Utilitarian Anthropocentric Management Strategies

From the United States to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Russian empire and the infant Soviet Union, utilitarian anthropocentric management strategies were aimed at maximizing or sustaining resource yields. The hints about ecological integrities and broadranging ethical rights were only accepted as promising seeds by a few enthusiastic activists. Foremost amongst these was American poet-scientistphilosopher John Muir, who championed the cause of wilderness conservation and questioned the audacity of humans to value themselves above the rest of unified Creation. Writing Custom E-Marketing Essay is a challenge. Obtain reliable assistance with your college essays! Dominant public images of wilderness had gradually changed from the initial European settlers’ outright hostility and fear to an increasing show of respect during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The transformation was based largely on aesthetic, nationalistic and scientific arguments, aided by the political influence wielded by those urban clubs and societies which had become focused on natural history and an indulgence in outdoor recreation. Wilderness addicts, Muir amongst them, were successful backers of innovative legislation for the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872.

Muir’s radical egalitarianism was tempered when he took issue, as a ‘preservationist’, with the astute conservationists whose ‘progressive’ notions of efficiency sat more comfortably with the politicians’ and industrialists’ aspirations for a new society. A leading evangelist of this ‘Gospel of Efficiency’ was federal forester Gifford Pinchot, who favoured ‘use but wise use’ policies of resource management. Pinchot’s forceful representations put public forestry in the vanguard of reform, and a number of other government agencies followed the forester’s lead. His framework was adapted from prior French, German and British Empire approaches, but there was no denying the special reception accorded in the USA to his proposals for ‘sustained yield management’. Winning the approbation of President Theodore Roosevelt, this utilitarian line came to dominate the first modern conservation movement and set a model for other countries in the New and Old Worlds. The battle lines were drawn in 1908 over the plans of the San Franciscan authorities to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the Yosemite National Park—proclaimed in 1890, it had been a personal triumph for Muir and his followers—and the controversy went unresolved for five years. Muir won the support of California’s newly formed environmental activist organization, the Sierra Club; he was opposed by City Hall, Pinchot and a daunting phalanx of backers from the ‘use but wise use’ school. Free Essay about Cause and Effect and working secrets on writing by writers! Shelving or suppressing his ecological and ethical principles to enter the political minefield, Muir adopted a more pragmatic line to emphasize anthropocentric ‘preservationism’ on several grounds—aesthetic and recreational (that is, with scenery conceived as a resource); spiritual nourishment (rest, regeneration, uplifting experiences); and catchment protection (the need to regulate the hydrological cycle in an insecure environment).

In this skirmish the utilitarians triumphed; but in a war which had only just begun, first the narrow preservationist stance and, ultimately, those deeper philosophical arguments which had been set aside by Muir, were to emerge as virile challengers on the national and international stage.