Conservation in the United States, as a movement, began with the American sportsmen who came to the realization that wanton waste of wildlife and their habitat had led to the extinction of some species, while other species were at risk.

The contemporary environmental movement arose primarily from concerns in the late 19th century about the protection of the countryside in Europe and the wilderness in the United States and the health consequences of pollution during the Industrial Revolution.

The movement’s goal was to preserve and promote the wise use of the nation’s natural resources, and it led to the development of national parks; flood control; reforestation; and the preservation of minerals, soil, water, and wildlife resources.

By the middle of the 19th century, many Eastern forests had been depleted. The settlement of the American West also set off a massive transformation of landscapes there with a rapid depletion of forests, soil erosion, and loss of wildlife that alarmed many people.

Preservationists: Preservationists, led by John Muir (1838–1914), argued that the conservation policies were not strong enough to protect the interest of the natural world because they continued to focus on the natural world as a source of economic production.

Answer: Works to correct the damage as well as prevent future destruction.

Textbooks celebrate the conservation movement as an unalloyed success: New forestry laws prevented widespread clear-cutting, erosion, and fires. Reclamation laws reformed the haphazard use of scarce water resources in the American West, enabling agricultural expansion.

The goal of the conservation movement was to preserve important natural features in America. The Conservation Movement advocated the establishment of state and national and state parks, wildlife refuges and national monuments.

First, conservation was deeply enmeshed within the larger Progressive movement of the time. Progressives favored dropping older laissez-faire practices in favor of a more active federal role in managing the economy. They also sought to limit some of the harsher effects of industrial capitalism.

Conservation and preservation are closely linked and may indeed seem to mean the same thing. Both terms involve a degree of protection, but how that is protection is carried out is the key difference. Put simply conservation seeks the proper use of nature, while preservation seeks protection of nature from use.

Theodore Roosevelt is often considered the “conservationist president.” Here in the North Dakota Badlands, where many of his personal concerns first gave rise to his later environmental efforts, Roosevelt is remembered with a national park that bears his name and honors the memory of this great conservationist.

Early 19th Century Conservation and the Romantic Movement: Promoting New Attitudes toward Nature The idea that nature is only a commodity to be used (albeit wisely) was challenged in the first half of the 19th century by American Romantic and Transcendental writers like William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

Catlin also holds a place in the conservation movement as he wrote movingly of his time in the wilderness, and as early as 1841 he put forth the idea of setting aside vast areas of wilderness to create a “Nations Park.”

Before Hays, scholars accepted the view of conservation held by the movement’s first leaders, who saw themselves as champions of democracy: The conservation movement sought to protect the nation’s natural resources from short-sighted exploitation by rapacious corporations. Hays rejected the view that the movement was democratic.

The first generation of historical writing about conservation was top-down, emphasizing the contributions of such national leaders as Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt. In American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (1975; third edition, Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000), John F. Reiger challenged that emphasis.