Allen Dieterich-Ward, Shippensburg University history associate professor, spoke at Stewart Hall about his newest book, “Cradle of Conservation.” The book dives into the complex history of Pennsylvania's conservation efforts that combated the negative effects of the steel, railroad and automobile industries.

These conservation efforts occurred simultaneously with Pennsylvania’s progressive evolution. The Pennsylvania Parks and Forests Foundation’s website said, “Cradle of Conservation moves across time and place, from the Haudenosaunee people of the Susquehanna Valley, to the iron furnaces of nineteenth-century Pittsburgh, to the diesel trucks on the twentieth-century Pennsylvania Turnpike.”

Because of Pennsylvania’s “limitations of relatively easy transportation, we get technological innovations,” Dieterich-Ward said. He noted that New York benefited from transportation from Lake Erie to New York City, allowing for a useful streamlined route that businesses and housing could use along the Erie Canal in a way that no one could in Pennsylvania. He said there is “no easy way to get across the state,” which leads to divided political regions among counties in the same state. 

Compared to New York’s political dynamic, Dieterich-Ward attributes that New York City’s politics flows along “that canal that then channels the west” in a way Philadelphia cannot. This also explains Pennsylvaina’s diverse journey of conservation, in which Dieterich-Ward categorized into three elements — places, policies and people.

Notable people include Myra Dock, the first female appointed to a Pennsylvania state government position, who worked at the Pennsylvania State Forest Academy before teaching at what is now known as Penn State Mont Alto. She has used her own book in class for a personal study on trees native to Pennsylvania.

Maurice Goddard, who was known for attempting to establish a state park within 25 miles of any Pennsylvanian, has turned into a modern notion of “a public place within a ten walk” Dieterich-Ward said. This is one of the many environmental legacies that Dieterich-Ward says Pennsylvania needs to draw.

While Goddard and Dock could be perceived as one of the winners of the conservation movement, Dieterich-Ward touches on one of the unfortunate losers of the movement, Ralph Elwood Brock. Brock was the first African American forester trade member in American history until he became a private gardener for the Paul Laurence Dunbar complexes in New York City's Harlem River Houses.

During the Vietnam war, about the same time as the creation of the atomic bomb and napalm, the common people started to look at science closely. “The notion that environmental regulation, that we could trust, had a common interest started to fray” Dieterich-Ward said. The middle class had begun to see through the rich’s ploy.

In response, those who had business leaders and even invested politicians developed stigmas against environmentalists, claiming they were against workers or the economy since they were putting in regulations that companies could not meet. Dieterich-Ward said this is only the beginning of environmental conservation becoming “part of a broader political battle.”

The regulatory state that was put in place would lead politicians and business leaders to blame “environmental regulations for the reason for the collapse of the steel industry,” which led to the deterioration of the Steel Belt, now called the Rust Belt. 

Since then, issues like fracking have been integrated into a broader political spectrum instead of solely being a conservation issue. Instead, Dieterich-Ward says Pennsylvanians need to get back in their backyard because nature is not for political leverage.

“The things that people discover out in their landscapes have had a profound effect on them,” he said.

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