Editing Conservation movement (section)

====Since 1970====
Environmental reemerged on the national agenda in 1970, with Republican [[Richard Nixon]] playing a major role, especially with his creation of the [[United States Environmental Protection Agency|Environmental Protection Agency]]. The debates over the public lands and environmental politics played a supporting role in the decline of liberalism and the rise of modern environmentalism. Although Americans consistently rank environmental issues as "important", polling data indicates that in the voting booth voters rank the environmental issues low relative to other political concerns.

The growth of the Republican party's political power in the inland West (apart from the Pacific coast) was facilitated by the rise of popular opposition to public lands reform. Successful Democrats in the inland West and Alaska typically take more conservative positions on environmental issues than Democrats from the Coastal states. Conservatives drew on new organizational networks of think tanks, industry groups, and citizen-oriented organizations, and they began to deploy new strategies that affirmed the rights of individuals to their property, protection of extraction rights, to hunt and recreate, and to pursue happiness unencumbered by the federal government at the expense of resource conservation.<ref>* Turner, James Morton, "The Specter of Environmentalism": Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right. ''The Journal of American History'' 96.1 (2009): 123-47 [http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/96.1/turner.html online at History Cooperative] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090703095241/http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/96.1/turner.html |date=2009-07-03 }}</ref>

In 2019, convivial conservation was an idea proposed by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher. Convivial conservation draws on social movements and concepts like [[environmental justice]] and structural change to create a post-capitalist approach to conservation.<ref>{{Cite book|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183pdh2|title=Nature Inc.|date=2014-05-29|publisher=University of Arizona Press|doi=10.2307/j.ctt183pdh2|isbn=978-0-8165-9885-4|editor-last=Büscher|editor-first=Bram|editor-last2=Dressler|editor-first2=Wolfram|editor-last3=Fletcher|editor-first3=Robert}}</ref> Convivial conservation rejects both human-nature dichotomies and capitalistic political economies. Built on a politics of equity, structural change and  environmental  justice, convivial conservation is considered a radical theory as it focuses on the structural political-economy of modern nation states and the need to create structural change.<ref name=":4">Büscher, B. and Fletcher, R., 2019. Towards convivial conservation. ''Conservation & Society'', ''17''(3), pp.283-296. </ref> Convivial conservation creates a more integrated approach which reconfigures the nature-human configuration to create a world in which humans are recognized as a part of nature. The emphasis on nature as for and by humans creates a human responsibility to care for the environment as a way of caring for themselves. It also redefines nature as not only being pristine and untouched, but cultivated by humans in everyday formats. The theory is a long-term process of structural change to move away from capitalist valuation in favor of a system emphasizing everyday and local living.<ref name=":4" /> Convivial conservation creates a nature which includes humans rather than excluding them from the necessity of conservation. While other conservation theories integrate some of the elements of convivial conservation, none move away from both dichotomies and capitalist valuation principles.

===== The five elements of convivial conservation =====
Source:<ref name=":4" />

# The promotion of nature for, to and by humans
# The movement away from the concept of conservation as saving only nonhuman nature
# Emphasis on the long-term democratic engagement with nature rather than elite access and tourism,
# The movement away from the spectacle of nature and instead focusing on the mundane ‘everyday nature’
# The democratic management of nature, with nature as commons and in context