Progressive Conservation

Earth, Wind, and Fire

The outdoor craze

Rise of Vacations, 1869: Camping

Summer youth camps

Old West craze

Owen Wister & Frederick Remington

Boy Scouts of America, 1910

Jack London: Call of the Wild, 1903

Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan, 1912

Wildlife conservation

Game rapidly disappears

Passenger pigeon & buffalo

Elite Eastern hunting clubs

Theodore Roosevelt

William Temple Hornaday, Washington Zoo

Our Vanishing Wildlife, 1913

National Forests and Parks

Presbyterian-raised conservationists

Fiercely protective of common good against selfish greed

Benjamin Harrison and John Noble, 1889–1893

Sequoia National Park, 1890, protecting world’s largest trees

Yosemite National Park, 1890

State mismanagement; watershed damage

John Muir: Yosemite NP, with Hetch Hetchy

Sierra Club, 1892

Forest Reserve Act, 1891

Harrison & Noble create 15 with 13 million acres

More Parks and Forests

Army oversees both parks and forest reserves

Grover Cleveland and Hoke Smith, 1893–1897

Creates 17 forest reserves with 27 million acres

Congress opposes; approves commercial use, 1897

Progressive Conservation

Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09)

5 new National Parks

Adds 100,000,000 acres in 118 reserves

Antiquities Act 1906: 18 National Monuments

51 bird reserves, 4 game preserves

Gifford Pinchot

Scientific management

First chief of Forest Service

“National Forests,” 1905

Successes: PR & professional foresters

“Conservation”: greatest good for greatest number for greatest length of time

Reclamation

Irrigating arid Western lands

Reclamation Act, 1902

160-acre limit

Widely ignored; speculation

Los Angeles steals the Owens Lake for a water supply, 1913

Hydroelectric power and the Parks

The case for cheap public power

Battles

Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park, 1913

Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Lane, 1913–1921

National Park Service, 1916; Stephen Mather, director

8 new National Parks