Explanation:
Conservation thinking has evolved over centuries, often as a response to the profound land use changes that shaped the American landscape after the arrival of European colonists in the 1600s. Since that time, deforestation, urbanization, and industrialization all produced profound environmental changes that spurred conservation ideas and practices. At the national level, environmental historians have identified three major historic strands of conservation thinking and action that provided historic foundations for the contemporary environmental movement. These are utilitarian conservation (natural resource management), preservationist conservation (preserving scenic nature), and wildlife habitat protection.
Utilitarian and preservationist conservation ideas, which developed by the first half of the 19th century, provided major, and different, arguments for a variety of large open space conservation initiatives in the second half of the 19th century, culminating in the creation of the first national and state forests. Many of the protected open spaces that we have today—and to a large extent, the arguments that we still use to conserve and protect natural places for their scenic, recreational, or habitat values—have been inherited from one or more of these three traditions.
