Arizona State University Professors Ben Minteer and Stephen Pyne say that from John Muir to David Brower, from the creation of Yellowstone National Park to the Endangered Species Act, environmentalism in America has always had close to its core a preservationist ideal. Generations have been inspired by its ethos—to encircle nature with our protection, to keep it apart, pristine, walled against the march of human development. But Minteer and Pyne say we have to face the facts. Accelerating climate change, rapid urbanization, agricultural and industrial devastation, metastasizing fire regimes, and other quickening anthropogenic forces all attest to the same truth: the earth is now spinning through the age of humans.
A new collection of essays “After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans,” edited by Pyne and Minteer, takes stock of the ways we have tried to both preserve and exploit nature to ask an important question: what is the role of preservationism in an era of seemingly unstoppable human development, in what some have called the Anthropocene?
Ben A. Minteer is Arizona Zoological Society Endowed Chair at Arizona State University and Stephen Pyne is Regents Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.
