Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946)

Abstract

The decades immediately previous to World War I witnessed a marked shift in popular attitudes toward the Canadian North. ... His 1907 canoe trip to the northeast of Great Slave Lake sharply focuses the impact Seton had on how we view the northern wilderness. ... Yet Seton's influence on the new response to the North was far more deep-seated than this single trip. He was in the advance guard of a new era of wildlife conservation, having sensed that a way of life fundamental to all mankind was rapidly growing extinct in the face of modern technology and communications. Unlike many outdoorsmen of his time and certainly unlike those of past generations, Seton saw the wilderness as a place that needed to be preserved, rather than conquered. He published over 40 books on the natural world. He undertook extensive lecture tours. He began "The League of the Woodcraft Indians," a youth organization that encouraged conservation and understanding of the natural world. When Robert Baden-Powell added a strong militaristic dimension to Seton's organization, the Boy Scouts came into being, and Seton, wholly dissatisfied, withdrew. ... in the philosophy he developed toward untamed nature, he blazed a path leading directly to the conservationist attitudes of today.