LECTURES: Understanding the Environmental Movement

A Historical Perspective of its Founders

Paganism - (1400-1700) Taught that people and the natural world were spiritually connected, were depended upon each other, and had a common bond. Pegans believed that spirits inhabited all of nature and were accessable to nature. Spirits took many forms, trees, rivers, valley, fairies, elves, etc.

Native American - Inuit mythology, Abanoke Gluscobe, contrasted to buffalo drives, the disappearing condor and the extinction of the large pliestocene mammals.

Judeo-Christian - Be fruitful multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it: And have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the foul of the air, and over every living thing moveth upon the earth.

Henry David Thoreau - (1817-1862) The 19th-century American writer Henry David Thoreau wrote philosophical essays in which he criticized social institutions and celebrated nature and individualism. Thoreau surrounded himself with only basic essentials when he went to live for a time at Walden Pond, and he wrote about simple living in his most famous book, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). In his influential 1849 essay, "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau advocates the concept of passive resistance.

Muir, John - (1838-1914) American explorer and naturalist, born in Dunbar, Scotland. He was a member of the United States Geodetic Survey in the Great Basin (1876-79) and while in Alaska sighted the glacier that now bears his name. An authority on forestry and forest management, he visited Russia, Siberia, India, Australia, and the Philippines to study their forests.

Theodore Roosevelt - (1858-1919) 26th president of the United States (1901-1909). One of Roosevelt's major interests was public land. His own studies in natural history and his travels about the country convinced him of the need to preserve the country's natural heritage. Forest, mineral, and water controls seemed to him basic to guarantee the nation's resources.

Gifford Pinchot - (1865-1946) Catalyst and publicist for the progressive conservation movement. The first American to choose forestry as a career. All resources were linked and that they were to be conserved for the good of man.

Aldo Leopold - (1887-1948) U.S. naturalist, conservationist, and forester, born in Burlington, Iowa; influential forerunner of environmental movement; graduated Yale College 1908; with U.S. Forest Service 1909-27, promoting establishment of wilderness areas, first of which was Gila National Forest in 1924; consultant on forestry 1927-33; professor of wildlife management University of Wisconsin 1933-48; a founder of Wilderness Society 1935; wrote 'A Sand County Almanac'(1949).

Carson, Rachel Louise - (1907-64) American marine biologist, author of widely read books on ecological themes, including Silent Spring. Born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, and educated at the former Pennsylvania College for Women and Johns Hopkins University, she taught zoology at the University of Maryland from 1931 to 1936. She was aquatic biologist at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and its successor, the Fish and Wildlife Service, from 1936 to 1952.

Eugen Odum - General principles of ecology; vertebrate populations; productivity and ecosystem energetics; ecology of birds; estuarine and wetland ecology; landscape ecology.

A Few of Today's Forward Thinkers:

David Ehrenfeld
Wendell Berry
Terry Tempest Williams
Robert Kennedy Jr.

Wangari Maathai



Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Yosemite