18 



BOTANISTS AND THE CONSERVATION 

 OF NATURAL RESOURCES 



Paul B. Sears 



North America has no monopoly on the need for conservation practices or 

 on their exercise. In parts of the Old World the capacity of environment has 

 been lowered almost beyond restoring. Elsewhere excellent patterns have been 

 developed under the spur of necessity, either by authority or by common 

 consent as in Switzerland. In South America Brazil affords an example of 

 an immensely rich environment now being exploited with little or no regard 

 for consequences. But in the United States we see a vast and varied modern 

 nation built up through rapid levies on its resources, yet showing increasing 

 concern to rationalize matters before it is too late. 



In some respects, then, the conservation movement, like the Botanical 

 Society of America, is a household affair. The term conservation itself was 

 brought into popular usage largely by Gifford Pinchot and his associates, 

 who defined it as "the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest 

 time." True, he looked for his model to Europe, where sound practice, sanc- 

 tioned by custom, had come to be based on science. But the problem here 

 was to challenge and modify, with the aid of science, an economy in which 

 science was being applied very largely to the depletion of resources and the 

 disruption of natural processes. It was Pinchot's achievement to be politically 

 effective, a privilege largely denied to his precursors. 



Plant life is such an essential resource, and so intimately a part of most 

 resource problems, that it is rather surprising to find few botanists conspic- 

 uous in the early phases of the conservation movement. This sounds worse 

 than it was, for there were not many American botanists during the 19th 

 century and the naturalists such as Powell, Muir, and Thoreau who gave good 

 account of themselves usually had a creditable knowledge of botany. William 

 Bartram noted the decline of fish along the Eastern seaboard and expressed 

 concern over the rapid destruction of nature, even in Revolutionary days. 



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