"Examines the life of Mira Lloyd Dock, a Pennsylvania conservationist and Progressive Era reformer. Explores a broad range of Dock's work, including forestry, municipal improvement, public health, and woman suffrage"--

A compelling and long-overdue exploration of the Progressive-era conservation movement, and its lasting effects on American culture, politics, and contemporary environmentalism The turn of the twentieth century caught America at a crossroads, shaking the dust from a bygone era and hurtling toward the promises of modernity. Factories, railroads, banks, and oil fields—all reshaped the American landscape and people. In the gulf between growing wealth and the ills of an urbanizing nation, the spirit of Progressivism emerged. Promising a return to democracy and a check on concentrated wealth, Progressives confronted this changing relationship to the environment—not only in the countryside but also in dense industrial cities and leafy suburbs. Drawing on extensive work in urban history and Progressive politics, Benjamin Heber Johnson weaves together environmental history, material culture, and politics to reveal the successes and failures of the conservation movement and its lasting legacy. By following the efforts of a broad range of people and groups—women’s clubs, labor advocates, architects, and politicians—Johnson shows how conservation embodied the ideals of Progressivism, ultimately becoming one of its most important legacies.

In Quantified, Whitworth draws lessons from the world's most tech-savvy, high-impact organizations to show how we can make real gains for the environment. The principles of his approach, dubbed quantified conservation, will be familiar to any thriving entrepreneur: situational awareness, bold outcomes, innovation and technology, data and analytics, and gain-focused investment. As President of The Freshwater Trust, Whitworth has put quantified conservation into practice, pioneering the model of a "do-tank" that is dramatically changing how rivers can get restored across the United States. The stories in Quantified highlight the most precious of resources--water--but they apply to any environmental effort. Whether in the realm of policy, agriculture, business, or philanthropy, Whitworth is charting a new course for conservation.

Conservation was the first nationwide political movement in American history to grapple with environmental problems like waste, pollution, resource exhaustion, and sustainability. At its height, the conservation movement was a critical aspect of the broader reforms undertaken in the Progressive Era (1890-1910), as the rapidly industrializing nation struggled to protect human health, natural beauty, and "national efficiency." This highly effective Progressive Era movement was distinct from earlier conservation efforts and later environmentalist reforms. Conservation in the Progressive Era places conservation in historical context, using the words of participants in and opponents to the movement. Together, the documents collected here reveal the various and sometimes conflicting uses of the term "conservation" and the contested nature of the reforms it described. This collection includes classic texts by such well-known figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir, as well as texts from lesser-known but equally important voices that are often overlooked in environmental studies: those of rural communities, women, and the working class. These lively selections provoke unexpected questions and ideas about many of the significant environmental issues facing us today.

This book assesses the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and identifies lessons learned for governance and policy through this new and innovative approach to collaborative forest management. Unlike anything else in US public land management, the CFLRP is a nationwide program that requires collaboration throughout the life of national forest restoration projects, joining agency partners and local stakeholder groups in a kind of decade-long restoration marriage. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the governance dynamics of the program, examining: questions about collaborative governance processes and the dynamics of trust, accountability and capacity; how scientific information is used in making decisions and integrated into adaptive management processes; and the topic of collaboration through implementation, an underdeveloped area of collaborative governance literature. Bringing together chapters from a community of social science and policy researchers who have conducted studies across multiple CFLRP projects, this volume generates insights, not just about the program, but also about dynamics that are central to collaborative and landscape approaches to land management and relevant for broader practice. This volume is a timely and important contribution to environmental governance scholarship. It will be of interest to researchers and students of natural resource management, environmental governance, and forestry, as well as practitioners and policy makers involved in forest and ecosystem restoration efforts, and collaborative natural resource management more broadly.

Neil M. Maher examines the history of one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's boldest and most successful experiments, the Civilian Conservation Corps, describing it as a turning point both in national politics and in the emergence of modern environmentalism.

A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly ngo workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both. West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

Water Conservation in the Era of Global Climate Change reviews key issues surrounding climate change and water resources. The book brings together experts from a variety of fields and perspectives, providing a comprehensive view on how climate change impacts water resources, how water pollution impacts climate change, and how to assess potential hazards and success stories on managing and addressing current issues in the field. Topics also include assessing policy impacts, innovative water reuse strategies, and information on impacts on fisheries and agriculture including food scarcity. This book is an excellent tool for researchers and professionals in Climate Change, Climate Services and Water Resources, and those trying to combat the impacts and issues related to Global and Planetary Change. - Covers a wide range of theoretical and practical issues related to how climate change impacts water resources and adaptation, with extended influence on agriculture, food and water security, policymaking, etc. - Reviews mathematical tools and simulations models on predicting potential hazards from climate change in such a way they can be useful to readers from a variety of levels of mathematical expertise - Examines the potential impacts on agriculture and drinking water quality - Includes case studies of successful management of water and pollutants that contribute to climate change

A post-capitalist manifesto for conservation Conservation needs a revolution. This is the only way it can contribute to the drastic transformations needed to come to a truly sustainable model of development. The good news is that conservation is ready for revolution. Heated debates about the rise of the Anthropocene and the current ‘sixth extinction’ crisis demonstrate an urgent need and desire to move beyond mainstream approaches. Yet the conservation community is deeply divided over where to go from here. Some want to place ‘half earth’ into protected areas. Others want to move away from parks to focus on unexpected and ‘new’ natures. Many believe conservation requires full integration into capitalist production processes. Building a razor-sharp critique of current conservation proposals and their contradictions, Büscher and Fletcher argue that the Anthropocene challenge demands something bigger, better and bolder. Something truly revolutionary. They propose convivial conservation as the way forward. This approach goes beyond protected areas and faith in markets to incorporate the needs of humans and nonhumans within integrated and just landscapes. Theoretically astute and practically relevant, The Conservation Revolution offers a manifesto for conservation in the twenty-first century—a clarion call that cannot be ignored.