However, this was carried out at a time of transition when Linnaeus (the Swedish botanist Carl von Linne) and others in botany to classify plants not in terms of moral status or usefulness but according to their intrinsic qualities and structures was quite new. Indeed, Linnaeus is said to have fallen on his knees to give thanks when he first saw gorse in England - a hated enemy of the agricultural improvers.

Thomas Huxley, like many Victorian's contemplating the rapid industrialisation of  the British countryside environment, wanted to deny man's participation in the war for survival raging in nature. On the other hand, they could not resist setting up their battle lines elsewhere. Manly combat for Victorians such as Huxley and Charles Kingsley had powerful attractions and required only a morally acceptable arena for its pursuit. Huxley's solution was to shift the focus of violence from a man- man to a man-nature confrontation. This was also the recommendation of the American philosopher William James in his 1910 essay "A Moral Equivalent to War." It was seen by both men as wholly legitimate, even honorific, to act aggressively toward nature, so long as that aggression was performed in the name of humanity, decency, virtue, and even health and cleanliness. They were intent on carrying the crusade against nature to the actual physical surface of the earth, on making the land over to serve as a kind of visible, external evidence of their accession to grace. Huxley's favorite metaphor for this ethic of ecological transformation was the image of the Garden of Eden, implying a civilized landscape surrounded by a wall to guard it from the Darwinian chaos. This garden was to be a place of virtue, but also of material productivity; the two ends were mutually reinforcing. It was, however, to be an expanding kingdom that one day would embrace the entire world. Already, in Tasmania, Huxley saw the walls moving out to encircle new territory, where a domesticated, "English" flora and fauna were replacing the native wilderness. If humans would restrain their self- seeking ambitions and work for the "corporate whole," they would see this process spread everywhere to create "an earthly paradise, a true Garden of Eden, in which all things should work together towards the well-being of the gardeners." Civilization, according to nature imperialists, became a process of pacification of nature by concerted force. In its train would come not only a more perfectly moral world but the rich rewards of productivity, wealth, and comfort for the human species.

Thus, the way was open to manage nature according to desirable economic objectives, which for the Victorians was wealth from mass-production. Ironically, managerialism was at the root of conservation.  In the early 1900s Roosevelt's Chief Forester, Gifford Pinchot defined conservation as "the fundamental material policy of human civilization".  He referred to forest conservation as "tree farming." Instead of mining the woodlands, his corps of rangers would replant cut-over lands, just as a farmer replants his crops each year. "Forestry is handling trees so that one crop follows another' he explained.

The purpose of Forestry, then, is to make the forest produce the largest possible amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees. ... A well-handled farm gets more and more productive as the years pass; so does a well-handled forest.

Like Francis Bacon, Pinchot saw the world as badly in need of managing, and he was convinced that science could teach man to improve on nature, to make its processes more efficient and its crops more abundant. He would not go as far as the Germans toward intensive cultivation, or establish as they did, tree farms that resembled factories in their planned orderliness—there was not enough manpower in America to manage nature that intensively over so vast a space. But he would insist that all renewable natural resources, especially forests and wildlife, be approached in the future as crops to be planted, harvested, and cultivated by skilled experts. And like any efficient farmer, he could see value in the land chiefly where it could be turned to profit.

Another aspect of the imperial view is that in a domesticated world some species are turned into pests. They are reduced to the status of marauder.  Selected plants and animals become outcasts and an elusive challenge to the controlling, contriving hand of man in the agrarian economy. Moreover certain animal predators, such as the wolf,  come to be seen as moral offenders, a species of "vermin" that must be eradicated—by any available means. In the pursuit of economic gain, or emotional equilibrium with nature we have singled out enemies as well as chosen favourites. The Anglo-American mind has exhibited a peculiarly intense moralism that, in this case, assigns every species to an absolute ethical category: good or bad. A few wild animals, songbirds chiefly, have been pronounced good; everything else is of use only for target practice. And "varmint" has been the very worst epithet in America's moral lexicon, a label reserved for those species that plumb the depths of depravity. Essentially these are the animals with teeth and claws: the carnivores, including wolves, pumas, bears—and latest in line, coyotes.  The survival of the coyote represents an outrageous defiance of man's righteous empire over nature.

Behind Pinchot's conservation philosophy lay an environmental tradition stretching all the way back to the eighteenth century: progressive, scientific agriculture. From the time of "Turnip" Townshend and Arthur Young, who taught England how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before, progressive agriculture had always promoted a kind of conservation. Its spokesmen had long been a force for closer management of water and woodlands. They had awakened earlier generations to the threat of soil erosion, developed contour ploughing, and invented chemical fertilizers to make the earth more productive. In America they had established a number of land grant colleges where students were taught the gospel of wise land use.

The Imperial tradition is still with us in our age of computer-run organizations and it was probably inevitable that ecology too would come to emphasize the flow of goods and services—or of energy—in a kind of automated, robotized, pacified nature. The managerial ethos has come to the rescue of nature. Ecologists have stepped forward to manage the natural environment. That it has been mismanaged for so long is urged as a sufficient reason for putting scientists and scientifically- trained experts in charge now. Entire university science programmes appear under the title "Environmental Management." And indeed, our current preocupation with bioeconomics has given would-be managers working the the strategic objectives of biodiversity action plans plenty to work on_.

The Baconian sense of mission is not yet dead. N. P. Naumov, probably a leading ecologist in the latter day Soviet Union, admitted that "the goal of studying the factors of productivity is to raise it." This ideal, he suggests, may be realized "by changing organic nature, the species content and ratios, and the means of using and managing the populations."