Conservation
"While the concept of Wilderness can be traced back to eighteenth-century European Romanticism, the concept came to the fore during the late nineteenth century, where preserving nature in its so-called wild and ‘natural’ state became the cornerstone of American environmental approaches. Leading advocates and architects of wilderness preservation and the Wilderness Movement in America were the writers and activists John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, as well as Emerson and Leopold. In particular, the power of Muir’s emotive and sentimental prose, along with other writers of the time, cannot be underestimated. John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892, whose manifesto was built on the call to ‘Save the Wilderness’ from the increasing encroachment of infrastructure and industrial tourism. Paradoxically, tourism and the availability of ‘wild nature’ for the masses to enjoy was a driving factor in the political development of the preservationist movement in America."[1]
Sources
- ↑ Ward, K. (2019). For wilderness or wildness? Decolonising rewilding. Rewilding, 34–54. doi:10.1017/9781108560962.003