# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 12, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-greatest-american-conservationist-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

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.

Tags: historical-figures, nature, usa, conservation