Environmental Conservation history

The world's second and the first for the US was Yellowstone National Park established in 1872.

In 1892, John Muir founded the Sierra Club in the US to protect the country’s wilderness.

By 1900, some American scientists, political leaders, and business elites were becoming concerned about the depletion of the nation's forest, soil, mineral, and water resources.

The conservation movement arose at the beginning of the century, while the environmental movement arose after 1950.

In 1952, 4,000 people died in London’s infamous killer fog, and four years later the British Parliament passed the first Clean Air Act.

Albert Einstein, who felt morally troubled by his contribution to the nuclear bomb, drafted an anti-nuclear manifesto in 1955 with British philosopher Bertrand Russell, signed by ten Nobel Prize winners.

In 1958, the Quaker Committee for Non-Violent Action launched two boats – the Golden Rule and Phoenix – into US nuclear test sites, a direct inspiration for Greenpeace a decade later.

In 1968, the American writer Cliff Humphrey founded Ecology Action.

Arguably, the largest success story is the Rodrigues Fruit Bat, reduced to just 100 individuals on the island after which it is named in the 1970s, today there are over 25,000 (29).

J. D. Hughes: Ecology in Ancient Civilizations (U. New Mexico Press, 1975): Oxford Academic

Donald Worster: Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 1977

At the last census in 2015, it was estimated that species numbers were anything between 19,500 and 21,000.

Historic England, an NGO responsible for maintaining and monitoring historic sites in England, reported that around 18% of protected heritage conservation sites and areas suffered heritage crime in 2017 (34)

2018 saw the technical (if not the literal) extinction of the Northern White Rhino when the last male died in an African reserve.