Of That Irreducible Terrain (Part I)
As the environmental movement merges with a parallel social justice movement and joins with indigenous movements, history can provide a valuable genealogy and the rootedness of ancestry, just as we look to the past to understand the development of species.
-Paul Hawken (Blessed Unrest, 2007)
In 2007, Paul Hawken wrote about the potency of what he called the “largest social movement in history” in his book, Blessed Unrest. This movement is without name, global in scale, and formed of a great merging of social and environmental action streams. Almost two decades on, this great coalescing continues and offers a glimmer of hope in these otherwise volatile and foreboding times. Extreme weather disasters, a global pandemic, war of aggression between sovereign Nations, an authoritarian renaissance, forced mass migrations, unprecedented species extinction—all are daunting realities of our world today. Amid this volatility and uncertainty there is promise in the amalgamation of social and ecological ideals under a prevailing sense of justice, democracy, and love for our shared home, planet Earth. This grand movement for the common good is not clear, linear, or simple. As Hawken describes, it is an amorphous phenomenon, ever-changing and dynamic. It roils, shifts, learns, emerges, recedes, and adapts. But it carries on, ever bending the long arc of time toward freedom and equality. How will this dynamic phenomenon manifest in these turbulent times? What might be gleaned by tracing a movement’s lineage—such as land conservation—to its historical roots? Are there lessons to be learned in a collective quest for a more resilient, just, and restorative future?
Entangled and Discordant Heritage
The modern U.S. environmental movement took form in the 1960’s and 70’s in the wake of “better living through chemistry”, or so the DuPont Corporation began selling in 1935. Earth Day was founded in April 1970 and over the next three years the pillars of federal environmental law—Clean Air and Water Acts, and the Endangered Species Act—were passed through Congress. The environmental movement, however, includes an older branch in its genealogical tree, one that grew out of the rampant exploitation and consumption of nature’s gifts during the founding and rise of the United States. From European discovery and colonization to expansion and industrialization, four centuries of privatizing, exploiting, and consuming Earth’s bounty eventually gave rise to the countervailing impulse of conservation. Land and wildlife conservation in the U.S. has been an active and growing movement since the 19th century. Its legacy and impact are profound, with over 477,000 square miles, or 13% of the entire US land area, under some form of public or private protection today. But its beginnings also parallel the historic atrocities in which today’s social justice and Indigenous movements in the U.S. are rooted, and land was often at the crux of these painful events.
In 1872, President Grant signed the protection for Yellowstone Park into law, the first such Federal law of its kind. This precedent evolved and grew into the National Park system, hailed as America’s best idea.[i] The Grant administration, however, also enabled a period of acutely violent and indiscriminate military campaigns against Indigenous people of the great plains and appropriation of their lands, including Yellowstone itself. War on the plains Indians was cruel and genocidal as evidenced by the systematic slaughter—to the point of near extinction—of the prolific buffalo herds that shaped the landscape. The wholesale extermination of these animals was intended as a fatal blow against the plains Indians’ way-of-life and lives, as it was well understood that buffalo were essential to the People’s physical, cultural, and spiritual well-being. In the reported words of U.S. military commander, General Phillip Sheridan, during an address to the Texas legislature in 1867, “let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring about a lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.”[ii] One might expect outrage and condemnation by early conservationists at the brutal, wholesale slaughter of this iconic American species, Bison bison. But it seems this was not the case. In 1901, the seminal wilderness champion and founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir, would write, “I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things they had to give way to better cattle.”[iii] Theodore Roosevelt, another “wilderness warrior” as chronicled in Douglas Brinkley’s biography of the same title, is given credit as an early savior of the buffalo. Though, as Brinkley also notes, he was also a “premier champion of Anglo-American settlement of North America” and supported military efforts to clear away the plains Tribes “like so many weeds.”
One of the earliest clarion calls for wildlife, water, and forest conservation in the U.S. came from George Perkins Marsh’s, Man and Nature, written in 1864. Man and Nature was a pioneering work with prescient ecological insight. It is now 170 years since Marsh warned,
“the Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant … and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence … would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climate excess, as to threaten the deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.”
That same year, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order Number 15 in the wake of emancipation and his March to the Sea to capture Savannah, Georgia. The Special Order stated,
“the islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.”
This Order was essentially made at the behest of a group of Black ministers convened by General Sherman four days prior to the decree. When asked how freed slaves might best take care of themselves and maintain their freedom, the ministers responded, “the way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” This original promise of reparations was never realized. Special Field Order Number 15 was rescinded less than a year later by incoming President Andrew Johnson, and the possessory titles to 400,000 acres held by 40,000 African families reverted to Confederate oligarchs.[iv] The first footnote of chapter one in Man and Nature references historical vignettes from the social unrest of 17th century Europe. Yet the footnote seems to speak directly to Field Order 15 and emancipation as it cites “civil and ecclesiastical tyranny”, the cruel impact of a peasantry that “became the property of inflexible, ignorant, indolent masters”, and what is deserved by those who are “attached to the soil” and work it with “indominable perseverance.”
In 1887, Massachusetts Senator, Henry L. Dawes, championed the General Allotment Act, which turned great tracts of collectively inhabited Indigenous territories into fragmented parcels to be owned by individual tribe members as private property. Often referred to as the Dawes Act, it affectively left Indian families isolated on small portions of formerly expansive lands granted by treaty, where they were expected to subsist by homesteading and farming what was often barren ground. At the same time, large swaths of treaty-granted land were deemed to be “excess” and flagrantly taken for settler homesteading and governmental control of natural resources. Ultimately, the Indigenous land-base was reduced by millions of acres. Black Elk, legendary holy man of the Oglala Lakota people, and his friend and collaborator, John Neidhardt, describe the era vividly in their work, Black Elk Speaks—“So the flood of Wasichus [white settlers], dirty with bad deeds, gnawed away half the island that was left to us.” While the Allotment Act unfolded, Dawes’s Massachusetts counterpart in the Senate, George F. Hoar, became the inaugural President of The Trustees of Public Reservations in 1891, establishing one of the nation’s first land conservancies. The founding of The Trustees of Public Reservations was the vision of a young landscape architect, Charles Eliot. It was a true social innovation of the time that aligned with a spirit of independence and commonweal. Conservation, from Eliot’s perspective, was not only the task of the federal Government to secure the grand natural cathedrals of the west, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, but a responsibility of individual citizens to act locally on behalf of nature. Eliot’s 1890 letter to the editor in Garden & Forest magazine implored, “lovers of Nature should now rally to preserve for themselves and all the people as many as possible of these scenes of natural beauty which, by great good fortune, still exist near their doors.” Ironically, for a Trustee of “public reservations”, Senator Hoar was a staunch supporter of his colleague’s Allotment legislation.
Knowing where we have come from can help shape where we are headed and what might emerge from the tumult of today’s blessed unrest. As a land trust practitioner, the lesson I find tangled in these snippets of history is one of humanity and humility, or the seeming lack thereof. The compassion for wildlife and reverence for a certain wild and scenic quality of the American landscape rarely included the humans that lived and worked closest to the earth, nor did it seem to stem from a humble sense-of-place and kinship.
[i] The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, is the title of a 2010 documentary film series directed and produced by Ken Burns. In the film Burns credits writer and environmental historian, Wallace Stegner, with coining the phrase. Though Stegner himself credits the phrase to James Bryce, the early 20th century British ambassador to the U.S..
[ii] From the papers of Martin S. Garretson, Denver Public Library; in, The Great Migrations, by Georges Blond, 1956.
[iii] In, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement, Dorceta Taylor, 2016.
[iv] The Truth Behind ’40 Acres and a Mule’, by Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., accessed online at, www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/, 2024.