green movement (extra)

The history of the green movement, like that of many other political and social movements, is just one part of America's complex history. Though the conservation movement had European roots, many observers maintain that the United States has emerged as the world's leader in the green history and environmentalism.

If America does in fact deserve credit for leading the green movement, what made the United States such a crucible for environmentalism? It's partly due to the immigrants who came to the North American continent in the colonial era, and partly the natural beauty of the land they found when they crossed the Atlantic.

America, of course, didn't invent the green movement any more than it invented trees. The basic principles of sustainable forestry management, for example, were known throughout Europe (especially Germany, France and England) since the medieval era. Farming communities in Asia practiced soil conservation through terrace farming and other sustainable agricultural practices.

English writer Thomas Malthus, in his oft-quoted An Essay on the Principle of Population, alarmed much of 18th-century Europe by proposing that an increase in human population beyond sustainable limits would result in a catastrophic plunge in population due to famine and/or disease. Malthus' writings would inform much of the alarm over the "population bomb" roughly 200 years later.

But it was after the colonization of the Americas by Europeans that writers and philosophers were among the first to propose that wilderness had an intrinsic value beyond it usefulness to humans. While fisheries, hunting grounds and timber stands were important to civilization, visionaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau proposed that "in wildness is the preservation of the world" (Thoreau). Their belief that nature possesses a spiritual element that transcended human utility gave these men and their followers the label "Transcendentalists."