1. Environmental Issues
by Michaela Zaenglein

2. Definition of Environment
Environment: Relating to the natural world and the impact of human activity on its condition.

3. Tobacco Fields
pg ,39,67-68
John Rolfe, the husband of pocahontas, in he had perfected the methods of raising and curing tobacco.
A tobacco rush swept over Virginia.
This weed changed the colonists economy and people were expanding to buy more land for more tobacco fields.
Intense tobacco farming exhausted the soil, creating a huge demand for untouched land.

4. Beavers
pg. 109
French fur-trappers started to pursue the sharp- toothed beaver.
Throughout the Great Lakes Area, present-day Saskatchewan and Manitoba, along the valleys of the Platte, Arkansas, Missouri and south of the border of spanish texas.
In this process they basically extinguished the beaver population

5. Bison
591-92,
There were bison hunts when the Native Americans were forced westward. The population of the bison soon rapidly decreased due to whites and Native Americans being competitive for the bison.
Before this time, native Americans used to use all of the bison not just the tongue or just the hide.
Uses of bison:
dung for fuel,
hides for clothing,
saddles, food

6. Moving to Cities
pgs. 557,
Cities started to grow in the 1890's both up and out. By the end end of the 1800's 4 out of 10 Americans were city dwellers.
Skyscrapers grew and Cities grew bigger.
Conditions in these cities, especially New York, to be terrible.
1890's NY
1870's NY

7. Moving to Cities cont.
Waste disposal became an issue and some of the other issues were impure water, uncollected garbage, unwashed bodies, and the droppings from draft animals left cities enveloped in a terrible condition.
Some of the worst were the human slums and soon the perfection of the "dumbbell' tenements came, these conditions in New York led to the "Lung Block" where hundreds of unfortunate urbanites coughed away their lives.
"Flophouses" were created so people could sleep in disgusting conditions for a few cents a night.

8. Automobiles pgs. 738,
After WWI the economy shed its war harness, this was the start of the "roaring twenties". The automobile became accessible to the common man and the assembly line prospered this.
This boom lengthened the list of imports of rubber, glass, fabric, and led the petroleum industry to boom.
Hundreds of oil derricks shot up in California, Texas, and Oklahoma, as these states expanded and the wilderness frontier became an industrial frontier.

9. Conservation pgs
As Americans were eager to build up the country they were also cutting down trees and polluting water.
Leaders of the time, like Roosevelt, brought forward the conservation of forests and deserts and rivers.
Conservation, including reclamation, may have been Roosevelt's most enduring tangible achievement.

10. Desert Land Act of 1877
pgs
This Act was the first step towards conservation, under which the federal government sold arid land cheaply on the condition that the purchaser irrigate the thirsty soil within three years.

11. Forest Reserve Act of 1891 pg.676
More Successful than the Desert Land Act, the Forest Reserve Act authorized the president to set aside public forests as national parks and other reserves.
Under this Act some 46 million acres of trees were rescued from getting chopped down.

12. Newlands Act of 1902 pg.676
Washington was required to collect money from the sale of public lands in the western states and then use these funds for the development of irrigation projects.
As settlers were repaid from their now- productive soil. The money was put into financing more enterprises.
The Roosevelt Dam was constructed on Arizona's Salt River and dozens of dams were put on basically every major western river in the decades to come.

13. The Sierra Club pg.677
Was a major environmental foundation founded in 1892.
Dedicated itself to preserving the western landscape.
The preservationist lost a major battle in when the federal government allowed the city of San Francisco to build a dam for its municipal water supply in the spectacular, high-walled Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park.

14. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pg. 679
This Agency created Acts like the Endangered Species Act and put out notice that developments like global warming and recognized national boundaries.

15. Multiple Use Resource Management pg. 680
Under Roosevelt, professional foresters and engineers developed a policy of "multiple-use resource management."
They sought to combine recreation, sustained-yield logging, watershed protection, and summer stock grazing on the same expanse of federal land.

16. Environmentalists pgs. 678-79
Natures earliest defenders were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans commanded powerful new technologies like the railroad and steam-powered drills and dredges, which promised unbridled dominion over the natural world.
By the dawn of the 20th century, many urban americans had come to romanticize their pioneer forebears.
Progressive conservationists believed that nature must be not be wastefully exploited, but instead must be efficiently utilized.

17. Dust Bowl pgs
In the Late 1933, drought struck the states of the trans-Mississippi Great Plains.
Though drought and high winds had a factor in this, but humans had fault in this too, as grain prices rose there was a need to bring countless acres of marginal land under cultivation.
As dry-farming techniques had revolutionized Great Plains agriculture. With the disc-plow tore up sod, leaving the powdery topsoil to be swept away by the wind.

18. Nevada
In 1935 the Resettlement Administration charged with the task of removing near-farmless farmers to better land. and 200 million trees were successfully planted on the prairies.
Colorado
Kansas
Oklahoma
New Mexico
Texas
The Dust Bowl Cont.