compet-
ing agendas.
This book attempts to show how some of the most important of these clashes have been
resolved. It also indicates some areas in which there will be increasing conflict between various
communities and between humans and the rest of the natural world in the anthropocene era—
the current age when humans are the dominant factor affecting the environment.
The magnitude of the impact of our environmental choices on national security, economic
well-being, public health, and social harmony and justice is greatly underappreciated. However,
before we can find acceptable solutions to the country’s and the planet’s complex, much-debated
environmental problems, it is necessary for people to become more willing to come together
with those whose core interests differ from their own. The current polarized political atmos-
phere in the United States poses a threat to our ability to examine environmental issues in a
rational way and to seek sensible, workable resolutions.
xxii The Environmental Debate