The modern American environmental movement is rooted in a 19th-century New England philosophical movement called transcendentalism, of which the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the naturalist and author Henry David Thoreau were leaders. In their writings, both expressed a reverence for the natural world, believing that humans and nature shared a divine spirit. Emerson asserted that nature was eternal and, much like the Gaia followers of the present day, contended that it was capable of recovering from mistreatment at the hands of humans. Thoreau, more protective and pessimistic, has been quoted as saying, "Thank God, men cannot yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth." Although Emerson and Thoreau wrote eloquently about the value of nature and its spiritual importance to humans, neither of them undertook a systematic analysis of the effects that humans could have on their environment. That task was left for George Perkins Marsh, who published Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action in 1864. This important book was the first to demonstrate that human activity could cause dramatic and irreversible damage to the earth. Marsh explained how agricultural practices had led to deforestation, loss of wetlands, desertification (the process of land becoming desert), species extinction, and changes in weather patterns. Protection of federal lands defined the tenure of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, and during his years in office, from 1901 to 1909, he greatly expanded both the national forest and national park systems and created a system of national wildlife refuges. Roosevelt appointed forester Gifford Pinchot as head of the U.S. Forest Service, and together they molded American conservation on two major premises. They recognized that even the vast natural resources of the United States were not limitless and thus had to be managed carefully, and they believed that those resources should be used for the betterment of the American people. Roosevelt, thinking broadly about resources, claimed that one of the most valuable natural assets was the American people themselves, and he argued that the protection of human health was a central and valid focus for the conservation movement. Roosevelt also was a friend of Scottish-American naturalist and essayist John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. Muir's philosophical approach to the environment was very different from Pinchot's: Muir valued nature for its own sake and argued forcefully to protect species and preserve wilderness, whereas Pinchot was much more concerned with the use of natural resources to serve human needs. Their perspectives fully diverged in the debate over California's Hetch Hetchy Valley, often considered a twin to the Yosemite Valley, also in California. Pinchot wanted to dam the Tuolumne River and flood the valley to provide water and electricity to San Francisco, while Muir thought the destruction of such a natural wonder an abomination. Roosevelt sided with Pinchot and the dam was authorized in 1913. When Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the U.S. presidency in 1933, he continued and expanded on the conservation efforts begun earlier in the century during the administration of his second cousin. Not only did he expand national parks and national forests, but, in response to the twin challenges of massive unemployment in the Great Depression and environmental havoc wreaked by the Dust Bowl conditions in the Midwest, he created the Civilian Conservation Corps to replant forests and improve recreational opportunities on public land and the Soil Conservation Service to protect valuable topsoil. In 1962 in her book Silent Spring, American biologist Rachel Carson warned of the grave dangers posed by the indiscriminate use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and related pesticides. The title suggested a time when birds, their populations greatly reduced by pesticides, could no longer be heard singing in the spring. Carson, by arguing that humans as well as wildlife were at risk, issued a call to action. A combination of solid science, a reverence for nature as strong as that of the transcendentalists, and a wonderfully poetic style moved people to a new level of environmental awareness and activism. On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, approximately 20 million Americans gathered at various sites across the country to protest corporate and governmental abuse of the environment. Earth Day, the events leading up to it, and its aftermath transformed American culture. Environmental awareness became much more commonplace, and numerous grassroots environmental organizations were established to work for political change, including the Environmental Defense Fund in 1967, Friends of the Earth in 1968, Greenpeace in 1970, the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in 1971.
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