John James Audubon on conservationism

[snopes]

Comment: The following quote has been attributed to John James Audubon (a Google
search yields nearly 300 references to this "fact"):

"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by
his fathers, but borrowed from his children."

I'm skeptical that Audubon is responsible for this quote because he died
in 1851, well before the birth of the American conservation movement in
the late 19th century.

I'm curious as to the true source (Audubon or otherwise) of this quote.

[ganzfeld]

Accoding to etymonline, even the use of the word conservationist (from 1922) isn't as old as the conservation movement. The conservation movement had its origins in the 1850s and 1860s (although I guess it could be argued that people such as John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, were early conservationists).

As far as I know, Audubon was never a conservationist and certainly wasn't in the modern sense. According to Wikipedia:

One of his biographers, Duff Hart-Davis, reveals: "The rarer the bird, the more eagerly he pursued it, never apparently worrying that by killing it he might hasten the extinction of its kind."

I have no idea who said that but it couldn't have been Audubon.