The conclusion sums up the historical legacy and implications of the landscape of genius. It begins with the landscape photographer and environmental activist Ansel Adams, who, like John Muir, became strongly associated with Yosemite and with the National Parks in general. Adams, through his photography and environmental advocacy, helped to translate the landscape of genius into the twentieth century, associating nature as wilderness with high culture and the fine arts. Those associations promoted both American nationalism and a specifically White, elite middle-class version of environmentalism. The conclusion then explores the wider implications of this “environmentalism of genius” for the environmental movement and popular conception of nature today. It argues for the dissociation of nature from genius as part of a larger reimagination of “nature,” in order to diversify the environmental movement and promote more socially just and ecologically effective approaches to environmental issues.

This chapter demonstrates how John Muir’s association with Yosemite defined its significance as a National Park and played a key role in the formation of modern environmentalism. Muir was deeply influenced by Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Burns and by the model of the landscape of genius in general. Muir represented nature in Yosemite as a form of high culture, analogous to the fine arts, in ways that defined the National Park as an institution and have exerted massive influence on modern discourses of nature. That high-cultural version of nature then shaped the American environmental movement, especially through the long political struggle from 1907–13 over the proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a reservoir for the city of San Francisco. In that struggle, Muir and his allies embraced many of the same forms of environmental rhetoric of the landscape of genius initiated by earlier attempts to preserve Wordsworth’s Lake District: a transatlantic connection that launched the American environmental movement and evolved into a hegemonic form of twentieth-century environmentalism.

This chapter defines the landscape of genius: literary landscapes in which the genius of the author became associated specifically with nature. It focuses on William Wordsworth’s association with the English Lake District and Henry David Thoreau’s association with Walden Pond as paradigmatic landscapes of genius in the British and American environmental traditions, respectively. Wordsworth’s connection with Lake District nature was widely celebrated in nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States and strongly influenced Thoreau’s identification with Walden. The chapter traces the historical development of those two landscapes of genius and the wider impact of their authorial associations. It explores how the Lake District and Walden Pond emerged as iconic sites for the development of an environmental movement, which sought to preserve such landscapes and their high-cultural associations from modern economic and technological development, as well as from the incursions of the urban working class and popular culture.

Description: Some concerns about the environment began in the 1950s and 1960s. They were mainly directed at the impact of lead in the gasoline that cars used. These led to some regulation on car mileage. A marine biologist, Rachel Carson, in a bestselling book, Silent Spring, raised concerns about the pollution of springs and rivers, and about the environmental impact of dams. <break>An environmental movement came into existence, worried about the impact that growth would have on the future availability of some essential resources. This led to the Club of Rome and to the No-Growth Society. The EPA was created in the USA and the Clean Water Act was created in those years. President Nixon strongly endorsed a clean environment that he called a “crusade.” But the choice between jobs and a clean environment led to strong opposition to the environmental movement.<break>In the 1990s, the focus changed toward more dangers, such as the growing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its impact on the world temperature. The concern became an existential one, as stressed by the Stern Review, by Vice President Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, by UN Reports, and by NASA estimates of climate change. Global warming started to be seen as an existential threat. The issue could no longer be ignored.

This chapter unpacks Garrett Hardin's 1968 landmark article "The Tragedy of the Commons" by exploring the controversial views of its author and the explosive social context from which it emerged. More than an essay about resource management in the abstract, Hardin's admitted main point in "The Tragedy of the Commons," often excerpted out of many anthologies and reprints, is at its core an argument for population control. Hardin’s views veered from the mainstream and openly incorporated racist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant ideas. Given this, it seems quite surprising today that the article was received so well, both popularly and in academic circles. But in reality, Hardin's success came because of his focus on population – not in spite of it. The article came at just the right time to catch on: precisely when the environmental movement neared its crest and just before his most controversial idea – population control – was about to enter the public realm as a serious matter of debate.

Chapter 5 examines the rebuilding of the global environmental movement after the Second World War. Environmental protection did not become one of the core objectives of the newly created United Nations. It was not until the ‘environmental revolution’ of the 1960s, which transformed environmentalism from an elite concern into a mass movement with wider electoral consequences for governments, that international society began to accept environmental stewardship as a new primary institution. Within a short space of time, from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s, leading industrialised economies established environmental protection first as a comprehensive domestic duty of the state and then as a general responsibility for international society. The 1972 Stockholm conference, the first UN conference on the environment, became the equivalent of a ‘constitutional moment’ in the greening of the international normative order. This chapter traces the process through which world society actors successfully transmitted environmentalism into international society, with leading powers such as the United States providing critical leadership along the way.

The first part of Chapter 3 introduces the diverse roots of environmental thinking and identifies the normative core around which modern environmentalism is built. It traces the evolution of different strands of environmentalism and outlines the main debates that have shaped the evolution of environmental thinking and activism since the nineteenth century. The second part of this chapter identifies the different ways in which environmental ideas can be applied to the international realm. Employing the English School’s conceptual dyads of pluralism/solidarism and international/world society, it identifies four ideal types of how a green global order can be created: ‘Green Westphalia’ and ‘global environmental governance’, representing the pluralist and solidarist variants of a green international society; and ‘eco-localism’ and ‘eco-globalism’ as the pluralist and solidarist versions of a green world society.

We argue in this chapter that the rise of social movements and the emergence of more popular forms of management, including the appeal of the management guru should be linked. In reading these histories together, especially around the environmental movement and the work of Peter Drucker we find resources for building our Liberal Management Education.