The commodification of nature and the creation of environmental concern
When Richard Grove published Green Imperialism in 1995, he was at pains to counter the impression that environmentalism derived historically from Northern responses to the local impacts of industrialisation, and that conservation interventions originated broadly in North America. Through his efforts and those of other environmental historians, we are now aware of a much richer, more dispersed history of the relationship between conservation and what these days we called development, as impelled by European colonial expansion. Yet a common element underlies both the home-grown reactions to industrialisation in countries like Britain and the wider arc of colonial encounters: the ‘commodification of nature’ (Beinart and Hughes, 2008; Castree, 2008). Turning natural ‘raw material’ into tradable commodities did not just transform landscapes: it fuelled colonial expansion, which in turn often (though not automatically) had an amplifying effect on global trade. It was the increasing scale at which this self-reinforcing process was occurring that triggered environmental concern, wherever it was observed. In this way, the engagement of conservation with capitalism – which has been the subject of attention in relation to the latter decades of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first (see chapters 5 and 6) – is not new. Rather, both conservation and development are the product of a capitalist economic model.
What is more specific to the North is its historical dominance of international environmentalism (Guha, 2000; Adams, 2009),1 even processes of imperial expansion fundamentally shaped the environmental conscience that gave rise, in the twentieth century, to the formation of an international conservation architecture. In this picture, countries such as the USA, the UK and Germany figure centrally. Some aspects of the historical development of environmental thinking and conservation movements in these countries were driven by the national setting. Yet the kinds of conservation that emerged were heavily influenced by people and events across the world, even as they became truly international in their reach (Guha and Martínez-Alier, 1997; Guha, 2000). The UK and USA in particular were very important – though by no means the only – settings in which two sometimes opposed, sometimes overlapping impulses emerged. The first impulse was fuelled, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by a counter-reaction to the industrial revolution, and manifested itself in both the ‘back to the land’ movement of the UK and the ‘wilderness’ movement of the USA. The second impulse, part ambivalent and part pragmatic about these processes of intensification and transformation, sought to govern them through rational, scientific management to curb wasteful, destructive tendencies.
‘Back to the land’ and ‘wilderness’: the beginnings of US and UK conservation
In the nineteenth century, concern grew over the effects of urbanisation, the intensification of agriculture to serve urban markets and the proliferation of industries turning nature into commodities to trade in domestic and international markets. In the UK setting, Romantic poets – most famously Wordsworth but also others such as John Clare – decried the adverse environmental effects of a proliferation of coal mines, textile mills, shipyards and railway lines. They scorned what they saw as city dwellers that, however literate or sophisticated, had lost the elemental connection with nature abounding in even the humblest shepherd (Marsh, 1982). Central to the Romantic view was the sheer aesthetic beauty of nature, accompanied by an acute horror of its being despoiled by industrial pollution, and devalued by an inexorably expanding urban culture. But as the fascination with rural ways of living denotes, Romantics also favoured a particular relationship between humans and nature, one that they deemed industrialisation to have disrupted. In this there was more than an element of social realism: industrialisation did indeed change the structure of the agrarian economy in ways which undermined the basis of peasant farming (Williams, 1973). As wealthy landowners enclosed erstwhile communal grazing pastures in order to intensify production for urban markets, many peasants were forced to move to towns and cities in search of other ways to make a living (Williams, 1973).
Near-contemporary commentators such as John Ruskin, Edward Carpenter, and later William Morris, all took their cue from Wordsworth, condemning what Guha terms the ‘desacralisation’ of nature (2000); that is, viewing the natural environment only as raw, exploitable material. They added to the Romantic view a keener, grittier awareness of the adverse impacts on human health of the industrial revolution. Where others saw progress – indeed something akin to what these days we would call development – they saw human misery: impoverished workers leading lives shortened by factory conditions, insanitary urban dwellings, smog-blackened air and contaminated drinking water. They rejected industrialisation and the creeping materialism accompanying it, advocating instead a rural life characterised by simplicity, self-sufficiency and a more harmonious relationship with nature (Marsh, 1982).
The Romantic movement was a critical source of inspiration for the societies that sprung up from the 1840s onwards, which intended to conserve a variety of things perceived to be at risk from industrialisation. These included:
- the Scottish Rights of Way Society, formed in 1843, and the Commons Preservation Society formed in 1865, which both sought to defend rights of way across/access to increasingly enclosed rural and urban landscapes;
- the Lake District Defence Society formed in 1883, dedicated to preserving the natural beauty of the area;
- The National Trust, dedicated originally to the preservation of both beautiful landscapes and architecture (though better known these days for the latter). (Guha, 2000)
A point in common with all of these societies was that humans and human creations were an integral part of what they wanted to conserve. The pre-industrial human–environment relationship was admired, and much value conferred on the intimate, intricate agro-environmental knowledge possessed by rural farming populations, regardless of their social standing. Yet this way of thinking found relatively little favour in key international conservation efforts driven by the North in much of the twentieth century, especially in relation to attempts to establish protected areas in the South. It was not until the 1970s that a dramatic resuscitation of the value of local knowledge would become a mainstream feature of international conservation (see Chapter 10). In many ways this can be explained by the power and prevalence of the wilderness ‘ideal’ that characterised US conservation thinking from the nineteenth century onwards, and particularly associated with the works of one of conservation’s most enduringly influential thinkers, John Muir.
John Muir, though born in Dunbar, Scotland, is better known for his writings on places and events in the USA, particularly as they related to the Sierra Mountains of California. He founded the Sierra Club, one of the USA’s most enduringly influential conservation organisations and provided the inspiration for the UK’s John Muir Trust. He was a highly vocal commentator on the levels of deforestation driven by the expanding agricultural frontier and the trading that accompanied it. His fear that forests might disappear drove his passion for wilderness, that is, for landscapes which were not transformed by the forces of economic dynamism. He was a lover of nature for its own sake, a defender of the right of all species, not just humans, to persist (Cohen, 1984). He prized, moreover, the spiritual value of a wild landscape, which he felt was a necessary connection for people to maintain with nature, and which, he believed, underpinned the burgeoning camping and trekking industry catering to urbanites seeking distance from city life (Fox, 1985). Yet for urban sophisticates to be able to appreciate nature, it was necessary for it to be left ‘untouched’ by human hand, and it was this sentiment which drove Muir’s insistence on a wild landscape as one free from human habitation. Where Wordsworth had considered the shepherd to be ‘part of the scenery’, a feature of the beauty of England’s Lake District, Muir recoiled at the idea of grazing in his Sierra (though his ire was aimed as much at logging and mining as it was at livestock farming). He advocated strongly that the USA’s nascent system of national parks should be guarded by the military, to ensure human ‘disturbance’ was kept at bay (Guha, 2000). These ideas would come to be echoed by commentators at the end of the twentieth century (for instance Terborgh, 2004 – see Chapter 10). In this, John Muir was a precursor of the ‘siege’ mentality which still runs strong in some conservation circles in the twenty-first century.
The establishment of Yellowstone in 1872, the first national park in the world, heralded the institutionalisation of the preservationist tendency in conservation, of cutting off ‘wild’ landscapes from the reach of permanent human settlement, and in particular the consumptive economic activities associated with it. This tendency would, as we shall see later on in the chapter, become one of the USA’s most powerful conservation exports. A part of this model which has become equally enduring is the ‘wilderness tourism’ that was as – if not more – important than strictly ecological criteria in the creation of the USA’s network of national parks (Runte, 2010). This notion of separating humans from wild landscapes, other than for the purposes of recreation or study, was very much contingent upon a particular moment in US cultural history. The notion of wilderness provided a means by which a settler society could invent its own history and cultural identity separate from those of the Native Americans whose presence it had fought to displace (Nash, 1973). In the notion of wilderness were also the foundations for a national culture which could rival the ancient regimes of Europe. They might not have the longstanding heritage, culturally or architecturally, of a France or a Greece, but they could hold their natural wonders, which had existed over a much longer timeframe, to surpass anything to be found in Europe (Nash, 1973). Critically, moreover, they could enforce a separation of people from landscapes much more easily than could be done in smaller, more heavily-populated European countries.
