The Conservation Crusade

Origins of the Movement.

Concern over the consumption of natural resources and its impact on the land began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson called attention to the destruction of nature in their native New England. Landscape painters of the Hudson River School, including Thomas Moran and Frederic Church, depicted idyllic wilderness scenes in the Adirondacks and the Rockies, evoking a yearning for romantic natural vistas by then under threat of destruction. Lumbermen had cleared eastern forests and were moving westward at a rapid pace, leaving behind barren lands subject to injurious soil erosion. In 1894 fear of watershed destruction and soil erosion in the Adirondacks led the New York State legislature to pass a "Forever Wild" constitutional amendment, which banned any logging within the Adirondack State Park. By the turn of the century lumbering was...

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