a 'wonderfull order and ballance': NATURAL HISTORY AND THE BEGINNINGS OF FOREST CONSERVATION IN AMERICA, 1730–1830

RICHARD W. JUDD

ABSTRACT

This article traces the origins of conservationist thinking among a group of scientists who constructed a system of American natural history while exploring the transappalachian frontier between 1730 and 1830. Despite the importance of conservationist thought in American environmental history, we know too little about how its major precepts—balance, interrelatedness, and the practical and spiritual importance of nature—were formulated prior to the Darwinian era. The early conservationists deserve more attention because they provided a firm foundation for ideas that took shape and triumphed in the second half of the nineteenth century.

IN 1945 THE AMERICAN Philosophical Society held a symposium to showcase its collection of materials relating to early American conservation. The conference highlighted a rich body of documents representing a variety of American and foreign naturalists from an era that spanned the writings of Mark Catesby in the 1730s and John James Audubon in the 1830s. Focusing on such notable figures as John and William Bartram (1699–1777; 1739–1822), François and François-André Michaux (1746–1802; 1770–1855), Alexander Wilson (1766–1813), Benjamin Silliman (1799–1864), Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859), and Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815), they revealed a variety of concerns about the forests and other resources in the eastern United States. Although the values and ideas articulated by these early explorer-naturalists might seem foreign in today's ecology circles, the 1945 conference provided a wealth of evidence that the roots of American conservation go deep into the Enlightenment century bracketed by Catesby and Audubon.1	1
Surprisingly, environmental historians have made little effort to follow up on the research unearthed by the 1945 conference, and, in fact, we have only an elemental understanding of how the conservation idea originated in America. At the beginning of the twentieth century the United States emerged as a pioneer in nature conservation, having created the world's first national parks, its first public game refuges, its first national forests, and its first full-blown preservationist and conservationist ideologies. Despite the global importance of these achievements, their history usually is reduced to a few obvious benchmarks. In most accounts, the conservation idea first took shape with the literary and artistic works of Romantics such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Feni-more Cooper, George Catlin, and Karl Bodmer, and it was given a scientific grounding by George Perkins Marsh, whose definitive work, Man and Nature (1864), traced the various implications of forest destruction across the natural landscape. From there, a string of individuals such as J. Sterling Morton, the father of Arbor Day, Franklin Hough, our first federal forester, and Gifford Pinchot and John Muir prepared the way for the Progressive-era conservation movement. But this is a tale of several dozen men, most with exceptional personalities, and it begs the question: Can such a world-shaping idea flow from such a thin national tradition? It seems unlikely. But if we add to this narrative the early nineteenth-century naturalists who first voiced the concerns that echoed down through the rest of the century, a fuller history of the conservation idea emerges.	2
Figure 1. Catalog of Species. John D. Godman, American Natural History (Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & I Lea, 1826). In the years between 1730 and 1830, American naturalists pieced together a remarkably detailed description of America's natural landscapes. This scientific achievement, although not well understood today, was fertile ground for conservation thought.   . . . There are about 13682 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.