Prospect Heights Natural Resources Commission

June 24th 2021 - Stanley Temple

7:00-8:30 PM - “Wilderness Preservation, Natural Resource Management and Harmony with Nature”

Please join us as we welcome Stanley Temple, Beers-Bascom Professor Emeritus in Conservation in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Senior Fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation as he gives his presentation, "Wilderness Preservation, Natural Resource Management and Harmony with Nature”.

Professor Stanley Temple will discuss the complex history of how American thinking about conservation and our relationship with nature has evolved over the past 200 years.

Initially conservation was not perceived as necessary when European colonizers mistakenly thought the continent's natural resources were superabundant and inexhaustible. By the 19th century this misconception began to give way to the inescapable realization that many natural resources were being depleted.

Professor Temple will highlight key figures who each introduced new ideas that have shaped our American conservation philosophy. George Perkins Marsh first articulated an American conservation philosophy in the 1860s. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau justified conservation of nature as a way to ensure psycho-spiritual as well as material values. John Muir expanded that idea of wilderness preservation and is regarded as the principal architect of a preservationist philosophy. In the early 20th century Gifford Pinchot championed the idea of managing natural resources in a sustainable way. Aldo Leopold introduced the idea of an ethical basis for our relationship with the natural world. His ideas gave rise to modern environmentalism in the 1960s.

The question remains: Will we ever achieve the ultimate goal of harmony with nature?

John Muir at Cumberlands mountains