David Lowenthal and the genesis of critical conservation thought
2022
Watt, Laura Alice
David Lowenthal’s doctoral biography of George Perkins Marsh, published in 1958, not only brought Marsh into public view as a ‘prophet of conservation’, but arguably created the beginnings of what today could be called the subfield of critical conservation thought. By combining Marsh’s insight about human societies’ relationships with, and responsibility for, the environments around them, Lowenthal’s scholarship pointed the way to what has developed into a diverse field aimed at understanding the complexities and sometimes-contradictions of conservation efforts. This paper traces the influence of Lowenthal’s emphases—on landscape as a tool providing insight into evolving human-environment interactions, the importance of understanding differing perceptions of the environment, and people’s complex intermixing of the present and the past—on shaping the recent decades of conservation debates and scholarship; in many ways, the rest of us are still catching up with David’s ideas first expressed in the 1950s.
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