After World War II, the center of environmental politics shifted from Progressive-era “conservation,” which stressed efficient use and management of natural resources, to a newer “environmentalism,” which stressed issues such as pollution, environmental degradation, and the preservation of wilderness.
New groups and leaders came forward, and the role of government in addressing environmental problems greatly expanded. As environmental questions moved into the policy arena, a new rank of environmental professionals emerged, sometimes generating tension with the grassroots movement of concerned citizens that developed during the same period.
Although the conservation movement benefited in the 1930s from a range of New Deal programs, it received low priority during and after World War II. When Dwight D. Eisenhower became president—in the midst of rapid economic expansion, rising affluence, cheap energy, and escalating consumer spending—his administration actively dismantled older New Deal conservation policies. Representative actions of the era included auctioning off federal lands, the defeat of proposals for new public power projects modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the privatization of publicly owned energy resources.
Nevertheless, the seeds of many important new issues took root in the immediate postwar years. Pennsylvania’s Donora-Webster “killer smog” of 1948, for example, killed 20 people and raised unsettling questions about air pollution and public health. Highly publicized nuclear tests created awareness of the dangers of radioactive fallout and generated a successful drive to ban atmospheric nuclear testing. The negative environmental effects of population pressure, too, gained a wide audience in Fairfield Osborn’s best-selling Our Plundered Planet (1948). Perhaps the most important work of the period, however, was Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, published posthumously in 1949. Especially popular among environmental activists of a later era, the book eloquently argued that all people, as members of a “biotic community,” had ethical responsibilities to maintain the health and diversity of the natural world.
Leopold, whose life work was grounded in the earlier conservation movement, also embodied the ability of conservationist groups founded before World War II to adapt to (and shape) the newer environmental agenda. For example, Howard Zahniser, executive director of the Wilderness Society, drafted the Wilderness Act, a key piece of environmental legislation passed in September 1964. The National Wildlife Federation, originally founded to promote hunters’ interests, increasingly advocated environmental concerns that sometimes seemed to contradict its advocacy of hunters’ rights. Most important was the Sierra Club, founded by John Muir at the beginning of the 20th century in California to foster an appreciation for the “cathedrals” of American wilderness. Under the leadership of David Brower, the Sierra Club championed the cause of wilderness preservation, spearheading drives against large dams in places like Echo Park (1955), Glen Canyon (1963), and the lower Grand Canyon (1966). The Sierra Club also took the lead in popularizing breathtaking nature photography, and especially landscape photography, to build support for preserving and protecting wild nature.
The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, however, constituted the major catalyst for grassroots environmentalism. The book touched a nerve by dra-
Smog obscures view of lower portion of downtown highrises, Los Angeles, California, 1966. (Library of Congress)
Matizing the dangers that ubiquitous “miracle” pesticides such as DDT posed to the health of plant and animal life. Carson was careful to moderate her position, objecting only to the indiscriminate use of pesticides and to what she saw as the hubris of trying to “control” nature, but her book prompted a firestorm of controversy and fierce resistance to her claims. Despite well-financed opposition, her work raised enough public concern to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ban DDT by 1972.
Through the 1960s, the American public became increasingly concerned with environmental issues, catching the attention of national political leaders. Big business, too, often sought federal regulations to standardize the increasing agglomeration of local and state environmental regulations. As a result, the 1960s and early 1970s saw a wave of significant new federal environmental laws, including the Wilderness Act (1964), the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act (1965), the Water Quality Act (1965), the Air Quality Act (1967), the Clean Air Act Amendments (1970), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (1972).
By the late 1960s, however, a growing number of Americans became disillusioned with regulatory and
Technical solutions to environmental problems, leading them to call instead for personal solutions to environmental ills. Criticizing the United States as a “society of waste,” some members of the era’s counterculture called for a movement “back to the land.” Pleading for heightened “ecological consciousness” and adopting Native Americans as icons for harmonious coexistence with nature, these new environmentalists read publications like the Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News and promoted decreased consumption and community-based recycling centers, stressing lifestyle issues over regulating industrial polluters. This different emphasis created an uneasy tension between “new” and “traditional” environmentalists, and set the stage for the changes and debates within environmentalism during the 1970s.
Further reading: Samuel Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
—Christopher W. Wells
World History
