When and where did the environmental movement begin? Stepping back from the limitations of national history, this book examines the question of environmental origins on a global scale. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the most sweeping environmental initiatives emerged under the auspices of British imperialism. As the following study will show, hard-headed environmentalists and legislators found in empire forestry a ready-made model to persuade the public that the reservation of vast areas of the public domain would serve settlers, industrial development, governmental revenue, and environmental purposes. Empire forestry resolved the tension between romantic preservationist notions and laissez-faire policies. This book traces the international trail of environmentalism from India, under Lord Dalhousie's Forest Charter, to the British colonies in Africa and Australasia where it matured and, finally, to Canada, the United States, and other parts of the globe where environmentalism permanently entered the pantheon of political creeds.

By the First World War a large area of forested land around the globe lay in the public trust, managed by a professional cadre of government foresters. In the British colonies alone the crown had environmentally protected a land mass equal to ten times the size of Great Britain. Concurrently in the United States, after transferring 1 billion acres of public land into private hands in the early and mid 1800s (approximately one-half of the land mass of the continental United States) a change suddenly occurred.