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Community Corner

The Rise of the Conservation Movement

The Eighth in a Series on the Environment of Northeast Queens

In my previous column, I wrote about how Aurora Gareiss formed the Udalls Cove Preservation Committee in 1969 with the mission of saving the last remnants of undeveloped wetlands and woodlands in the Udalls Cove watershed, which lay between Douglaston, Little Neck and Great Neck.

In relatively short order, she secured support from federal, state and local officials – elected and appointed – to acquire the land. Today, all but a few acres have been acquired. In the center of the Udalls Cove Park and Preserve lies Aurora Pond, which was named for the woman who made it possible. 

Admittedly, Aurora was in the right place at the right time. What we know today as the environmental movement, but which was originally known as the “ecology” movement, had snowballed throughout the 1960s, which was a period of exceptional ferment. 

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It emerged during that decade alongside other dramatic social upheavals – the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Viet Nam war movement, which extended into the peace and nuclear disarmament movements, the women’s liberation movement and the gay rights movement.

The notion of “conservation” was not a new one. It had started in the 19th Century as a means of preserving the extraordinary landscapes of the American west. During the height of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was the first to set aside federal land, protecting what would later become Yosemite National Park. 

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The first true National Park, Yellowstone, was created in 1872 under President Ulysses S. Grant. The U.S. system of national parks has been described as one of the nation’s greatest ideas and has been exported to almost every country on earth.

Conservationism as a movement - or more accurately, a creed - became a central theme of the national agenda under President Teddy Roosevelt and his friend, Gifford Pinchot, who was the first head of the National Forest Service. Here in New York, great urban parks such as Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park complemented spectacular wilderness preserves like the Adirondacks, which is the largest park in the nation outside of Alaska. 

Until the 1960s, this was the mission of the conservation movement: to preserve large tracts of open land and grand vistas. But the mission rapidly evolved after 1962, when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring.

Carson warned that the vast number of new chemicals created as part of the industrial era, particularly during and after World War II, posed a profound threat to all living species, including human beings. Her warning resonated with city dwellers breathing heavily polluted air and surrounded by waters so contaminated that they were virtually devoid of life and occasionally even caught on fire. 

Scientists pursuing the relatively new discipline known as ecology investigated how the many different elements of a natural system work together and depend on one another, so that eliminating one element - a species or a habitat area - can cause the rest of an ecosystem to suffer or collapse. Certain types of habitats were recognized as being of exceptional importance. 

Front and center among these were coral reefs, tropical rainforests, and wetlands. While coral reefs and tropical rainforests were not found extensively in the U.S., wetlands were found throughout the length and breadth of the nation. 

Indeed, some were even left in urban areas like New York City, and it was one small patch of these that Aurora Gareiss set out to save.

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