No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2022
This article explores the role of business in supporting and benefiting from nature protection during the second half of the nineteenth century. It begins with the support of business for protecting scenic wilderness in California and the creation of Yellowstone, as well as the role of the railroads in encouraging easterners to visit to the nation’s western national parks—all designed to create economic value by promoting tourism. It then examines the efforts of a wide range of business interests to protect the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Adirondack forest in New York State. The later effort was led by business interests from New York City who worried that deforestation would impair freight traffic on the Erie Canal and Hudson River as well as endanger the city’s water supplies. This article compliments Hay’s research on business and conservation during the Progressive Era by demonstrating that business also played a critical role in supporting wilderness and forest protection.
1. Kraft, Michael and Kamientiecki, Sheldon, eds., Business and Environmental Policy: Corporate Interests in the American Political System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).Google Scholar
2. Kamieniecki, Sheldon, Corporate America and Environmental Policy: How Often Does Business Get Its Way? (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. This is the central argument of Vogel, David, California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
4. Sears, John, Sacred Place: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteen Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 125.Google Scholar
5. Sears, Sacred Place, 125.
6. Binnewies, Robert, Your Yosemite: A Threatened National Treasure (Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 2015), 78.Google Scholar
7. Binnewies, Your Yosemite, 81.
8. Stradling, David, The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 84.Google Scholar
9. Stradling, The Nature of New York, 95.
10. Sears, Sacred Places, 131.
11. Binnewies, Your Yosemite, 82.
12. “Climbing the World’s Biggest Tree,” Economist, December 24, 2016, 101.
13. Sears, 130.
14. Joseph Engbeck Jr., State Parks of California from 1964 to the Present (Portland, OR: Charles Belding, 1989), 19.
15. Sears, 130.
16. Engbeck, State Parks, 19; Sears, Sacred Places, 130. The later wording is taken from the legislation.
17. Fox, Stephen, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1981), 56 Google Scholar.
18. Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 312.
19. Frank Graham Jr., The Adirondack Park: A Political History (New York: Alfred Knoff, 1978), 116.
20. Orsi, Richard, Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850-1930 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2005), 363.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21. Fox, John Muir, 106.
22. Graham, The Adirondack Park, 114.
23. Binnewies, Your Yosemite, 132.
24. Richard Orsi, Sunset Limited, 367.
25. Fox, John Muir, 128.
26. Orsi, Sunset Limited, .368
27. Worster, A Passion for Nature, 399.
28. Orsi, Sunset Limited, 374.
29. Orsi, Sunset Limited, 353–54.
30. Sears, Sacred Places, 160.
31. Sears, Sacred Places, 162.
32. Sears, Sacred Places, 162.
33. Sears, Sacred Places, 163.
34. Runte, Alfred, National Parks: The American Experience (London: Taylor Trade, 2010), 80.Google Scholar
35. Runte, National Parks, 80.
36. Runte, National Parks, 75–76.
37. Runte, National Parks, 83.
38. Runte, National Parks, 75–76.
39. Runte, National Parks, 85.
40. Barringer, Mark Daniel, Selling Yellowstone: Capitalism and the Construction of Nature (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 23.Google Scholar
41. Runte, National Parks, 83.
42. Judd, Richard, Lands, Common, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 100.Google Scholar
43. Judd, Common Lands, Common People, 101
44. Judd, Common Lands, Common People, 103.
45. Stroud, Ell, Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 73.Google Scholar
46. Judd, Common Lands, Common People, 110.
47. Judd, Common Lands, Common People, 204.
48. Graham, The Adirondack Park, 85.
49. Stradling, The Nature of New York,.101
50. Nash, Roderick Frazier, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 118.Google Scholar
51. Nash, Wilderness, 110.
52. Nash, Wilderness, 116–17.
53. Nash, Wilderness, 119.
54. Nash, Wilderness, 119.
55. Graham, The Adirondack Park, 100.
56. Graham, The Adirondack Park, 102.
57. Stradling, The Nature of New York, 102.
58. Graham, The Adirondack Park, 107.
59. Nash, Wilderness, 120.
60. Hays, Samuel, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progress Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Mansfield: Martino Publishing, 2014).Google Scholar
61. Ekland, Sarah, How Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power & the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).Google Scholar
62. Kathryn Schulz, “Food Fight,” The New Yorker, October 1, 2018, 52.