On this day, July 22, 1966, the Inaugural meeting of the “Conservation Society”
There’s this corking article if you’re interested-
Herring, H. (2001) The Conservation Society: Harbinger of the 1970s Environment Movement in the UK. Environment and History 7, 4 pp. 381-401.
Why this matters.
We need to remember that organizations come and go, and are creatures of their time, and can be “trapped” – by their own cognitive and emotional settings, by others expectations and perceptions of them. A little like humans themselves, donchathink?
What happened next?
The Conservation Society was influential and important in the late 60s – we will come back to the 1968 lecture by Ritchie Calder. Its apogee was 1971-2, when it hosted a conference with Paul Ehrlich as a guest speaker. Its decline in influence through the 1970s and 80s (it was wound up in 1987) was tied to the rise of groups like Friends of the Earth and The Ecology Party (aka The Green Party), not tied to population concerns and not perceived as old, white and conservative.