History
Early European settlers to the United States brought from Europe the concept of the commons. In the colonial era, access to natural resources was allocated by individual towns, disputes over fisheries or land use were resolved at the local level. Changing technologies however, strained traditional ways of resolving disputes of resource use and local governments had limited control over powerful special interests. For example the damming of rivers for mills cut off upriver towns from fisheries. Logging and clearing of forest in watersheds harmed local fisheries downstream. In New England many farmers became uneasy as they noticed clearing of forest changed stream flows and a decrease in bird population which helped control insects pests. These concerns become widely known with the publication of Man and Nature (1864) by George Perkins Marsh. The environmental impact method of analysis is generally the main mode for determining what issues the environmental movement is involved in. Contrary to critics beliefs this model is used to determine how to proceed in situations that are detrimental to the environment in the way that is least damaging and has the fewest lasting implications.
Read more about this topic: Environmental Movement In The United States
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)