Richard S. Newman

United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice

I n January 1986, The Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ initiated two major research projects designed to determine if there was a relationship between the treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous waste and the racial composition of the areas where these facilities were located. The first study concentrated on commercial hazardous waste facilities; the second on toxic waste sites. These two studies were the first in the United States to consider the issue of locating hazardous waste sites in minority communities, and the ensuing national report was instrumental in bringing the issue of “environmental racism” to the attention of environmentalists, policy makers, and the general public.

Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946)

While a student at Yale in the 1880s, Gifford Pinchot decided that he would pursue a career as a professional forester. Because no such programs were offered by any American universities at the time, he attended the French National School of Forestry. Following his return to the United States in 1890, he took a position with the recently formed United States Bureau of Forestry. He soon left government service to open his own consulting firm, where he developed a reputation as one of the country’s leading foresters and conservationists. In 1896 Pinchot served on a forestry commission appointed by Congress to study ways to implement the Forest Reserve. Pinchot was a proponent of resource management or “wise use,” and while serving on the commission had a falling out with fellow commission member John Muir over the issue of opening the newly created forest preserves for mining and grazing. Over the next twenty years, this conflict between wilderness preservation and resource utilization would have significant repercussions for the conservation movement, which split into two antagonistic factions over this issue. After Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1901, Roosevelt appointed Pinchot as his chief forester, a position he held until he was dismissed by President William Taft in 1910. Pinchot later served two terms (1923–1926 and 1931–1934) as governor of Pennsylvania.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

While many of his contemporaries saw Henry Thoreau as little more than one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist disciples, many scholars now trace the roots of modern environmentalism back to Thoreau. After Thoreau returned to his native village of Concord, Massachusetts following his graduation from Harvard in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson became his spiritual and literary mentor. Unlike Emerson, however, Thoreau’s studies of natural history were far more systematic, and resulted in a body of work—particularly that contained in his remarkable journals—that anticipates the science of ecology. Thoreau’s intimate knowledge of natural history distinguishes his work from that of Emerson in both content and style. After reading Thoreau’s journals in 1863, Emerson wrote in his own: “I find the same thought, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, & illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in sleepy generalities.”

William Blackstone (1723–1780)

Sir William Blackstone, an eminent jurist and professor of law at Oxford University, was the eighteenth century’s leading authority on the development of English common law. The underlying principles of the common law were based primarily on the customs and usages of the society, encompassing the ancient, often unwritten, laws of England, statutory enactments, and the judgments and decrees of the English courts. Blackstone’s monumental four-volume treatise on English Law, Commentaries on the Laws of England was first published in 1765 and was soon recognized as the authoritative guide to English common law. In the thinly settled American colonies, the need for a portable yet definitive guide to the common law made Blackstone’s Commentaries an essential treatise for colonial lawyers and magistrates. Even after the revolution, Blackstone’s work remained a cornerstone of early American jurisprudence, as adapted and edited by the federalist law professor St. George Tucker in 1803.

George Catlin (1796–1872)

After a brief career as a lawyer, George Catlin decided to pursue his lifelong interest in painting and set up a portrait studio in Philadelphia in the 1820s. After painting the portrait of the explorer William Clark, coleader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Catlin accompanied Clark (who now served as Superintendent for Indian Affairs) on a trip west to negotiate treaties with several of the Indian nations. Catlin became fascinated with the Indians and their way of life, which he realized would soon be forever changed as a result of Western expansion. In 1832 he embarked on an eight-year-long painting expedition that took him through much of the Indian territories in North America. Catlin visited approximately 146 Indian tribes during his journeys and painted and sketched thousands of portraits and other scenes of Indian life. Upon his return east, Catlin had hoped to sell his collection of paintings to the nation, but when that proposal was defeated in the U.S. Senate, he left for Europe, where he spent the next thirty years with his family. He returned to the United States shortly before his death in 1872.

The Wilderness Act (1964)

While writers such as John Muir and Bob Marshall had long argued that there was a need to protect wilderness areas, it was not until the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 that federal policy makers took a significant step beyond the “wise use” philosophy of the Progressive era. In 1956 the executive director of the Wilderness Society, Howard Zahniser, proposed legislation that would permanently protect millions of acres wilderness areas located in the national parks and forestreserves. Senator HubertH. Humphrey (D-MN) and Representative John Saylor (R-PA)introduced such a bill the following year. After numerous revisions, the bill was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3,1964. While the law’s final definition of wilderness was more limited than many wilderness advocates had hoped, and the bill itself left the thorny issue of designating future wilderness areas largely unresolved, it was still a legislative milestone in wilderness protection and codified the desirability of creating a National Wilderness Preservation System.

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)

While still in his teens, poems such as “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl” gained Bryant a reputation as one of America’s most promising poets. Much of Bryant’s poetry reflects his love of the outdoors and his belief that nature is the visible manifestation of God. In 1825 he became coeditor of the New York Evening Post, and a few years later he became the editor-in-chief, a position he would hold for nearly fifty years. From the mid to late 1800s, Bryant’s love of nature was manifested in numerous articles and editorials supporting the creation of parks and forest preserves throughout the United States. As can be seen from this article, Bryant was also one of the first to recognize the importance of Marsh’s Man and Nature and to incorporate Marsh’s rationales for forest preservation into his own arguments in favor of creating forest preserves.

Peter Kalm (1716–1779)

While a graduate student at Uppsala University in Sweden, Pehr (Peter) Kalm became a pupil of famed botanist and taxonomist Carl von Linne (Carolus Linnœus). In 1744 Kalm assisted Linne on a research trip in Russia, and the following year he was elected to the Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1747 he was offered a professorship in agriculture at the Abo Academy in what is today Finland, but was almost immediately given leave to travel to North America on a research trip sponsored by the Academy of Sciences. After a remarkably difficult trip that included a shipwreck and numerous delays, Kalm finally reached Philadelphia on September 15, 1848. Over the next three years, he traveled throughout the mid-Atlantic region (primarily Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey) and Canada. He returned to Sweden late in the spring of 1751, where he resumed his academic career and worked on the account of his Travels, which appeared in three volumes (1753–1761). In addition to his work as a naturalist, Kalm was ordained as a Lutheran clergyman in 1757 and awarded a doctorate in theology in 1768 from the University of Lund.

John Muir (1838–1914)

When Muir was eleven years old, his family moved from Dunbar, Scotland to the Wisconsin prairie, where the family established a farm on the frontier. As Muir later recounted in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1912), his father was a stern Christian fundamentalist who used the bonfires in which they burned the brush cleared from the land as a religious lesson, “comparing their heat with that of hell, and the branches with bad boys.” Although Muir loved life on the frontier, he chafed under the austere authoritarianism of his father, and left home in 1860 to study at the University of Wisconsin where he studied geology and botany. After leaving the university in 1863, Muir went to Canada, a decision that was partly motivated by his desire to botanize there and partly by a desire to avoid the Civil War era draft. After recovering from a sawmill accident that nearly cost him his eyesight, Muir embarked on a walking tour from Indianapolis to Florida in September 1867. The journal notes from that trip were published after Muir’s death as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf 1916). The following year, Muir sailed to San Francisco, and made his first visit to the Yosemite Valley. In 1869 Muir took a job as a sheepherder in the Sierras, an experience he describes in My First Summer in the Sierra (1911).

John Burroughs (1837–1921)

The seventh of ten children, John Burroughs was born on a small dairy farm in the foothills of New York’s Catskill Mountains on April 3,1837. Just after his seventeenth birthday he began a career as a country schoolteacher in nearby Ulster County. During the summer months Burroughs would pursue his own education, and he soon came under the influence of Emerson’s writings, which he later said, “were like the sunlight to my pale and tender genius which had fed on Johnson and Addison and poor Whipple.” In October 1863, Burroughs moved to Washington D.C., where he soon obtained an appointment to the Department of the Treasury, and formed a close friendship with Walt Whitman. for the next three decades Burroughs was an important supporter of Whitman and his poetry and his first book (partly ghostwritten by Whitman himself) was about the poet. In 1871 Burroughs published his first book of natural history essays, Wake-Robin, which received laudatory reviews and launched his career as America’s most popular nature writer. Over the next fifty years, Burroughs published thirty books as well as hundreds of essays in many of the country’s leading periodicals. He built a writing cabin that he named Slabsides near his Hudson Valley farm, where he hosted numerous friends and admirers, including Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and John Muir. In 1903 he was the guest of President Roosevelt on a tour of Yellowstone Park, an experience that Burroughs described in Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt (1907). Roosevelt dedicated his own Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter (1905) to Burroughs, writing: “It is a good thing for our people that you have lived, and surely no man can wish to have more said of him.”