Reconstructing Conservation: Finding Common Ground

By Ben A. Minteer and Robert E. Manning

In the 1990s, influenced by the deconstructionist movement in literary theory and trends toward revisionist history, a cadre of academics and historians led by William Cronon began raising provocative questions about ideas of wilderness and the commitments and strategies of the contemporary environmental movement. While these critiques challenged some cherished and widely held beliefs -- and raised the hackles of many in the environmental community -- they also stimulated an important and potentially transformative debate about the conceptual foundations of environmentalism.

Reconstructing Conservation makes a vital contribution to that debate, bringing together 23 leading scholars and practitioners -- including J. Baird Callicott, Susan Flader, Richard Judd, Curt Meine, Bryan Norton, and Paul B. Thompson -- to examine the classical conservation tradition and its value to contemporary environmentalism. Focusing not just on the tensions that have marked the deconstructivist debate over wilderness and environmentalism, the book represents a larger and ultimately more constructive and hopeful discussion over the proper course of future conservation scholarship and action.

Essays provide a fresh look at conservation icons such as George Perkins Marsh and Aldo Leopold, as well as the contributions of lesser-known figures including Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and Scott Nearing. Represented are a wealth of diverse perspectives, addressing such topics as wilderness and protected areas, cultural landscapes, rural/agrarian landscapes, urban/built environments, and multiple points on the geographic map. Contributors offer enthusiastic endorsements of pluralism in conservation values and goals along with cautionary tales about the dangers of fragmentation and atomism. The final chapter brings together the major insights, arguments, and proposals contained in the individual contributions, synthesizing them into a dozen broad-ranging principles designed to guide the study and practice of conservation.

Reconstructing Conservation assesses the meaning and relevance of our conservation inheritance in the 21st century, and represents a conceptually integrated vision for reconsidering conservation thought and practice to meet the needs and circumstances of a new, post-deconstructivist era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781610917704

Book preview

Service

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

Conservation: From Deconstruction to Reconstruction

BEN A. MINTEER AND ROBERT E. MANNING

The idea for the present volume was born in discussions with our colleagues about the changes rippling through the academic environmental community at that time, the mid- and late 1990s. Of these, perhaps the most significant was the appearance of a set of high-profile critiques questioning the very foundations of environmental thought and practice from the vantage point of the end of the twentieth century. Led by William Cronon and his now well-known debunking of the American wilderness idea, these arguments had generated more than a few sparks across a wide range of scholarly and professional fields.¹ Indeed, Cronon’s and others’ work seemed to issue an indirect yet provocative challenge to scholars and practitioners engaged in the study and management of human–environment relationships. As academics with an interest in the integrity and contemporary vitality of the American conservation tradition, we can say that these deconstructive arguments certainly got our attention.

Although the revisionist papers appearing in Cronon’s oft-cited collection, Uncommon Ground, were focused more on coming to terms with the consequences of the cultural mediation of our knowledge of nature and models of ecological change in postwar environmentalism, Cronon’s own dismantling of the meanings and images associated with the American wilderness idea suggested that the earlier conservation movement was also implicated in the broader critique. In particular, Cronon singled out the nature romanticism of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir and the primitivism of Frederick Jackson Turner as examples of how American thinking about wilderness had been saddled with utopian myths that represented a flight from lived human history and an escape from the hard problems presented by modern urban and industrial life.² If Cronon was right, it meant that our thinking about wilderness had been at best intellectually lazy in its acquiescence to these wrongheaded ideas about our place in the world. At worst, it had been morally irresponsible, especially in its neglect of urban and rural conditions and the men and women who toiled in the fields and in the factories, away from an idyllic and imaginary pristine nature.

Cronon’s criticism of the wilderness concept and, more generally, the deconstructivist assessment of the commitments and strategies of late-twentieth-century environmentalism are now part of the environmental studies canon. They have been joined by a growing and broadly sympathetic literature, including further interdisciplinary critiques of the wilderness idea,³ attempts to demystify significant contemporary conservation concepts such as that of biodiversity,⁴ and projects exploring the historically neglected dimensions of class, culture, and authority in the management of parks and wildlife.⁵ For the most part, we believe this critical turn has provided a useful service. It has, for example, exposed the previously unreflective presuppositions of contemporary environmentalism, holding traditional and widely accepted interpretations of concepts such as wilderness and biodiversity to the fire of critical scrutiny. Even though the academic and popular environmental community’s response to Cronon and his followers has been at times overly defensive and less constructive than we might have liked, these critiques have nonetheless stimulated an important and potentially transformative debate about the conceptual foundations of environmentalism as we move into the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Yet, as we said before, it is also true that these penetrating criticisms of modern American environmentalism have issued an undeniable challenge to those who would defend the classical conservation tradition—the period running roughly from George Perkins Marsh to Aldo Leopold (and perhaps to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring)—as practically viable and intellectually relevant in the new deconstructivist era. After all, the mostly unquestioned realism about nature during this time and the nascent modernist ecological understandings of the era’s principal thinkers would seem to make the tradition a prime candidate for systematic debunking and demythologizing. Nevertheless, we believed that there was still much of value in the tradition, even if we also conceded its very real philosophical and scientific limitations as a template to guide current and future thought and practice. How, we wondered, should we go about reading the conservation tradition in this new, highly charged, and seriously self-conscious academic environment?

To answer this question, we decided to do what most academics do when faced with an intellectual crisis of epic proportions: we held a seminar. In this we were also following the model established by Cronon and his colleagues, given that the papers appearing in his Uncommon Ground began their lives in a seminar held at the University of California, Irvine, in the early 1990s. For our project, we wanted to create an appropriate forum in which both the scholarly and practitioner communities could come together and attempt to fill the deconstructionist void. We believed it was important to bring these two groups into an open dialogue with each other, and we hoped that the opportunity for increased traffic between the theory and practice of conservation would help achieve a balance of intelligent practice and practical intelligence at the seminar.

Our primary task was an ambitious one: to assess the meaning and relevance of our conservation inheritance in the twenty-first century and to chart a course for revising the conventional narratives and accounts of the tradition so that a usable past might be uncovered that could inform present and future conservation efforts. In the fall of 2001, then, we organized and held an invited, interdisciplinary seminar in Vermont focused on the challenges of reconstructing conservation thought and practice in the wake of the earlier deconstructive efforts. The seminar participants were a select group of leading academics and professionals nationally and internationally known for their work in conservation scholarship or the practice of conservation in local communities and on the landscape. They approached our project’s goals with great intellectual seriousness and creativity, and their energy held steady over the nearly five full days of plenaries, panels, and roundtable discussions. This enthusiastic response suggested to us that we had managed to start a conversation not only compelling in its conceptual scope and orientation but also timely in its asking of hard questions of the conservation tradition regarding its role as a guide for a new age’s relationship with its environment.

In hindsight, we think the physical settings of the talks had more than a little to do with what we (naturally) think of as the success of the seminar. The symbolism of our chosen locations for the events in Vermont was hard for the participants to ignore. The first half of the seminar took place in the majestic John Dewey Lounge in the University of Vermont’s historic Old Mill building, underneath a portrait of the great American philosopher (and the university’s most famous graduate). Dewey’s influential 1920 book Reconstruction in Philosophy not only inspired the title of the present volume; it also served as a model for our desired mix of judicious criticism of the conservation tradition with the development of a positive, forward-looking vision for conservation thought and practice in the twenty-first century.

The second half of the seminar was held in the small historic village of Woodstock, Vermont. Woodstock was the home of George Perkins Marsh, whose 1864 book Man and Nature was, as Lewis Mumford memorably put it, the fountainhead of the conservation movement.⁶ It was here, in the hills and valleys of Vermont, that Marsh made his initial observations of human effects on the environment and began formulating his original ideas about the proper course of the human–nature relationship. Woodstock is also the site of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, the first unit of the National Park System devoted to studying and interpreting conservation for the public. The park houses the National Park Service’s Conservation Study Institute, which conducts a program of research, education, and practice on conservation as applied to national parks, public lands, and beyond.

In the drive south from Burlington to Woodstock, then, our seminar participants were, in a very real sense, bringing their meditations on the American conservation tradition back to the birthplace of the national conservation impulse. Laurance S. Rockefeller, who with his wife, Mary French Rockefeller, gifted the lands constituting the park in Woodstock to the nation, had passionately stated his hope at the park’s dedication that the park and its affiliated programs would carry on the tradition of sending the message and vision of conservation across the nation from the hills of Vermont. In our view, there was no better place to discuss the prospects of reconstructing conservation than at the University of Vermont and in Woodstock.

Given the unusually high caliber of the participants, it should not have been surprising that the presentations and discussions at the seminar surpassed our expectations. Moreover, the conversations took on a compelling life of their own over the course of the agenda in Burlington and Woodstock. Although the deconstructivist critique had catalyzed our decision to bring the project participants together in Vermont, the panel presentations and ensuing discussions went much further than these initial beginnings. It was obvious to us, in fact, that in many cases our contributors had already moved beyond the confines of this tendentious debate about the cultural foundations of environmentalism set down in the mid- and late 1990s. We believed this was a healthy development. While remaining sensitive to the changed atmosphere of conservation in light of these critical projects, the seminar participants were clearly less interested in providing partisan defenses of the deconstructive enterprise or knee-jerk rejoinders to it than they were in looking forward, probing the structure and substance of a reconstructed and revised conservationism for the future.

By taking part in this project, the seminar participants were not only stepping into the breach with regard to the tensions that have marked the deconstructivist debate over wilderness and environmentalism; they were also entering a larger and, we think, ultimately more important discussion about the proper course of future conservation scholarship and action. This larger discussion, however, has also been marked by considerable academic and professional debate and divisiveness in recent years. Any careful survey of the scholarly and popular literature in conservation, for example, will reveal a host of conceptual and methodological polarizations that have worked to divide individuals and camps within the diverse fields of conservation thought and practice. A representative list of these oppositional elements might include the following:

•  Conservation versus preservation

•  Conservationism versus environmentalism

•  Anthropocentrism versus biocentrism/ecocentrism

•  Instrumental value versus intrinsic value

•  Utility versus aesthetics

•  Efficiency versus equity

•  Nature as construct versus nature as essence

•  Moral pluralism versus moral monism

•  Urban/rural environmentalism versus wilderness environmentalism

•  Eastern (U.S.) versus western (U.S.) perspectives

•  Regional focus versus national focus

•  Working/cultural landscapes versus pristine nature

•  Stewardship versus hands-off management policies

•  Grassroots action versus centralized approaches

•  Citizen environmentalism versus expert/bureaucratic environmentalism

•  Models of ecological disturbance versus models of ecological order

•  Conservation theory versus conservation practice

Some of these tensions are captured in the aforementioned deconstructivist critique, though many speak to additional commitments and goals that are debated in academic and professional conservation circles. Of course, this list is by no means exhaustive. We also do not wish to suggest that a subscription to one or more of the commitments on the left or the right entails an endorsement of all the claims and tenets on that side of the aisle. But we do believe this list captures some of the major philosophical and strategic disagreements within conservationism, both past and present. And though some of these divisions seem to be slowly disappearing, or at least moving toward some degree of conceptual compatibility (e.g., the debate over equilibrium-based and disturbance-based ecological models), others remain firmly in place and even appear to have deepened in recent years (e.g., anthropocentrism versus biocentrism/ecocentrism, the constructivist–essentialist debate).

We know that many of our participants probably believed they had a stake in one or more of these debates at the seminar, yet we were struck by the degree to which they attempted to move beyond these imposed categories and their entailments. Even when it was apparent that some of the presenters were interested in working along one side of an argument, for example, they sought to develop complementary rather than adversarial projects, or they worked to shore up weaknesses and fill conceptual holes in the conservationist literature. This is not to say that the divisions represented in the foregoing list were somehow magically erased in Vermont, nor to suggest that many of these opposing ideas do not provide a useful way of thinking about some of the real tensions in our understanding of conservation thought and practice. We only point out here that our participants were not beholden to either-or logic in the framing of their discussions and proposals for reconstruction. This independence was probably best demonstrated by the numerous pleas for philosophical compatibility and tactical cooperation at the seminar and by the participants’ awareness of the need to move beyond rigid ideology and the constraints of historically entrenched positions and arguments in their respective fields.

The specific questions that emerged through the individual presentations and discussions at the seminar formed a crosscutting pattern of historical reflections, philosophical investigations, social scientific studies, and practical considerations of the past, present, and future of conservation initiatives on the landscape. Among the questions raised by these lines of inquiry were the following:

•  Why and how have the intellectual and social histories of conservationism ignored certain subjects and movements, and how might these accounts be revised to accurately reflect the peoples, places, and ideas left out of these histories?

•  What is the role of human agency in natural and cultural landscapes, and how do we come to terms with the demands and responsibilities of conservation stewardship?

•  What are the limitations and lessons of early-twentieth-century Progressive conservationism for conservation in the first part of the twenty-first century?

•  How should we understand the philosophical and value bases of conservation in light of new histories, new methodologies, and new analytic models in the natural and social sciences?

•  What, if any, should be the overarching goals of conservation in a contemporary environment characterized by social, ethical, and methodological pluralism?

•  How do questions of class, identity, and community shape the material prospects of conservation on the ground?

•  What are the descriptive and normative features of community-based conservationism, and how do these approaches promise to engage citizens more effectively in conservation practices?

These questions and others like them filled our five days in Vermont that fall. And they would continue to engage the participants as they returned to their own places to reflect and write about them for this book.

This Book

The book you hold in your hands brings together the mature versions of the ideas and arguments first advanced at our seminar. The chapters reflect not only the authors’ original statements about the prospects of reconstructing conservation but also their subsequent thinking on these issues in light of their dialogues with other seminar participants over the course of the Vermont meetings. The contributors represent an impressive range of scholarly fields and professional disciplines. On the academic side, they offer perspectives informed by history, philosophy, political theory, sociology, economics, anthropology, historic preservation, legal studies, and conservation biology. Our professional/practitioner contributors bring considerable experience and leadership in the stewardship of protected areas and cultural landscapes, both domestic and international. Together, they provide the volume with an unusually broad yet conceptually integrated vision for rethinking past and present conservation thought and practice to meet the needs and circumstances of a new, post-deconstructivist era.

Although each contributor brings his or her own unique perspective, interests, and experience to the discussion in the ensuing chapters, we believe the chapters are linked by several broad and intersecting lines of argument that advance the larger project of reconstructing conservation. We will revisit these threads in more detail—in a set of emerging principles for reconstructing conservation—in our conclusion to this volume. A brief outline of larger concepts here, however, offers a useful thematic orientation to the chapters that follow.

Revising and Expanding the Conservation Tradition

The recent publication of new and impressive biographies of key conservation thinkers such as George Perkins Marsh, John Wesley Powell, and Gifford Pinchot serves to remind us of the enduring significance of the conservation tradition.⁷ Yet these treatments appear at a time in which a number of new, alternative histories have greatly extended our view of the populist and social dimensions of the American conservation impulse.⁸ Both historical approaches—taking fresh stock of the pillars of the tradition, and expanding the conservation story to include people and places traditionally left out of the canon—are represented in the present volume. In several of the chapters that follow you will find new, critical perspectives on many of the towering figures of conservation, including those thinkers we might consider the historical bookends of the movement: George Perkins Marsh, who is discussed in the chapter by David Lowenthal, and Aldo Leopold, who figures prominently in the chapters by Susan Flader, Curt Meine, Eric T. Freyfogle, and J. Baird Callicott. But you will also come across a number of forgotten or underrepresented voices and movements in the tradition that hold the potential to deepen and enrich the conservation story. In the chapter by Bob Pepperman Taylor, for example, you will read about the oppositional form of conservationism developed by Scott Nearing. Likewise, Ben A. Minteer’s chapter introduces the pragmatic conservationism of Lewis Mumford into the intellectual history of conservation philosophy. In his chapter, Robert McCullough acquaints us with the shared humanism of conservationist/planner Benton MacKaye and architect Clarence Stein. Richard W. Judd’s chapter uncovers the historic eastern model of conservation practiced by rural New Englanders on their farms and in their forests. And Paul B. Thompson’s chapter resurrects the earlier agrarian thinkers and their ideas about the relationship between subsistence, moral character, and political economy. Together, these authors’ reconsiderations of the conservation tradition and their attempts to expand its historiographic and philosophical borders provide some of the pieces of a new, rewoven conservation history.

Reconciling Nature and Culture

Not surprisingly, many of the chapters in this book engage, directly and indirectly, the deconstructivist critique of the idea that we can achieve an unmediated understanding of nature independent of the interpretive frameworks of culture. From Jan E. Dizard’s discussion of the (often ignored) intertwining social and ecological dimensions of new efforts in ecological restoration to McCullough’s plea for establishing common ground between historic preservation and traditional nature conservation, many of the contributions provide fascinating glimpses of how a reconstructed conservation might come to terms with its interwoven natural and cultural dimensions. Other chapters in this vein offer a revised conservation agenda that includes the built and cultivated environments as well as the natural (e.g., the chapters by McCullough, Judd, Thompson, Minteer, and Freyfogle), suggesting that a geographic rapprochement of nature and culture, in addition to the conceptual, is in order. As Luis A. Vivanco reminds us in his chapter, however, there are considerable perils associated with adopting an essentialist understanding of culture in any such reconciliation, a move that can expose troubling issues of power and justice in conservationist discourse and practice.

Reviving Progressive Conservation

It is difficult to think about the professional conservation movement of the first decades of the twentieth century apart from the moral language and institutions of American Progressivism: the gospel of efficiency in natural resource management, the rise of scientific expertise in public administration, and a democratic suspicion of corporate capitalism. Several chapters in this book mark a return to such Progressivist themes, offering critical assessments of their liabilities but also recognizing their potential to inform a retooled conservationism in the twenty-first century. Flader’s discussion of Aldo Leopold’s evolving views on the importance of conservation citizenship and Taylor’s chapter on Scott Nearing’s Progressive homesteading reveal the positive and destructive features, respectively, of the earlier Progressive impulse. Meine’s call for a return to the radical center, however, holds out the hope that in this new era, conservationism can retrieve its Progressive roots in the search for common cause across party, class, and ideological lines.

Revising Conservation Inquiry

Several of the chapters in this volume argue for changes within the academic disciplines that investigate the conservation tradition. Judd, for example, presents a brief for an eastern approach to the study of environmental history as a counterpoint to the dominant western model in the field. Minteer suggests that environmental philosophers need to develop more sophisticated intellectual histories by revisiting the ideas and intellectual influences of environmental thinkers, such as Mumford and the regional planners, whose works are underrepresented in the field’s narratives. In his chapter, Meine argues for a more nuanced conservation history, one that recognizes the dynamic and diverse foundations of the movement and its rich interweaving of science, philosophy, policy, and social practices. Robert E. Manning, in his chapter, makes a case for more sociological analyses of conservation philosophy and presents the results of some empirical studies of environmental values and ethics to support a methodologically pragmatic approach to studying environmental commitments. In a similar manner, Bryan Norton advances a new analytic model for environmental ethics, one that is more problem oriented and is couched in a larger multi-criteria adaptive management framework. And David N. Bengston and David C. Iverson call for economists to incorporate a more serious regard for ecological limits and to recognize social values beyond utility maximization in the quest for ecological sustainability.

Linking Conservation Theory and Practice

A key and recurring theme of our project is the need to connect the theory about conservation with grounded discussions of the activity of conservation on the landscape. The chapters by Lowenthal, McCullough, Flader, and Patricia A. Stokowski demonstrate how the insights of conservation history and social thought can inform more intelligent practice, from improved stewardship and community conservation efforts to new and fruitful alliances between the professions that study and inform conservation actions. The chapter by Rolf Diamant, J. Glenn Eugster, and Nora J. Mitchell and the chapter by Brent Mitchell and Jessica Brown both illustrate how thoughtful practitioners can help conservation theorists to understand the strategic and political constraints facing conservation activities, as well as to recognize opportunities for reconstructing conservation on the ground. Similarly, Stephen C. Trombulak’s chapter provides a conservation biologist’s view of the importance of securing biological and ecological processes through a dominant use system of land designation, an approach he suggests will protect biodiversity values alongside human economic development. By linking theory and practice in this manner, we hope the present volume not only helps keep theorists grounded in their work but also sets the stage for bringing the reconstruction discussion down from the tower of the academy and into communities and institutions, where it may be engaged by citizens and environmental professionals who are building conservation on the landscape.

Coping with Change through Adaptation

Many of the chapters in this volume address the challenges presented by manifestations of change in contemporary conservation, in both social and ecological contexts. In his chapter, Callicott explores the evolving paradigms of ecological thought in the scientific community and discusses the implications of the emerging flux-of-nature model for contemporary philosophies of conservation. A similar discussion may be found in Dizard’s chapter, which emphasizes the need for responsible environmental management in light of nature’s perpetual motion. In their chapter, Bengston and Iverson illustrate how new ecological knowledge and changing social values have challenged the assumptions of traditional economic thinking about the environment and how an adaptive ecological economics offers an appropriate model for valuing a plurality of ecological goods and systems in a new era of conservation. And the chapters by Diamant, Eugster, and Mitchell and by Mitchell and Brown provide helpful discussions of some developing trends in conservation practice, many of which attempt to cope with the numerous social and ecological changes that characterize the contemporary scene.

Defending Pluralism, Embracing Community

One general conclusion that seems to draw nearly unanimous consent among our authors is that a reconstructed conservation in the twenty-first century will be a very diverse enterprise. It will be multi-foundational in its philosophical commitments (Minteer) and pluralistic in its value and ethical justifications (Manning; Bengston and Iverson). Indeed, as Norton suggests in his chapter, environmental and conservation-related problems involve choices among competing goods, which must be experimentally integrated into environmental policies, not reduced to any single value. Norton and others (e.g., Diamant, Eugster, and Mitchell; Mitchell and Brown) indicate that the specific strategies and goals of conservation, too, will be as different as the publics that propose them and the landscapes they ultimately concern. Alongside this recognition and defense of pluralism in conservation thought and practice is the embrace of community that appears in many of the chapters. In particular, several chapters advance elements of a community-based conservationism, a project that connects a concern for human social well-being with the stewardship of our built and natural surroundings (e.g., the chapters by Flader, Meine, Thompson, and Stokowski). In several cases, these pleas for community are accompanied by warnings of the dangers of moral individualism and fragmentation and the resulting loss of land health and landscape-level thinking in conservation planning and action (e.g., the chapters by Freyfogle and Trombulak).

The Responsibilities of Stewardship

Finally, many of the chapters that follow argue for the necessity of the practice of intelligent stewardship in a reconstructed conservation. In a sense, the more theoretical contributions to this volume provide much of the conceptual justification for conservation stewardship in the twenty-first century, inasmuch as they offer readings of environmental thought and action that firmly embed human values and goals in the landscape. David Lowenthal’s recovery of George Perkins Marsh’s ideas about the nurturing of stew-ardship for present and future generations and Dizard’s point about the importance of responsible stewardship in the face of a constantly changing ecological order remind us of the costs of relinquishing our obligations to promote a sustainable and healthy environment through sensitive intervention in natural systems. Thompson’s chapter on the agrarian conservation vision, too, suggests how the tradition’s impulse to ensure that productive processes are passed down through the generations provides a normative framework for community-level stewardship. Diamant, Eugster, and Mitchell and, in their chapter, Mitchell and Brown discuss stewardship from a practitioner’s perspective and illustrate its continuing practical and conceptual significance in their fields.

These are some of the more significant themes we believe flow out of the nineteen contributed chapters in this volume. There are certainly many others, and we hope that part of the value of this book is its ability to inspire further discussion of the issues and arguments advanced herein. We believe that the chapters, taken together, demonstrate that a reconstructed conservation, one that draws upon the strengths of the tradition while revising and refitting it to meet the changed circumstances and needs of the present, can move us into a more positive relationship with our intellectual bequest and our biophysical surroundings. In this, we once again draw inspiration from John Dewey, who set the standard for such a process in his aforementioned Reconstruction in Philosophy:

A plea for reconstruction cannot, as far as I can see, be made without giving considerable critical attention to the background within which and in regard to which reconstruction is to take place. Far from being a sign of disesteem, this critical attention is an indispensable part of interest in the development of a philosophy that will do for our time and place what the great doctrines of the past did in and for the cultural media out of which they arose.⁹

The chapters in this book are organized in the following manner. Part II, Nature and Culture Reconsidered, contains chapters by Judd, McCullough, Dizard, and Vivanco and explores the contested meaning of the human presence in the landscape, including the question of how we are to cope with the lack of universally clear and absolute distinctions between nature and culture in the histories and practices of conservation. Part III, Reweaving the Tradition, brings together chapters by Thompson, Minteer, Flader, Taylor, Freyfogle, and Meine and is concerned with the historical refocusing of our conservation narratives and the assessment of their legacies for current and future inquiry and action. In part IV, New Methods and Models, contributions by Norton, Manning, Bengston and Iverson, Callicott, and Trombulak provide fresh analytic approaches relevant to understanding the values and science of conservation, including new ways of conceptualizing conservation goals on the landscape. Part V, Reconstructing Conservation Practice: Community and the Future of Conservation Stewardship, contains a series of chapters (by Stokowski; Mitchell and Brown; Diamant, Eugster, and Mitchell; and Lowenthal) that explore the growing dependence of conservation efforts on community action, including the leading role of stewardship ideals and behaviors in this process. In the concluding chapter, we present and discuss twelve emerging principles for a reconstructed conservation, distilled from the preceding chapters. We think these principles provide a useful summary of the book, and we hope they will stimulate further discussion and reflection on the conservation impulse in the years ahead.

We would like to acknowledge the generous support of The Woodstock Foundation, the National Park Service’s Conservation Study Institute, The Trust for Public Land, and the University of Vermont’s School of Natural Resources. We would also like to thank the following individuals for their suggestions and their commitment to this project over the course of its development: Don DeHayes, Rolf Diamant, David Donath, David Houghton, Nora Mitchell, Bryan Norton, and Bob Pepperman Taylor. We are grateful to our editors at Island Press, Barbara Dean, Barbara Youngblood, and Laura Carrithers, for their enthusiasm about this volume and their efforts in helping to bring it to fruition. Last, we thank Elizabeth Corley and Martha Manning for their good advice, kind patience, and unwavering support.

Part II

Nature and Culture Reconsidered

Chapter 2

Writing Environmental History from East to West

RICHARD W. JUDD

Environmental history emerged in the United States in the early 1970s as a subset of the country’s western history, having absorbed as its dominant themes the panorama of untrammeled nature and a vast public domain. Well into the 1980s, recruits came predominantly from this parent field, and environmental history continues to bear the imprint of these beginnings. Of the fifty-two articles about the United States published in the first five volumes of Environmental History (1996–2000), twenty focused on the West (including Alaska), thirteen on the country at large, eleven on the East, five on the Midwest, and three on the South. Just as the New England synthesis—Puritan cohesion, declension, Yankee individualism—dominates early American history, the western framework—Native harmony, frontier exploitation, conservation consciousness—provides the paradigm for environmental