Beginning in the early 20th century and stemming into the mid-1900s, conservation had a different meaning than it does to us now. Worster describes in Part 5 of Nature’s Economy, that Gifford Pinchot, the founder of the forest service, had an understanding of the word conservation. Conservation was simply the efficiency and productivity of public lands. However, he did not come to this definition from an ecological standpoint but instead it was based solely on agricultural views. Pinchot enacted policies to kill off predators in order to preserve livestock for agriculture and big game for hunting. Dunlap describes this time of history very well in his paper about the extermination of coyote populations. The Forest Service was using poison methods at first but that shifted throughout history due to it being inhumane and ineffective. The article provides an efficient way to learn about the poisoning of coyotes and the wildlife policies put in place to control the issue. 

After the failure of these methods came a new way to look at the idea of conservation. Nash introduced in Chapter 11 of Wilderness and the American Mind, two great men of environmental history. John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Both of these men were making an effort to preserve the natural wilderness. Leopold created the idea of “Land Ethic” in one of the books that was published after he died. The idea of the land ethic is completely contradicted by Pinchot and early Americans views of conservation. The land ethic is an environmental framework that stems from the concept that the preservation of land is strictly limited to the benefits of nature and rejects all human-centered ideals of how the environment should be managed. This is completely different than early ideas of conservation when people believed that to conserve the land was to make it more productive, and ultimately increase business. After the emergence of these views, the extermination of predators began to cease and environmental protection took precedence.