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This year, Americans celebrate the centennial of the National Park Service. On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act. The bill culminated decades of effort by a remarkable generation of dedicated men and women who fought to protect the nation’s natural wonders for the democratic enjoyment of the people.

The post Remembering John Muir on the centennial of the National Park Service appeared first on OUPblog.

Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on 3 September 1964, the Wilderness Act defined wilderness “as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” It not only put 1.9 million acres under federal protection, it created an entire preservation system that today includes nearly 110 million acres across forty-four states and Puerto Rico—some 5% of the land in the United States. These public lands include wildlife refuges and national forests and parks where people are welcome as visitors, but may not take up permanent residence.

The definition of what constitutes “wilderness” is not without controversy, and some critics question whether preservation is the best use of specific areas. Nevertheless, most Americans celebrate the guarantee that there will always be special places in the United States where nature can thrive in its unfettered state, without human intervention or control. Campers, hikers, birdwatchers, scientists and other outdoor enthusiasts owe much to Howard Zahniser, the act’s primary author.

In recent decades, environmental awareness and protection are values just about as all-American as Mom and apple pie. Despite the ill-fated “Drill, Baby, Drill,” slogan of the 2008 campaign, virtually all political candidates, whatever their party, profess concern about the environment and a commitment to its protection. As a professor, I have a hard time persuading my students, who were born more than two decades after the first Earth Day (in 1970), that environmental protection was once commonly considered downright traitorous.

For generations, many Americans were convinced that it was the exploitation of natural resources that made America great. The early pioneers survived because they wrested a living from the wilderness, and their children and grandchildren thrived because they turned natural resources into profit. Only slowly did the realization come that people had been so intent on pursuing vast commercial enterprises they failed to consider their environmental impact. When, according to the 1890 census, the frontier was closed, the nation was no longer a land of ever-expanding boundaries and unlimited resources. Birds like the passenger pigeon and the Carolina Parakeet were hunted into extinction; practices like strip-mining left ugly scars on the land, and clear-cutting made forest sustainability impossible.

At the turn of the last century members of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs called for the preservation of wilderness, especially through the creation of regional and national parks. They enjoyed the generous cooperation of the Forest Service during the Theodore Roosevelt administration, but found that overall, “it is difficult to get anyone to work for the public with the zeal with which men work for their own pockets.”

Not surprisingly, Theodore Roosevelt framed his support for conservation in terms of benefiting people rather than (non-human) nature. In 1907 he addressed both houses of Congress to gain support for his administration’s effort to “get our people to look ahead and to substitute a planned and orderly development of our resources in place of a haphazard striving for immediate profit.” It is a testament to Roosevelt’s persona that he could sow the seeds of conservationism within a male population deeply suspicious of any argument even remotely tinged with what was derided as “female sentimentality.” Writer George L. Knapp, for example, termed the call for conservation “unadulterated humbug” and the dire prophecies of further extinction “baseless vaporings.” He preferred to celebrate the fruits of men’s unregulated resource consumption: “The pine woods of Michigan have vanished to make the homes of Kansas; the coal and iron which we have failed—thank Heaven!—to ‘conserve’ have carried meat and wheat to the hungry hives of men and gladdened life with an abundance which no previous age could know.” According to Knapp, men should be praised, not chastened, for turning “forests into villages, mines into ships and skyscrapers, scenery into work.”

The press reinforced the belief that the use of natural resources equaled progress. The Houston Post, for example, declared, “Smoke stacks are a splendid sign of a city’s prosperity,” and the Chicago Record Herald reported that the Creator who made coal “knew that smoke would be a good thing for the world.” Pittsburgh city leaders equated smoke with manly virtue and derided the “sentimentality and frivolity” of those who sought to limit industry out of baseless fear of the by-products it released into the air.

Pioneering educator and psychologist G. Stanley Hall confirmed that “caring for nature was female sentiment, not sound science.” Gifford Pinchot, made first chief of the Forestry Service in 1905, was a self-avowed conservationist. He escaped charges of effeminacy by making it clear that he measured nature’s value by its service to humanity. He dedicated his agency to “the art of producing from the forest whatever it can yield for the service of man.” “Trees are a crop, just like corn,” he famously proclaimed, “Wilderness is waste.”

Looking back at the last fifty years, the Wilderness Act of 1964 is an important achievement. But it becomes truly remarkable when viewed in the context of the long history that preceded it.

Headline image credit: Cook Lake, Bridger-Teton National Forest, Wyoming. Photos by the Pinedale Ranger District of the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Elyse Turr

San Francisco, here we come.

Oxford is excited for the upcoming annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History in San Francisco this week: 12-16 March 2014. The theme of the conference is “Crossing Divides,” reflecting the mixed history of the discipline and California itself.

We’ll be at the Opening Reception, co-sponsored by Oxford University Press, MIT, University of Delaware, and the Winslow Foundation on Wednesday, 12 March 2014 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. in the Cyril Magnin Ballroom.

Stop by Oxford’s display in the Exhibit hall. We’ll have hundreds of books on display, including several hot off the presses like Jared Orsi’s Citizen Explorer: The Life of Zebulon Pike, Cecilia M. Tsu’s Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California’s Santa Clara Valley, and Kendra Smith-Howard’s Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900.

Pick up a complimentary copy of Environmental History and other key Oxford journals at the booth. The most current issue features new articles on the environmental history of work, environmental politics and corporate real estate development, the shift to steam power in water reservoirs, and how skiing transformed the Alps. The editors have also compiled a special conference-companion virtual issue that draws on the theme of “Crossing Divides.” And for your teaching and research needs we’re offering free trials of Oxford’s online resources. Check out census data going back to 1790 with Social Explorer or assign sections, chapters, or full texts of books with Oxford Scholarship Online. Pick up a free trial access card at the booth.

ASEH 2014 is offering a number of field trips, but the one we’re fired up about is a field trip to Muir Woods on Friday, 14 March 2014. In 2008 Oxford was proud to publish Donald Worster’s biography of John Muir, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. Worster discusses Muir’s appreciation for and belief in the power of the forest in this passage:

“Nature, particularly its forests, offered an ideal of harmony to a nation torn apart by conflict between capital and labor, country and city, imperialists and anti-imperialists. That harmony was first and foremost one of beauty; nothing in nature was ugly or discordant, a lesson that could be learned by hiking a trail into the Sierra or standing at the rail of a steamer along the Alaskan coast. The challenge was how to help American society achieve that same degree of moral and aesthetic unity.

“Violent confrontation was not the way to achieve ecological harmony, a beautiful landscape, or a decent civilization. One must start by resolving to conserve the natural world for the sake of human beings and other forms of life. Conservation offered both an economic and aesthetic program of social reform—learning to use natural resources more carefully, for long-term renewability, and learning to preserve wild places where humans could go to learn about how nature constructs harmony. Muir tried, as other green men did, to push conservation in both directions. Achieve these reforms, he believed, and a truer, better democracy would evolve in which people of diverse origins, abilities, and needs would live in greater peace and mutuality, just as all the elements of nature did. If a forest could thrill the sense and still the troubled heart with its harmonies, then society could become like that forest. Such was the hope of the green men.”

—Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

My own first experience in Muir Woods:

I grew up in the Northeast –I’ve tapped maples looking for sap, hiked portions of the Appalachian Trail and spent enormous chunks of my childhood climbing the pine tree in our front yard–I thought I knew trees. Last Spring, while visiting friends in San Francisco, we toured Muir woods and I very quickly realized that any of the previous trees I knew were mere twigs by comparison to the majestic redwoods. It was both powerful and humbling to be among these giants, feeling dizzy trying to find their tops and small trying to wrap my arms around one and not even getting half-way. Never before had I been able to step inside a fire-charred redwood or run my hands across the hundreds of rings in a fallen tree. Muir Woods is a beautiful, peaceful place and I am very glad I was able to experience it; it was an experience I will always remember.

—Elyse Turr, History Marketing

Elyse Turr in Muir Woods

See you in San Francisco!

Elyse Turr is an Assistant Marketing Manager for history titles for Oxford University Press.

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