From Walden Pond to Love Canal

...But in another sense, they did not budge an inch from the main line laid down through Nineteenth Century America: They did not question the conquest of wilderness as the American goal—its conversion to garden and town, its taming by civilized life...

...Carol Polsgrove, an editor of Mother Jones magazine and a contributing editor of The Progressive, has written frequently on environmental issues...

...They were hunters and fishermen for whom wilderness had a definite use, a recreational use...

...In the first year of publication, LaFollette wrote of the awakening, under President Theodore Roosevelt, to the "enormous waste with which we are carrying forward our wonderful progress...

...Most did not confront the possibility that the essential direction of environmental change, no matter under whose control and no matter how moderated, might run counter to the public interest...

...How should we use our land, our water, our forests and fields...

...But after the wilderness cleansed their psyches and restored their souls, they returned to the cities...

...But the new, broader-based environmentalism has its dubious aspects, too...

...The back-to-the-landers are our variant strain...

...It bypasses the individual and the cosmos...

...To see these questions clearly, we need to ask others, even more basic: What kind of people do we want to be, and how should we spend our days...

...Yet the idea now has an ever greater chance to sink in...

...These discoveries are prompting a grass-roots challenge to corporate power...

...To build up great factory-fired cities, the nation needed development of a massive infrastructure: power sources, transportation routes, a dependable timber supply...

...It is easy to dismiss the back-to-the-land movement on the ground that our population is too dense to scatter city dwellers about the landscape—certainly there would be no wilderness left (a fact that might not bother back-to-the-landers, who tend to be gardeners at heart...

...There was yet a more radical line of environmentalists: true antimodernists who questioned the very slant of the American economy...

...On occasion, antimodernism has surfaced as something more tangible than a habit of mind: The back-to-the-land movement has actually tried to preserve or reinstate a small-scale agrarian economy...

...Since few environmental problems are strictly local, local efforts to solve them can only succeed if they lead to renewed national efforts...

...Still, there is cause for hope in the essential reality that Americans now seem more aware of themselves as physical beings, their fate inextricably linked to the fate of the Earth—not actors on a set that can be changed or replaced at will...

...In a fine history, John Muir and His Legacy, John Fox states the main antimodernist point: "Modern progressimplying cities, technology, and human arrogance— [is] ambiguous at best, probably nothing more than a harmful illusion that exchanged sanity and wholeness for less important physical improvements...

...here they could go far back in time, imagining themselves in the Stone Age...

...A concern for a healthful urban environment does not necessarily lead to a desire to preserve wilderness...

...And now environmentalists had on their side some scientists who, having helped make today's technological world, saw what they had done and were not sure it was good...

...The real irony is not that we ended up with environmental destruction on a scale private enterprise might not have matched...

...that was predictable...

...They remind us that we can live in a circumscribed place, with a few people we know well, with a minimum of getting and spending— and be happy...

...For a while in the 1960s and the 1970s, it seemed that the back-to-the-land movement was gathering strength...

...Wisely, the Federal Government would build a better world: neaten the mess the Nineteenth Century had made of things, and, like a thrifty householder, turn America into a tidy garden, with woodlots here and vegetable gardens there...

...Corporations can no longer assume that Americans will accept any and all environmental abuse in return for jobs...

...Pinchot-style conservationists did not question the American march of material progress— the industrialization, urbanization, and nationalization of the economy...

...They remind us that there is more than one sort of human society...

...The challenge to industry has broadened the base of the environmental movement, bringing in a wider spectrum of races and classes...

...How should we use the land, water, forests and fields of other countries with which our economy is linked...

...It is easier to find single-evil solutions: If we could just get rid of nuclear power, if we could just get rid of toxic wastes, if we could just make corporations responsible—all would be well...

...In The Progressive's 1970 special issue, "The Crisis of Survival," he made the argument he later developed in The Closing Circle: "Environmental pollution is not to be regarded as an unfortunate, but incidental, byproduct of the growth of population, the intensification of production, or of technological progress...

...It is, rather, an intrinsic feature of the very technology which we have developed to enhance productivity...

...The preservationists took exception to the rush to develop America...

...They acted out the romantic adoration of nature that had seized Western culture at the first crackle of the industrial era...

...Being alone or with a few fellows in a large expanse of forest and mountain, hearing no roar of auto traffic and getting from one place to another on foot, they experienced a radically different mode of being in the world...

...While he did not shift the direction of American history, the individual Americans he inspired have saved from extinction a way of thinking about life that we may one day need for our own preservation...

...For one thing, a shift in regulatory responsibility from Federal to state and local governments signals a loss of faith in Federal protection...

...But the irony is more apparent than real...

...All this would be done righteously, not for the petty profit of private industry but for "the people...

...In subsequent articles, the magazine outlined its position: The Government must step in and turn the scramble into an ordered march...

...Yet many of these preservationists were, in their own way, also pragmatists...

...He cared not a fig for the uses of nature...

...From Walden Pond to Love Canal They made a wasteland and called it progress BY CAROL POLSGROVE When Robert LaFollette started his magazine in 1909, some already understood that Americans had devastated a continent...

...The more active among them went from demonstrating against the war, as it wound down, to demonstrating against nuclear power...

...In the light of our dawning ecological consciousness, what should we make and how...

...And, like the early conservation measures approved by the progressives, their program assumed continued development of the American economy along that main line laid down in the past—toward ever greater technological and social complexity...

...The fight against pesticides, to be followed by fights against other invisible dangers—radiation, toxic wastes—pitted environmentalists directly against corporate America...

...Today's environmentalists may find it ironic that one arm of their movement— the arm with the most muscle—should have brought into being such entities as the Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S...

...In oratorical tones, he described the lamentable state of affairs: "We have looked upon the Earth's resources as inexhaustible...

...Army Corps of Engineers, and the Tennessee Valley Authority...

...Ecological consciousness is spreading...

...The progressive conservationists of the early Twentieth Century were in one sense radical: They rejected the notion that private property rights are absolute and argued that some things belong to us all...

...In an early form, George H. Maxwell's Homecrofter proposal in 1906, the movement had a decidedly socialist flavor, not in the Marxist tradition but in that of the Nineteenth Century Utopian socialists...

...As the first president of the Sierra Club, founded to save California's wilderness, Muir was the spiritual father of preservationist environmentalists...

...Wilderness should be saved so animals could live there so humans could hunt them...

...Furthermore, the degree of affinity between the new urban-environment activists and the wilderness preservationists is not yet so clear...

...It is hard to know what to do with the thought that our whole technological civilization— our economy based on the human transformation of nature—is bad for us...

...he wrote...

...As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man...

...Here was an escape from urbanizing and suburbanizing America...

...It confines its attention chiefly to society...

...but we now learn that lands in the old world which have been farmed since the beginning of the Christian era are less exhausted than fields tilled by us for fifty years We have acted like tenants-at-sufferance of a farm, 'skinning' it of its best, and spoiling it for the next comer...

...Alongside the Audubon Society sprung up feistier preservationist groups such as Greenpeace and, later, Earth First...

...Rachel Carson's landmark Silent Spring (1962) signaled this merger, setting forth the evidence that disturbing the natural order endangers human beings...

...More than nuclear power, the dumping of toxic wastes may be the issue that does the trick...

...A later back-to-the-lander, Scott Nearing, set out the difference between his socialism and Marxism: "Marxism has laid great emphasis on economic development...

...Writers like the Nearings or Kentucky's Wendell Berry, who praise the distinctiveness of rural life, offer a radical challenge that should not be taken too literally...

...others—or the same oneswithdrew into their own form of the simple life, which sometimes combined urban bohemianism with antimodernist environmentalism...

...The next step, a giant one, is to develop an economy that is consistent with that recognition...

...Meanwhile, the environmental movement had already linked up with the public health movement...

...To Muir, the proposal was sacrilege: "Dam Hetch Hetchy...

...A combination of factors—the sexual revolution, drug use, resistance to the Vietnam war, and boredom with the 1950s lifestyle—produced among the young a counterculture that rejected the American way...

...The new activists assumed the people's right, asserted years before by the progressives, to control environmental change for the public good...

...The back-to-the-landers are like varied wheat and corn strains kept multiplying in seed banks, while monoculture rules farming...

...LaFollette took the side of Roosevelt's trusted adviser Gifford Pinchot and other pragmatic environmentalists who thought of conservation not as preservation but as wise, nonwasteful use of resources—damming rivers for electrical power, digging canals to make farmland of deserts...

...A prudent system of managed waterways and power lines would gracefully link nature to industry...

...They tried not to work for wages and often turned nomad, trekking down highways, their packs on their backs, as if all America— paved and unpaved—were a wilderness to explore...

...We have thought our farmers the best in the world...

...Marshaling scientific evidence, environmentalists challenged environmental destruction and successfully lobbied for the Environmental Policy Act, the clean air and water acts, the Occupational Safety and Health Act...

...To him nature was not a resource but a fine thing in itself...

...In fact, they actively helped usher in the next stage of economic growth—urbanization and industrialization...

...At the rate things were going, LaFollette foresaw, the great American scramble for progress would come to a screeching halt...

...if no variant strains remain in existence, there will be no more wheat or corn...

...Indeed, city dwellers might prefer to scatter unhealthful industries into wilderness areas, away from population centers, as has been done in the case of nuclear power...

...But that kind of criticism misses the point...

...Still, environmentalists shrink from taking that bull of an idea by the horns...

...Such homocentric attitudes dominated amateur conservation efforts from the 1920s to the 1950s, when they began to lose ground to the purer wilderness advocates in such organizations as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society...

...but the truth is that they are in process of rapid exhaustion...

...Let us, they said, keep some places wild...

...The basic drive of the pragmatic conservationists, from the beginning of the century until World War II, was to put the Earth to human use, to harness nature...

...Thus they laid the theoretical groundwork for allying the environmental movement with the peace and women's movements...

...The real irony is that the public good ended up being so little served even in the narrow ways the progressives intended...

...Love Canal turned out to be not a solitary tragedy, affecting a lone unsuspecting community...

...Instead of transferring wealth to those who did not have it, many of the great public works projects of the first half of this century gave the wealthy a chance to enhance their fortunes at public expense...

...One day the monoculture may be wiped out by circumstances or disease...

...The environment would be altered, no question about that—but not willy-nilly...

...Feminists—Susan Griffin, for instance, in Women and Nature—added to radical action a radical theory, connecting the exploitation of nature with men's domination of women and linking that, in turn, with the militarization of society...

...While wilderness organizations remain predominantly affluent and white, polls show environmental concern cutting across race and class lines...

...By 1909, Muir was in California, fighting a losing battle against a project Pinchot supported, the damming of Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park to create a water and power source for San Francisco...

...Rather, communities across the country are discovering the legacy of thirty years of the chemical economy—the toxic contamination of land and water...

...Usually city-dwellers, these mountaineers and backpackers and birders found in the wilderness the same virtues the hunters found there, but they saw these virtues as ends in themselves...

...They stand firm in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau: He lived on Walden Pond for only two years and two months and went home often to his mother for dinner...

...But Pinchot had an adversary: John Muir, an immigrant from Scotland who first met the wilderness in southeastern Wisconsin...

...Storming power plants or lying down in the streets, the nuke protesters brought a new militancy to the environmental movement...

...Muir stood square in the way of the march of progress...

...Biologist Barry Commoner was one of the earliest scientists to sound the cautionary note...

...They joined together in rural or city communes to live on brown rice and smoke pot...

...In a basic document of the homestead movement, Living the Good Life, Nearing and his wife Helen wrote: "We are far from assuming that the ruralists will be able to set up a social communal alternative to capitalist urbanism What we did feel and what we still assert is that it is worthwhile for the individual who is rejected by a disintegrating urban community to formulate a theory of conduct and to put into practice a program of action which will enable him or her to live as decently as possible under existing circumstances...

...Some demonstrated...