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We owe the term conservation, in its environmental sense, to Gifford Pinchot, the head of the U.S. Forest Service in Theodore Roosevelt's administration. Having formulated the doctrine of multiple use for the nation's forests, Pinchot asserted that America's renewable resources could be made to last indefinitely so long as a certain amount of natural capital was kept in the bank and managed efficiently. The idea of "conservation," writes historian John Reiger, precedes Pinchot by many years. Its foremost exponents were sport hunters, who had an interest in keeping the wild well stocked with a fresh supply of targets. Acting through organizations such as the Boone and Crockett Club and publications such as Field and Stream and American Sportsman, these hunters advanced a waste-not, want-not ethic that cohered with other conservationist measures, among them the establishment of the first national parks. One of them, George Bird Grinnell, wrote by way of explanation, "No woods, no game; no woods, no water; no water, no fish." That simple message carried, and by the 1880s thousands of hunters had adopted a code of sporting ethics that prohibited wanton, wasteful behavior and encouraged careful attention to the condition of wildlife in the field. Reiger continues the story to the middle years of the 20th century, when the forester Aldo Leopold developed the still-influential "conservation ethic." Reiger's book, originally published in 1975 and substantially revised, has become a standard work, and it offers much useful material for students of American environmental history. --Gregory McNamee
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