The question as to when legally relevant nature Conservation thought began is sub ject to dispute. Politically effective and undoubtedly sustainable legal nature Conservation began in parks, in which nature was preserved on the basis ofits own value. Such public parks were created after 1860 in the United States. The history ofYellowstone Park which was founded in 1872 can be viewed as the beginning of the legally as well as historically relevant Conservation thought. Insofar as the American national parks posed a material challenge to the beginning homeland protection movement, their philosophical foundations in Europe remained for the most part unnoticed. In Europe it was mosdy the historically arisen environment which was intended to be preserved, whereas in the American approach the experience of nature was in the focus. The admiration of nature should not take part from the perspective of a spectator, but in direct contact with the elementary forces. For the legal historian, the problem lies in the specification of the point in time in which the valuation of natureclose life was transposed into a demand for the preservatton ofspecific landscapes. Inspired and supported by European theological arguments, in particular those of Rousseau and Schelling, in the New England ofthe 1840s, the civilization-critical school of thought arose called transcendentalism. The main proponent of transcendentalism, taught a form of self-observation, which connected the degree of subjective freedom with the degree of natural behavior. His student HDT radicalized this view and made political in the 1850s the independent, distant-from-state lifestyle he practiced. In the course of the beginning dispute between the Northern and Southern States Thoreau’s convictions provided a moral justification for the Northern States. His thought and self-view oriented themselves along the lines ofthe original way oflife, its valuation in the consequence increasingly influenced the self-picture ofthe United States. One consequence of this was not only the recognition of typically American landscapes, a romanticisation of Native Americans and the creation of inner-city parks, but also the beginning of the Conservation Movement. Without the leading function of Emerson and Thoreau these movements could not have established themselves. John Muir transposed these philosophical foundations into practice.