-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Elizabeth D. Blum, Miles A. Powell. Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 235–237, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.235
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Environmentalism has often been seen as a bastion of liberal ideology. Miles A. Powell’s Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation, however, traces a dark and disturbing origin story of conservation, one of the mainstays of the environmental movement. Powell seeks to untangle connections between a century of conservation language, fears about the extinction of animals and white masculinity, immigration restriction and eugenics, and population control.
Taking a chronological approach beginning in the mid-1800s, Powell characterizes American elites as initially having a “fixation with taming lands and peoples, and destroying organisms that defied domesticity” (44). In a time when the West still presented a real threat to whites, civilization and domestication seemed safer ideologies. In the late 1800s, however, with the “end” of the frontier and increases in urbanization, industrialization, and immigration, white elites supported protecting wilderness as a testing ground for white masculinity, recreation, and sport hunting (46–47). Nonwhites, however, had to be excluded because they failed to use the land appropriately. Those who hunted animals for market or for food, conservationists maintained, “practiced unsporting methods” (94) or destroyed the “pristine” image of the land. In addition, since native-born whites perceived immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe as a threat to the white race, imperiled animals in wilderness areas “became a potent metaphor for the endangered white American” (80, 83).
