Rethinking Our Relationship to Nature, 1920–1959 87
far from convenient shopping and transportation.
These suburbs spawned a new way of life based on
the automobile. With the disappearance of farmland
close to city centers, milk, poultry, and other fresh
foods for the metropolitan areas had to be brought in
from ever more distant farms. While some visionaries
worried about the loss of open space and farmland
in the 1950s—the Nature Conservancy was founded
in 1951—and there were a few state and local efforts
to protect farmland in the 1960s and 1970s [see
Document 104], urban and suburban sprawl did not
become a national issue until the early 1980s.
As population numbers rose, automobile use
increased, highways spread across the nation, and
suburban areas encroached on once-rural water-
sheds. In more and more places, the air was unfit to
breathe and the water unsafe to drink. In 1955, the
federal government began to finance and develop
programs to prevent and control air pollution [see
Document 93]. However, truly effective federal water
pollution control and safe drinking water legislation
were not passed until 1972 [see Document 116] and
1974, respectively.Reconsidering the Human-Nature
Relationship
By the 1920s, recognition of the decline in wild-
life and wilderness areas had encouraged hunters,
fishermen, and other sportsmen, including members
of the Boone and Crockett Club [see Document 57],
to reexamine their relationship with the wild. In
1925, George Bird Grinnell and Charles Sheldon
noted, “The original purpose of the Boone and
Crockett Club, to make hunting easier and more suc-
cessful, has changed with changing conditions, so that
now it is devoted chiefly to setting better standards in
conservation.”^1 The drop in the populations of cer-
tain wildlife species [see Document 86] and the dis-
appearance of wilderness areas provided impetus for
the creation of a host of new conservation organiza-
tions, including the Izaak Walton League (1922), the
Wilderness Society (1935), Ducks Unlimited (1937),
Defenders of Wildlife (1947), and the Conservation
Foundation (1947), and by 1959 there was strong sup-
port for a Wilderness Act [see Document 96].
Shortly after the turn of the century, local gov-
ernments, in an effort to contain building growth
and industrial development, had begun to imposeDepartment of the Interior to combat soil erosion
and water wastage. Then, in 1937, President Frank-
lin D. Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation
Corps. The Corps was both a response to the Great
Depression—which began with the stock market
crash of 1929 and was exacerbated by the dust bowl
crisis—and an attempt to redress the country’s prodi-
gal use of its natural resources. Roosevelt had long
recognized the relationship between resource protec-
tion and national well-being [see Document 77].
The Synthetic Environment
Expansion of the chemical and food process-
ing industries in the 1920s and 1930s brought a wide
range of new products into existence to satisfy both
the agricultural sector and the urban market. While
many of these new, man-made substances provided
great benefits for farmers and the general public,
some of them had serious unanticipated negative
consequences, including the endangerment of human
health and the destruction of wildlife. New factories,
unhampered by any kind of governmental environ-
mental constraints, also made existing air and water
pollution problems worse.
As the century progressed, opposition among the
public to the government’s leniency concerning indus-
trial pollution and waste grew [see Document 78],
and there was increasing demand for greater govern-
ment oversight of the quality of manufactured goods
and the labeling of processed foods and drugs [see
Document 79]. The passage of the Food, Drug, and
Cosmetics Act of 1938 strengthened the federal gov-
ernment’s ability to clamp down on the free-wheeling
sales of manufactured products to consumers.
In general, though, inadequate consideration
was given to the long-term effects of the many new
products that came to market in the 1930s and 1940s,
such as pesticides like DDT and the numerous syn-
thetic materials, including nylon and plastics, that
were developed for use in World War II. It took many
years before the impact of certain pesticides on the
food chain and the problem of non-biodegradable
waste, became evident.
The Growth of Suburbs
After World War II home building boomed.
Many of the new homes were constructed in the sub-
urbs on former farmland, woodland, and open space,