Greeny News

An almost-forgotten speech by a U.S. congressman warned of global warming and the mismanagement of natural resources

If we in the birth of the conservation movement 19th Century thinking, are the names that usually in the sense as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, men who wrote to protect the necessity of wilderness areas in an era when the concept of people 's "manifest destiny "was all the rage.

But a far less remembered American - can claim that the person who first published the now largely unchallenged idea that humans can negatively affect the environment, they are supported - a contemporary of Thoreau and Muir.

But in the speech he also called for a more thoughtful approach to consuming natural resources, despite the apparent near-limitless abundance on offer across the vast expanses of northern America. As the Clark University biography notes, he wasn't an environmental sentimentalist. Rather, he believed that all consumption must be reasoned and considered, with the impact on future generations always kept in mind: he was making the case for what we now call "sustainable development". In particular, he argued that his audience should re-evaluate the worth of trees:

The inconveniences resulting from a want of foresight in the economy of the forest are already severely felt in many parts of New England, and even in some of the older towns in Vermont. Steep hill-sides and rocky ledges are well suited to the permanent growth of wood, but when in the rage for improvement they are improvidently stripped of this protection, the action of sun and wind and rain soon deprives them of their thin coating of vegetable mould, and this, when exhausted, cannot be restored by ordinary husbandry. They remain therefore barren and unsightly blots, producing neither grain nor grass, and yielding no crop but a harvest of noxious weeds, to infest with their scattered seeds the richer arable grounds below.

On the other hand, where too large a proportion of the surface is bared of wood, the action of the summer sun and wind scorches the hills which are no longer shaded or sheltered by trees, the springs and rivulets that found their supply in the bibulous soil of the forest disappear, and the farmer is obliged to surrender his meadows to his cattle, which can no longer find food in his pastures, and sometime even to drive them miles for water.