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Predecessor: Conservation
While Earth Day launched the idea of environmentalism in its present sense, the realization of the value of wilderness and an appreciation of the consequences of its destruction dates back several centuries in America. For example, as early as 1652, the city of Boston established a public water supply, a step followed in the next century by several towns in Pennsylvania. By 1800, 17 municipalities had taken similar measures to protect their citizens against unfit drinking sources. Still, anyone living in the great cities of New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Boston just after the American revolution could not escape the ill-effects of expanding urbanization: the stench of sewage in near-by rivers; the unwholesome presence of animal and human wastes underfoot; the odors of rotting food; the jangling shouts of vendors in narrow lanes; and the constant grinding of hooves and iron wagon wheels on unpaved streets.
Industrialism in the nineteenth century widened the impact of environmental degradation. Literary people were the first to sense the meaning of this trend. Herman Melville's epic novel Moby Dick (1851) and Henry David Thoreau's Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) emphasized, respectively, the power and the tranquility of nature. A second generation of writers, perhaps sobered by the final settlement of the American West, wrote without fictional guise. John Burroughs published 27 volumes of intimate, experiential nature essays. John Muir, the Scottish prophet of the rugged outdoors, set down his observations in a series of books, beginning with The Mountains of California in 1894.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who undertook a western camping trip with Muir in 1903, came to symbolize the campaign for conservation, which gained steadily in political popularity. During and after his Administration, the use and retention of natural resources became a preoccupation of government.
President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal enacted a number of natural resource measures. The Soil Conservation Service, founded in 1935, applied scientific practices to reduce the erosion of agricultural land. The depletion of animal life received recognition in the passage of the 1937 Pittman-Robertson Act, establishing a fund for state fish and wildlife programs from the proceeds of federal taxes on hunting and fishing equipment. Most ambitious of all, the Tennessee Valley Authority erected nine dams and a string of massive generating stations.