FROM PLUMES TO PRESERVATION: HOW THE ANTI-FEATHER CRUSADE SPURRED THE AMERICAN CONSERVATION MOVEMENT -Scarlet Strogov
Representative to the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education, founder of the Empathy Across Difference Club, and a tutor with the Achieve Foundation. She co-founded and edited The Pigeon at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership. This summer, she is reporting with CivicStory's Summer Newsroom and interning in Senator Cory Booker's Newark office. Her interests span history, philosophy, politics, religion, music and theater.
Introduction
The history of modern Western fashion has often been intertwined with a darker narrative of ecological exploitation. Beginning in 1534, European fur traders were active in North America, hunting and trapping a multitude of animal species, including fox, fisher, lynx, mink, muskrat, otter, pine marten, timber wolf, bison, and beaver.
By 1895, beavers, whose pelts were particularly valuable because of the popularity of beaver hats, were almost completely extinct in the eastern United States and were in steep decline in the western states.
Overhunting to satisfy Western fashion demands was also responsible for the depletion of animal populations outside of North America. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, elephant populations in Africa declined considerably, with some local populations facing extinction due to the high demand for the elephants’ tusks, which provided the ivory that Europeans and Americans used to craft a wide array of sartorial objects, from buttons to shoe buckles to flea traps—hollow cylinders, baited with honey or blood, that were worn as pendants.