From natural resources to environment : Broadening our mission and message

This important conference (the fourth in a series) addresses higher education in “natural resources.” Indeed, most participants are affiliated with programs, departments, schools, or colleges of natural resources and/or related professional terms such as conservation, forestry, wildlife biology, range science, and park management. By professional standards, these areas of study and practice are relatively young. However, the words we use to describe them (and ourselves) are a century or more old. Gifford Pinchot was America’s first professional forester, and he coined the word “conservation” early in his career (or so he writes in his book, Breaking New Ground). The Conservation Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was founded on the principle that we need to “manage our natural resources more efficiently” through application of science and technology, and this idea was at the heart of emerging professions such as forestry, fish and game management, range science, and water resource development