Name______________________________

Date__________________
Famous Environmentalists

Directions : Read the passage. Explain the highlighted words. On a

separate sheet of paper write the main idea of each passage.
Instrucciones:

Henry David Thoreau was an influential author, philosopher and

environmentalist. After the death of his brother, Thoreau moved to a
forest along the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts.
Thoreaus experience at Walden formed the basis of his legendary
work, Life in the Woods, published in 1854. The book described his
memoirs of his life along the beautiful pond as a spiritual quest. He
spent 26 months on Walden Pond.
Thoreau went on to write a two million-word journal (over 24 years)
about the natural history of Concord and surrounding areas, He also
wrote essays on fall foliage, seed dispersion, and hiking and canoeing.
He was among the first to advocate land conservation and wilderness
as well as Charles Darwins Theory of Evolution. Today, Henry David
Thoreau is considered Americas first environmentalist.
Forest
hiking
Shores
canoeing
Advocate

memoirs

quest

foliage

seed

wilderness

During the early 1900s, conservation began to develop as a national

movement. People considered plants and animals as instrument to
increase human welfare, rather than as independent species with their
own inherent right . In 1908 President Roosevelt brought together

governors, federal official, scientists, business executives, and

conservation leaders for a White House conference to adopt national
policies for the use of natural resources. Under his leadership he
protected land from being solely used for commercial development.
Welfareresources.
Rather than

inherentpolicies-

natural
solely

development
Aldo Leopold was an American naturalist, wildlife biologist and
conservationist. He wrote the A Sand County Almanac, a collection of
essays about the natural world and conservation. The book was published
posthumously in 1949. A Sand County Almanac went on to become one of the
key texts of the environment movement. Leopold is identified with The Land
Ethic, the final essay in the Almanac, in which he argued that people are part of
the land community, and so bear moral responsibilities that extend beyond the
realm of the human to include the non-human parts of that community.
Wildlife
texts
argued
realm

posthumously

bear

With Silent Spring, Rachel Carson helped launch the modern

ecology movement. She was a marine biologist who wrote about the
destructive effects of DDT. She wrote that pesticides poison the food
supply of wild animals and could also contaminate the food supply of
human beings. It has been 50 years since Rachel Carson died. Her
indomitable spirit finally exhausted by a long struggle with cancer. The
chemical industry had challenged the validity of her book Silent Spring.
Because of her work, she battled against the smear campaigns,
misinformation and the lies of the chemical industry. In 1964, she died
victorious. The spraying of DDT had stopped and a new wave of
environmental awareness had taken hold, first in the United States
and then the worldwide.

Launch
smear
awareness

Validity

lies

campaigns

DDT

Garrett Hardin was an ecologist and microbiologist, best known for his
controversial beliefs about population control. Hardin became famous
through his writing, specifically through a 1968 essay, The Tragedy of
the Commons.
The tragedy of the commons explains over-exploitation of resources
that we all have in common; such as air, land and water. It is an
economic problem in which every individual tries to reap the greatest
benefit from a given resource. When the resource is over used, every
individual who consumes an additional unit directly harms others who
can no longer enjoy the benefits. For example, if neighboring farmers
increase the number of their own sheep living on a common block of
land, eventually the land will become depleted and not be able to
support the sheep, which is detrimental to all.
Controversial

over exploitation

reap

harms

consumes

detrimental

Al Gore is the former Vice President of the United States (19932001).

He was Democratic Party presidential nominee. He was a co-recipient
of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. He has been involved with the environmental activist
movement for a number of decades. Gore starred in the documentary
film An Inconvenient Truth, released on May 24, 2006. The film
documents the evidence for anthropogenic global warming and warns
of the consequences of people not making immediate changes to their
behavior.

Nominee
change
anthropogenic

co-recipient

warns

climate