Abstract

Peter Kalm was a Finnish/Swedish naturalist, botanist/scientist, and travel writer in Colonial America. Travels into North America (1753-1761), Kalm’s representative work described the North American colonies in the eighteenth century. Exploring how "Travels into North America" offered incisive commentaries on the European colonists’ short-sighted thinking and wasteful use of North America’s natural resources, this study argues that Kalm’s work offered an alternative to the dominating and predominant expansionary ethos of the age, and therefore helped introduce the idea of sustainability and initiate a minority tradition of environmental concern into early American environmental history. In this way, Kalm became an essential precursor to conservation history of the following two centuries.