Wise Conservation > "This Work of Conservation"
The Chamber of Commerce embraced the cause of conservationism early on and honored it thereafter. The merchants directed their energies toward causes that directly affected their own quality of life. Their involvement began with concern for their harbor, continued as factories sullied the urban air, and peaked when industrial despoliations began to threaten even the remotest of their estates and hunting grounds. Combining far-sighted altruism with financial self-interest, and a desire to protect upper-class privilege, the Chamber’s members were inevitably conflicted in their environmental efforts. “The danger in the development of this work of conservation,” a contributor to the Monthly Bulletin complained in 1915, “is that too much emphasis may be laid upon the commercial side, when it should be laid upon the first use of water, or its conservation for life and health.”
It had only taken a decade or two for industrial capitalism to reveal its destructiveness. During the years following the Civil War, ecosystems, landscapes, and ways of life had vanished in an alarming succession. Once gone, these national treasures were lost for good. Beginning in the 1880s, the Chamber of Commerce attended to two looming – and interrelated – crises: safeguarding the state’s water supply and preserving the Adirondack forests.
Market forces were at work. In 1883, a rise in prices for timber products had made it profitable – for the first time – to harvest inaccessible and low-grade Adirondack trees. As a result, “new mills are being built, the old Adirondack Railroad scheme is revived with considerable energy, and owners of forest land through the Wilderness are taking vigorous measures to get their logs to market.” Deforestation threatened the watershed feeding the crucial rivers and canals that connected the Manhattan piers with the agricultural hinterlands of the nation. To protect these commercial networks, the Chamber urged “a wise and comprehensive State policy [that] will seize upon the whole forest region, perhaps 4,000,000 acres … and keep it for all time as a great forest preserve, and in this way insure abundant water to the Hudson and the Canal.”
Two years later, the Legislature followed this suggestion, designating the watershed as protected land. In 1895, the newly updated State Constitution declared the Adirondack Park “forever wild.”
It didn’t take long before the Chamber became eager to preserve not just the land, but also its own reputation as a conservator of nature. The Special Committee on Conservation routinely opened its memos by referencing the history of its own commitments.
“WHEREAS, the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York has, for many years, favored a public policy of wise conservation of the natural resources of the state and nation,” a typical example from 1913 began,
having from 1883 to the present time labored for the preservation of the Adirondack forests; having as early as 1895 urged upon Congress the appointment of an expert commission to report and plan for the protection of the forests of the nation; having in January 1912 appointed a Special Committee on the Conservation of the waters of the State for the benefit of all the people …
The Chamber’s members relied on wise governmental action – guided by themselves – to protect public resources. This was not a confession that free-market capitalism was inevitably destructive of the environment, but rather it reflected the conviction that corrupt politicians were constantly defrauding the public trust in favor of cronies and monopolists. Few, if any, of the elite members of the Chamber had earned their fortunes without some governmental connivance. But – with these fortunes secure – the merchants now acted to prevent latecomers from sharing in the boodle.