Grey Owl - Conservationist Views

Conservationist Views

Initially Grey Owl’s efforts and conservation were focused towards the beaver up North; however, with the publication of The Men of the Last Frontier, his conservation efforts came to include all wild animals. While he had at one time been a fur trapper, he came to believe that “the trap, the rifle, and poison” would some day result in “the Dwellers in the forest to come to and end too.” He expresses in Pilgrims of the Wild how our rush to exploit natural resources for commercial value overlooks “the capabilities and possibilities of the wild creatures involved in it.” It was this “commodification of all living things that was responsible for the destruction from the beaver.” While he was against the commodification of wild animals, his theory was not for the preservation of all living things, but for the conservation of them. Grey Owl expressed that if there were “temporary at least” protection for fur bearing animals, then we would “see the almost human response to kindness” from animals. He expresses the conception of people to place themselves outside of nature as one of the problems, and instead he called for people to remember “that you belong to nature, and not it to you.” His publication of Men of the Last Frontier was first called The Vanishing Frontier, and subsequently named Men of the Last Frontier by the publishers, which he felt “missed the entire point of the book” as he “spoke of nature, not men.” The changing of the title exemplified for him the conception of people “that man governs the powers of nature.”