Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

How America Became the Progenitor of Environmentalism

From Indigenous practices to the Green New Deal, our country has always focused on prioritizing our planet.

Natural high: The Knife Edge trail, not far from the Maine’s North Woods, which shaped Henry David Thoreau’s ideas about nature.

America is a young country. I have plenty of friends who—like Jane Fonda, my fellow contributor to this special issue—make note of the fact that they’ve been alive for a third of its 250-year history as a nation. One thing this has meant is that America came to full consciousness—literary and political—in the period when we were turning its forests and topsoil into money. Unlike in Northern Europe or the countries of the Mediterranean, where these transformations were ancient history by the time people were writing books, the transformations happened here in relative modernity, which explains why one of America’s great gifts to the Western world has been the environmental idea.

That Indigenous people had long since hit upon this complex of ideas almost goes without saying. But its slow rediscovery, beginning, I think, with Henry David Thoreau, has been a crucial part of the American story. Thoreau was little read in his time; not so George Perkins Marsh, whose Man and Nature, published two years after Thoreau’s death, stands as one of the first decisive works of environmental exhortation. Marsh’s understanding that, by cutting down vast swaths of timber, humans were altering the temperature and aridity of our landscape led pretty directly to early experiments in land conservation—things like the protection of the Adirondacks. And they helped charge the air that Teddy Roosevelt, the first giant of conservation, breathed so deeply.

250 Years of Searching for a More Perfect Union

Special Issue: America at 250 Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Nichols

Special Issue: America at 250

How to Win the Next 250 Years for the Working Class Sara Nelson

How to Win the Next 250 Years for the Working Class

What Makes American Architecture American? Kate Wagner

What Makes American Architecture American?

Roosevelt’s name, of course, reminds us that this legacy can be troublesome—at points, American environmentalism has been linked with eugenics, with anti-immigrant nonsense, and with a kind of privilege-based affection for scenery. But at its heart, I think, it’s mostly been helpful to the human cause, a challenge to the accumulations of industrial wealth and power. Rachel........

© The Nation