certainly tasted better. Marjorie had become disgusted with ‘‘sportsmen’’—
the very class she represented—who had been principal makers of hunt-
ing preserves and restrictions. Like herself, they had no compelling need
for a deer’s life. ‘‘When a clean kill is made,’’ one ‘‘hardened hunter’’ said
to her, the sportsman ‘‘takes pleasure in the sport.’’ But most shots do not
kill cleanly—‘‘the fallen deer is yet alive...and[thehunter] must cut its
throat...thebigeyes turned on him with a stricken wonder.’’^35 Cal-style
hunters, desperate and without alternative protein, might do such work
quickly and honorably, leaving no waste and eating with profound grati-
tude. Throat-slitting is ugly business to most (although certainly not all) of
us. To Marjorie—and some male hunters, she said—such business is justi-
fied only by necessity. She herself went on killing domestic ducks and chick-
ens, but well before her too-early death in , it seems clear, Marjorie
Rawlings’s version of conservation had come to include a definitive moral
aspect.
tThis moral aspect was hardly unique to Rawlings. The American men
(mostly) who created and named conservation, a cohort slightly older than
Marjorie’s parents, wrote and spoke of conservation in terms economic and
political. Nature must be used, and wisely, for our self-interest and national
security. Fouled waters sicken and kill people and livestock. Clear-cut for-
ests not immediately replanted will leave the next generation short of wood
—and the nation dependent on overseas sources. Clearing the air will re-
duce the costs of health care and bring forth healthy, productive workers,
not to mention future soldiers. Yet I have yet to encounter the writings of a
single prominent early-twentieth-century conservationist who was not also
a Romantic. Spectacular nature (notably in the first national parks) defined
the United States. Nature (mountains most of all) transported humans and
put them closer to God. Wilderness was not only a healthy but a necessary
check on urban civilization. Theodore Roosevelt, already quite famous for
roughing it on the Great Plains and in Cuba, was famously photographed
with John Muir in California, on the peak of a high Sierra, joining Muir, at
least by suggestion, in the Christian metaphors Muir indulged: The natu-
ral world is blessed, sacred. Roosevelt had been a close student of nature
since childhood, in fact, and would continue to be. His friend Gifford Pin-
chot, one of the American definers and exemplars of conservation, was no
less the outdoorsman and worshiper of natural beauty both monumental
and tiny. So was the southerner Hugh Hammond Bennett, premier soil sci-
entist of the first half of the twentieth century and first chief of the U.S. Soil