1. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2. There is a long list of scholarly studies that seek to understand the natural world by focusing on a few well-placed figures. Among the most prominent of such works are Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Barbara Novak,

2. Having begun this study with the sense that I was voyaging alone into uncharted territory, I have been pleased to encounter several fellow explorers of conservation's hidden history along the way. Louis Warren studies poaching in The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Mark Spence focuses on the impact that the park movement had on American Indians in Dispossessing the Wilderness: The Preservationist Ideal, Indian Removal, and National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Richard Judd attempts to place rural New Englanders at the forefront of the conservation movement in Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Ben Johnson explores the effect of conservation on working-class immigrants in “Conservation, Subsistence, and Class at the Birth of Superior National Forest,” Environmental History 4 (January 1999): 80–99.

3. One of the clearest proofs of this shift is the fact that by the turn of the century it was possible for the first time to find thick manuals of forest law. See, for instance, George W. Woodruff, Federal and State Forest Laws, Bureau of Forestry Bulletin No. 57 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1904); and J. P. Kinney, The Development of Forest Law in America (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1917). For an example from British India at much the same time, see B. H. Baden-Powell, Forest Law: A Course of Lectures on the Principles of Civil and Criminal Law and on the Law of the Forest (London: Bradbury, Agnew, and Co., 1893).

4. The term “environmental bandits” is derived, of course, from the “social bandits” that Eric Hobsbawm first described in his work Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959); he developed his concept further in Bandits, rev. ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1981). Hobsbawm's work has spawned a huge literature, too vast to note here. One useful recent review essay, however, is Gilbert Joseph, “On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant Resistance,” Latin American Research Review 25 (1990): 7–53.

5. Although such language was widespread in early conservation literature, these particular quotes come from the commission in charge of the Adirondack Park. New York Forest, Fish and Game Commission, Eighth and Ninth Annual Reports, 1902–1903 (Albany: James B. Lyon, 1904), 107–8.

6. Roderick Nash, “The Value of Wilderness,” Environmental Review 3 (1977): 14–25. For a discussion of the development of environmental history as a distinct discipline and Nash's place in the field, see Richard White, “American

7. As Stephen Fox contends in his history of conservation, “Politics seldom lends itself to such simple morality plays. But environmental issues have usually come down to a stark alignment of white hats and black hats.” Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), 103. Among those works that adopt a similarly heroic stance toward conservation history are Frank Graham Jr., Man's Dominion: The Story of Conservation in America (New York: M. Evans, 1971); Frank E. Smith, The Politics of Conservation (New York: Pantheon, 1966); Douglas H. Strong, Dreamers and Defenders: American Conservationists (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Richard Stroud, ed., National Leaders of American Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985); and Peter Wild, Pioneer Conservationists of Western America (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press, 1979), and Pioneer Conservationists of Eastern America (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press, 1986).

8. See E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” and “The Moral Economy Reviewed,” in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), 185–258, 259–351. There is also a growing body of work that focuses on matters of political ecology—that is, on the “political sources, conditions, and ramifications of environmental change.” Raymond L. Bryant, “Political Ecology: An Emerging Research Agenda in Third-World Studies,” Political Geography 11 (January 1992): 13; see also Leslie Anderson, The Political Ecology of the Modern Peasant: Calculation and Community (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Adrian Atkinson, Principles of Political Ecology (London: Belhaven Press, 1991).

9. For examples of illiteracy or near-illiteracy in the Adirondacks, see the testimony of Joseph Lahey and Joseph Mitchell in New York State Assembly, Report and Testimony of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Depredations of Timber in the Forest Preserve, New York State Assembly Document No. 67, 1895 (Albany: Wynkoop, Hallenbeck, Crawford, 1896), 253, 314. (Hereafter referred to as Report, 1895.) The following chapters on Yellowstone also reveal numerous examples of people whose command of written English was quite limited.

10. A fascinating case study of how scholarly sleuthing can occasionally unearth the popular folklore that surrounded the rise of conservation can be found in Edward D. Ives, George Magoon and the Down East Game War: History, Folklore, and the Law (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

11. This emphasis on rereading elite documents to understand peasant consciousness has been central to the subaltern school of Indian studies. See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 14–17; and Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravortry Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). The term hidden transcript comes from the work of James Scott on the discourse of resistance. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

12. Information on the European roots of American forestry can be found in Nancy Peluso, Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 7–8.

13. Bernhard E. Fernow, “Report of the Forestry Division,” in U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture, 1887 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1888), 605–6. Fernow was scarcely alone in pointing to the example of Europe. In his first official report as federal forest commissioner, Franklin B. Hough included a detailed discussion of environmental legislation in Prussia, along with a description of the course of study at the German Royal Forest Academy. Hough, Report upon Forestry, 1877 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1878), 360–65, 613–15.

14. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975); John Broad, “Whigs and Deer-Stealers in Other Guises: A Return to the Origins of the Black Act,” Past and Present 119 (May 1988): 56–72; and Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Although the Captain Swing riots also focused on concerns about the mechanization of rural labor, many of the rioters came from the Forest of Dean, where they acted in defiance of state controls over the forest. See Richard H. Grove, “Colonial Conservation, Ecological Hegemony, and Popular Resistance: Towards a Global Synthesis,” in Imperialism and the Natural World, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1990), 46, n. 58. More general treatments of poaching in Great Britain can be found in Harry Hopkins, The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars, 1760–1914 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1985); E. G. Walsh, ed., The Poacher's Companion (Suffolk, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1982); and the classic article by Douglas Hay, “Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase,” in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (New York: Pantheon, 1975).

15. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 35; see also Peluso, Rich Forests, Poor People, 14. For more on the poaching of game in Germany, see Regina Schulte, The Village in Court: Arson, Infanticide, and Poaching in the Court Records of Upper Bavaria, 1848–1910, trans. Barrie Selman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

16. Peter Linebaugh, “Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate,” Crime and Social Justice 6 (fall-winter 1976): 5–16.

17. Grove, “Colonial Conservation,” passim; David Anderson and Richard Grove, eds., Conservation in Africa: People, Policies, and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The literature on conservation in India is particularly well developed. See, for example, Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India's Central Provinces,

18. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 2–4; Robert H. Weibe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), xiii–xiv, 185–86. As Andrew Ross has observed, “Ideas that draw upon the authority of nature nearly always have their origin in ideas about society.” Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (New York: Verso, 1994), 15.

19. For those wishing more background information on the rise of conservation, a chronology of major events has been provided following the text.