Who is the greatest American conservationist of all time?

Some of them wrote the laws, some of them wrote the books, and one of them just took very good photographs of the mountains.

1

John Muir

The Sierra Club founder whose writing and camping trip with Roosevelt helped save Yosemite.

2

Theodore Roosevelt

The president who signed the Antiquities Act and set aside roughly 230 million acres of public land.

3

Rachel Carson

The marine biologist whose 1962 book Silent Spring forced pesticides onto the national agenda.

4

Aldo Leopold

The forester and author of A Sand County Almanac, who argued for a land ethic decades before ecology was mainstream.

5

Gifford Pinchot

The first chief of the U.S. Forest Service and the architect of managed, working forests.

6

Ansel Adams

The photographer whose black-and-white Sierra images became the argument for protecting them.

7

John James Audubon

The naturalist and painter whose Birds of America still anchors American bird conservation.

8

Stephen Mather

The businessman who became the first director of the National Park Service and built it into a system.

9

Marjory Stoneman Douglas

The writer whose River of Grass reframed the Everglades as worth saving rather than draining.

10

Sylvia Earle

The oceanographer and former NOAA chief scientist who has spent decades campaigning for marine protected areas.

11

Henry David Thoreau

The Walden author whose case for wildness became the philosophical starting point for American conservation.

12

George Bird Grinnell

The editor and Audubon Society founder who campaigned for Yellowstone and for the bison's survival.

13

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The president behind the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put three million young men to work on public land.

14

Edward Abbey

The Desert Solitaire author whose writing about the Southwest turned a generation into public-lands defenders.