The U.S. conservation movement that began in the American West near the turn of the twentieth century and continues to influence environmental politics today has a tense history that has affected landscapes and peoples throughout the western hemisphere. Conservationism looms large in scholarship about early environmentalism and the development of the American West and the rest of the country. Yet the ideas about wilderness, leisure, and resource management that conservationists brought to these landscapes spread far beyond the United States. This panel explores impacts of conservationist ideas in various locations, recovering specificities as well as overarching similarities. We ask how conservationist ideas took root, or failed to, in very different environments. What relevance did efforts to conserve the forests and mountains of the western U.S. have for people concerned about resource-use or the environment in an American city, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the Caribbean island of Jamaica, and Alaska? How did conservationist ideology impact these geographically and climatically distinct landscapes?

Mars Plater argues that while the creation of national parks as monuments to wilderness in the American West could have devalued small and shabby urban parks, immigrant New Yorkers who crafted an overlooked and clashing strain of early environmentalism asserted the importance of their local pockets of green space. Henrice Altink looks at the evolution of what became the Cockpit Country Protected Area in Jamaica, and the interplay between stakeholders like the government, international organizations, environmental organizations, and Cockpit communities in that evolution. Sarah Sears analyzes how capitalist extraction, religious fundamentalism, and settler colonial processes underpinned the transformation of northern Mexico’s surface and groundwater, forests, and grasslands from the late 1880s to 1950. The paper shows that Mexican diplomats and federal policymakers closely watched the transformation of the U.S. West, with a particular interest in homesteading and arid lands policies. Mark Rice examines the use of rivers in Alaska, and how changes in the perception of rivers from places of resource extraction to places of experience consumption helped consolidate the movement towards the 1908 Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act.

Together the papers illuminate assumptions that shaped conservationist ideology, as well as ways that peoples in various places reworked them to create their own understandings of sustainability and stewardship.