Environmentalism In The 18th Century

What is ‘Environmentalism’?
In the 18th century, it was discovered that there is an existing link between the forest and the water balance of the soil. That discovery led to beginning of modern environmental awareness. From the very beginning the tandem of water and forest (excluding air) is a dominant and important resource used by many people, and it is with water and forest usage, in particular, that environmental problems become a political issue early on. Higher authorities are trying to find a solution for these problems, in some cases created by them in the first place. Human always try to maximize the use of the environment, leading to environmental problems. One of these problems is turning the environment into a private property.
George Perkins Marsh’ said that the Earth was given to man for usufruct, not for consumption or waste. Man must be cautious to using their resource that future generation could still use it. 1890, Gifford Pinchot became the first head of the U. S. Forest Service—under President Theodore Roosevelt—and a strong voice for conservation. Gifford’s’ conservation meant using nature but in such way that it was not destroyed; his aim was ‘the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run’. (Easton,
Conservation is the antecedent of environmentalism. Resource conservation lost some of its political steam under the administration of President Taft and his secretary of the interior, Richard Ballinger, and was submerged in government bureaucracy for some twenty years (List, 1993). Environmentalism had begun building in the United States after the Dust Bowl era and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Administration. The Americans had realized that handling the environment requires a degree of knowledge, power and money that only the national government could facilitate. But it was interrupted by the World War II. Modern environmentalism begun in 1960’s when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published. ‘The end of the world is imminent’, these is believed for at least three millennia by the world. This apocalypse force people to see what’s happening in the environment, and to do something about the crisis the environment is suffering. The introduction to Carson’s Silent Spring is exceptionally potent because the imagery of nuclear detonation redefined popular conception of the end of the world, whilst the fear of lethal fission products such as strontium-90 undetectable to the senses provided a perfect model for the all-pervasive insinuation of pollutants such as DDT, lindane and dieldrin (Garrard,