{"id":462,"date":"2026-06-29T09:07:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T09:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=462"},"modified":"2026-06-29T09:07:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T09:07:19","slug":"how-america-became-the-progenitor-of-environmentalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=462","title":{"rendered":"How America Became the Progenitor of Environmentalism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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America is a young country. I have plenty of friends who\u2014like Jane Fonda, my fellow contributor to this special issue\u2014make note of the fact that they\u2019ve been alive for a third of its 250-year history as a nation. One thing this has meant is that America came to full consciousness\u2014literary and political\u2014in the period when we were turning its forests and topsoil into money. Unlike in Northern Europe or the countries of the Mediterranean, where these transformations were ancient history by the time people were writing books, the transformations happened here in relative modernity, which explains why one of America\u2019s great gifts to the Western world has been the environmental idea.<\/p>\n

Read more January 12, 1991: Congress Votes to Send Troops to Expel Iraq From Kuwait<\/a><\/p>\n

That Indigenous people had long since hit upon this complex of ideas almost goes without saying. But its slow rediscovery, beginning, I think, with Henry David Thoreau, has been a crucial part of the American story. Thoreau was little read in his time; not so George Perkins Marsh, whose Man and Nature<\/em>, published two years after Thoreau\u2019s death, stands as one of the first decisive works of environmental exhortation. Marsh\u2019s understanding that, by cutting down vast swaths of timber, humans were altering the temperature and aridity of our landscape led pretty directly to early experiments in land conservation\u2014things like the protection of the Adirondacks. And they helped charge the air that Teddy Roosevelt, the first giant of conservation, breathed so deeply.<\/p>\n

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250 Years of Searching for a More Perfect Union<\/h4>\n