Dave Foreman's Around the Campfire Issue 20
Excerpt…
Shortly after the end of World War Two, visionary conservationists and scientists such as Fairfield Osborn began to warn that continued human population growth would cause all kinds of problems including heightened plundering of wild Nature. It was not until the late 1960s, however, that population growth […]

Popularity: 29% [?]

The Angry West: ‘Get Off Our Backs, Uncle Sam.’
—Newsweek cover, 1979
Beginning with this Newsweek cover story in 1979 (complete with a clench-jawed Marlboro Man on horseback),1 ill-informed East Coast journalists began to peddle the carefully fermented whine of the Western economic elite that “The West” was dead set against conservation and public lands.
Of all the […]

Popularity: 31% [?]

We have seen a rising tide of hysteria in the last few years over the recovery of gray wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming and over the Mexican wolf (lobo) in Arizona and New Mexico. Wolf-haters are using any argument, plausible or not, to demand the second extinction of wolves in the wild.
The […]

Popularity: 19% [?]

"There has been a boatload of changes during the past thirty years in the conservation, environmental, and resource movements. Perhaps the most remarkable and deep-rooted shift is that worry and doggedness about explosive human population growth, which was central to all three in the 1960s and 1970s, today is kicked into the corner and […]

Popularity: 18% [?]

"In the last few issues of “Around the Campfire,” I’ve contrasted the values and policies of resourcism and conservation. Some scholars and agency representatives think I make overmuch of these differences and that I do not give adequate credit to the resourcist movement and resource agencies like the United States Forest Service for America’s […]

Popularity: 17% [?]

In some circles, the late Julian Simon has fame as a Dragon Slayer. The Dragon that Sir Julian slew was the dread Doomsdayer. The largest and most fearsome of its many poisonous heads was Ehrlich. Not only did Sir Julian lop Ehrlich off with his magic sword Blind Optimism, he pried […]

Popularity: 17% [?]

In the last “Around the Campfire” I argued that Nature conservationists, who work to protect wilderness areas and wild species, should be called conservationists, and that resource conservationists, who wish to domesticate and manage lands and species for the benefit and use of humans, should be called resourcists.
I also believe that Nature […]

Popularity: 17% [?]

"I’ve stirred up the anthill by warning that worldviews and policies of resourcism and enviro-resourcism are undermining and weakening certain conservation organizations and the whole conservation community. In the next issue of “Around the Campfire,” I’ll look at the bedrock of the conservation mind—that when we really dig down deep, Nature conservationists believe that […]

Popularity: 16% [?]

For over twenty-five centuries, the written record carries descriptions of damage wrought by too many people, and the worries of wise people about the consequences of human population growth. I think a careful search would find such writings even earlier. Had we the tools and could find the artifacts, we might find […]

Popularity: 17% [?]

The beating heart of the 1964 Wilderness Act is the definition of Wilderness Areas as places “where man is a visitor who does not remain.” This idea of uninhabited solitudes upsets some intellectual critics of the Wilderness Idea­the so-called wilderness deconstructionists­and their resource exploitation allies.

Popularity: 22% [?]