Historians continue to disagree about what ideas really motivated the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s

     Adam Rome noted in his article “Give Earth a Chance” that as Americans emerged out of the New Deal era with a sustainable level of material comfort, liberal motivations shifted from a quantitative discussion to a qualitative one in concern for providing for the public. For the environmental movement, the idea of government going beyond economic assistance to concerns for community services meshed with idea of setting aside wilderness areas.  As Nash pointed out in his writings about Robert Marshall, and as we’ve read in multiple other articles, there was a belief dating back to Thoreau that man needed to be in nature to restore himself from the oppression of the city. That he needed the solitude and grandeur of wild places to regain the humility that comes from seeing one is part of something much larger. As such, to improve the quality of human existence, man needed wild areas.
     What made the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s different though was how concern for the environment went beyond just advocating for wilderness areas to acknowledging the “broader concern with ecology itself” (Steinberg, 240).  Books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and events like Love Canal made it clear pollution was affecting the quality of life for many Americans and groups like the Sierra Club used those events to drive environmental issues into the mainstream of American lives.  Alongside this, an environmental conscious was making its way into popular media with Walt Disney jumping on board and TV programs such as Wild Kingdom making their debut in American living rooms. Leopold’s idea that man had a “responsibility to the rest of life” was gaining a foothold (Nash, 192).  As a result, the growing environmental movement not only had a human health aspect but a moral side as well in its quest to better the quality of human life on the planet.  This motivation to improve the physical and moral quality of life versus just improving it economically made the strides in environmentalism possible as it engendered wide support.  That support in turn drove sweeping governmental action.