The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890-2000

Almost fifty years ago, Samuel Hays argued in Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959) that a wave of federal legislation and reform passed during the Progressive Era to conserve the nation's forests, fields, and streams was not the result of a democratic impulse to protect the people's interests. Instead, Hays viewed the conservation movement as symptomatic of a growing faith in, and reliance on, the ability of scientific experts to rationally manage and control economic and social forces in American society. Since the publication of Hays's classic work, environmental historians have built on and challenged its thesis. Much of that revisionist scholarship has attended closely to the ways in which a wide range of actors— from wealthy sportsmen to subsistence hunters, from New England farmers to Native Americans—were affected by and drove both historical changes in the land and the efforts to regulate and govern the use of resources. In The Evolution of American Ecology 1890–2000, Sharon E. Kingsland adds ecologists to that expanding cast of characters. Ecological science, she argues, was a by-product of “the same economic imperatives and the same need to rationalize resource use that supported the conservation movement” (p. 4).