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Show 17 Pinchot, which led to an unraveling of his vision of conservation. 39 Muir had argued that the catalyst that would turn public opinion toward preservation was exposure - tourism. "Only in darkness docs vandalism flourish," he wrote. 40 Many researchers credit the surge in postwar tourism to national parks and monuments as the major factor strengthening the conservation movemcnt. 41 During the 1950s, a debate over a dam in Utah's Dinosaur National Monument marked another turning point for the national conservation movement. That pivot provides a window into the conservation movement in the West and in Utah, where the controversy led to a deepening mistrust and anger between Utahns and federal land managers. When the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation proposed the construction of the Echo Park Dam, the debate emerged as a dash of two distinct generations in the environmental movement - the conservationists who advocated utilitarian resource management, and the preservationists (also called conservationists) who advocated nature preservation. The groups opposing the dam decided that their primary goal was to keep it out of the national monument - federally protected land. Their mantra was to protect the sanctity of the national park system. 42 However, the federal government's plan included a complex of dams proposed throughout the upper and lower Colorado River basins. Rather than opposing all dams, the environmental groups suggested, as a compromise, 39 R. McGreggor Cawley, Federal Land. Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and £nl"ironmental Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 18-19. 40 John Muir, Our National Parks (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), 25. 41 Cawley. Federal Land, Western Anger, 19; Mark W. T. Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness: EL·ho Park and the American Conservation Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 288. 41 Harvey,A Symbol of Wilderness, 209,210. |
