by Eric Rutkow
The competing uses of lumbermen and recreationists raised a fundamental question about the nation’s publicly controlled trees: Were they stumpage destined to end up as timber and forest products or were they the architecture supporting outdoor leisure? The unenviable task of providing an answer rested with the Forest Service, whose jurisdiction included the overwhelming majority of public woodlands.
The Forest Service already had a policy in place before the surge in postwar use. Known as “multiple use,” it dictated that forest acreage serve as many concurrent purposes as possible but that in cases of conflict discretion be employed to select the highest use. This sounded reasonable in theory, but as with so many things, the devil was in the discretion. The Forest Service shared a long relationship with the logging industry, and many foresters still considered timber production to be the preeminent concern. And, of equal importance, the 1897 Pettigrew Amendment, which remained in effect, did not cover recreation. Thus, highest use by statute excluded the needs of autocampers. The upshot was that when the needs of the two factions were at loggerheads, the loggers often seemed to come out ahead of the recreationists.
But the recreation community was evolving into a powerful constituency. It comprised not only millions of individuals interested in conservation, hunting, leisure, and pleasure driving but also corporate interests, such as the American Automobile Association (AAA), which argued: “In evaluating the recreational value of the national forests, the economic importance of travel should not be overlooked.” A study that the AAA commissioned found that “motor vacationists spend nearly $10 billion during the course of their journeys.” The Forest Service’s own literature confirmed these findings and noted that by the mid-1950s outdoor recreation ranked third among American industries, trailing only manufacturing and agriculture. Recognizing the economic and political strength of the motorist lobby, the lumber and forest products industries tried to appear conciliatory—their joint public relations arm even issued pamphlets titled “Story Tips for Outdoor Writers,” which were peppered with vignettes showing how loggers worked in chorus with recreationists. Nonetheless, the forces aligned with recreation began to demand reform of the system.
The issue reached Congress in the late 1950s. Legislators soon found themselves torn between the appeals of the recreationist lobby (labeled by its opponents as advocating a “single use” approach) and of the forest products industry (labeled by its antagonists as promoting “overuse”). The Forest Service, meanwhile, continued to champion “multiple use” but chafed at any legislation that might alter its mandate. Congress was soon flooded from all sides with statutory proposals and potential amendments. One congressman, in frustration, asked, “[H]ow can we possibly put together these various amendments, incorporate them in this bill, and then vote on it[?]” But pressure for a resolution would not let up.
In mid-1960 Congress passed the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act (MUSYA), the first legislation since the 1897 Pettigrew Amendment to confront the ultimate purpose of the national forests and their trees. The act attempted to offer some degree of satisfaction for everyone involved. The Forest Service preserved its discretion in choosing between conflicting uses. The forest products industry gained some assurance that its access would remain unfettered—the “sustained yield” requirement was viewed by many as a guarantee that the era of intensive logging would continue. And outdoor enthusiasts saw recreation gain a formal statutory endorsement. The first sentence of the new legislation read: “[I]t is the policy of the Congress that the national forests are established and shall be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, wildlife and fish purposes.” Recreation was now a top-level use, equal in stature to timber production. The nation had officially recognized a new dimension for its publicly owned trees.
Nonetheless, some recreationists and conservationists felt that their side had lost out in the fight. The year following the act’s passage, Michael McCloskey, the future executive director of the Sierra Club, wrote an extended critique in the Oregon Law Review. He argued that the gains for recreationists were more rhetorical than functional: The act’s recognition of recreation had failed to provide any enforcement beyond the discretion that the Forest Service already held. McCloskey concluded that if the Act was of major importance it was only “because of the legal confusion it add[ed] to an already confused area.”
McCloskey’s legal analysis was spot-on (as future conflicts would confirm), but from another perspective the MUSYA could simply be seen as codifying a revolution that had already taken place. By the time the act passed, the Forest Service was in the midst of implementing its most ambitious outdoor recreation program to date, known as “Operation Outdoors,” and in 1962 the federal government created the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. The national forests were now for the people in a way that would have been inconceivable at their founding. It was part of the culture that traced back to Ford and the creation of mass-produced cars. Even if many sites were damaged by clear-cutting, the national forests were still the destination for tens of millions of American families packing up and heading out for vacation. In fact, if one didn’t follow the political battles or encounter an active logging site, it would have been easy to assume that the forests were for nothing but recreation. The best example of this might have been the 1960 Winter Olympic Games, which are little remembered but stand out for several reasons: They were the first ones broadcast live; they featured an American ice hockey victory over the Soviet Union (the “forgotten” Miracle on Ice); and they were staged almost entirely on land leased from the Tahoe National Forest in Northern California.
The End of the Road
WHILE THE NATION’S motor tourists and forest products industries disagreed on many issues, they both tended to be in favor of more road construction. Roads provided the all-important access to the country’s trees, whether the product being sought was timber, pulp, or leisure.
But not everyone shared this attitude. To a small minority of recreationists and conservationists, the twentieth-century mania for road building marked mankind’s having gone too far in its effort to exert control over nature. The sound of a motor sputtering in the distance meant that the trappings of society always remained within earshot. Solitude was constantly haunted by the specter of the next car horn. A forest (or any other ecosystem) bisected by roads was one that had forever lost a certain degree of its inherent wildness. And once that fell to the imperium of the automobile, it was nearly impossible to resurrect.
This concern would develop into an issue of national prominence during the postwar period. It had become increasingly apparent that if measures weren’t taken to protect some public lands from automobile traffic, there would soon be nowhere left to escape from the rumbling of modernity, nowhere left for land to remain undisturbed. And just as a coalition had formed in the late nineteenth century to protect some forests from the rapacious slashing and burning of the lumber industry, so, too, would one now come together to salvage these last stands of wilderness.
The spirit of this group would owe much to John Muir, the great naturalist, writer, national parks champion, and, in his last years, antagonist of Gifford Pinchot. But the movement’s true intellectual anchor—a man dubbed “the Jeremiah of wilderness thinking” and “the Commanding General of the Wilderness Battle”—was someone who had actually spent almost his entire career working for Pinchot’s Forest Service. His name was Aldo Leopold. He never arose to any position of national prominence, and for most of his lifetime was little known outside forestry circles. But his writings set the foundation for one of the twentieth century’s most important environmental movements.
Leopold’s life began just as the nation was awakening to the reality that its once illimitable forests and their trees were running out. He was born in Burlington, Iowa, on January 11, 1887, three years before the U.S. Census declared that the frontier was officially exhausted and four years before President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed the first national fo
rest reserve. Like so many Americans, the Leopold family drew their livelihood from the very trees that had suddenly become the subject of so much agitation. Aldo’s father, Carl, ran a company that manufactured wooden desks. They were made from the finest cherry, oak, and walnut, and the family business soon gained a national reputation for the quality of its product. The elder Leopold, when not tending to business affairs, spent much of his time immersed in the natural world. He was an avid birder, hunter, and woodsman, pursuits that young Aldo absorbed with the passion of a zealot. Aldo’s love of the outdoors and his fear for its long-term survival bred an interest in professional forestry, a field that had just arrived on this side of the Atlantic. By age fifteen, he had determined to become a forester and join the ranks of Pinchot’s budding federal agency. Leopold’s father urged his son to remain in Iowa and enter the family desk business, but his mother, seeking to provide her son the opportunity he desperately craved, pressured her husband to finance an elite secondary education in the East, with the hope that Aldo might then be able to attend Yale, home to the newly established School of Forestry.
In January 1904, Leopold arrived at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. Located between Trenton and Princeton, it was among the nation’s oldest boarding schools and featured a campus designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The school’s parklike setting appealed greatly to Leopold, but he spent much of his free time on tramps in the surrounding countryside. A month after arriving he had mastered the terrain for ten miles around, naming the places that captivated his interest: Big Woods, Cat Woods, Fern Woods, Owl Woods, Ash Swamp. The tramps continued unabated throughout the next three semesters. During the fall of 1904, he wrote, “What great satisfaction there is in plowing through the rich brown autumn leaves of the woods on a fine sunny day!” The other students took to calling him “the naturalist.”
Leopold nonetheless balanced his love for the surrounding woods with his schoolwork, and, as his mother had hoped, he earned himself a place at Yale for the fall of 1905. He chose to enroll in the university’s Sheffield Scientific School, which offered preparatory work in forestry. The long tramps of his Lawrenceville days gradually gave way to the demands of a more rigorous curriculum, but Leopold dutifully made this sacrifice. It was a thrilling moment to be studying forestry. President Roosevelt was expanding the national forests at a breakneck pace, and his loyal deputy Pinchot had just won a campaign to wrest control of the national forests away from the Department of the Interior. Leopold, who entered the Forestry School full-time in the fall of 1906, worked tirelessly to distinguish himself and, in one of his proudest moments, was tapped to join the Society of Robin Hood, the school’s elite fraternity. By the time of his graduation in 1909, it was clear that Leopold was going to join the burgeoning ranks of Pinchot’s Forest Service, a dream he had been pursuing since before his arrival in the East.
In July 1909, Leopold arrived at Albuquerque, in the New Mexico Territory, to begin his work as an assistant forester. Though much of the Southwest was a desert, the region also hosted a network of woodlands and scrub brush. By the time Leopold appeared on the scene, the Southwest, known to the Forest Service as District 3, contained twenty-one national forests. Leopold soon learned that he had been assigned to the sprawling Apache National Forest, which had been created the previous year from public lands in the Arizona Territory (the forest’s name provided a somewhat cruel tribute to the Native American tribe, led by Geronimo, that as late as 1886 had resisted federal efforts to claim their land). The Apache featured a range of forest ecosystems characteristic to the region. Along the canyon stream banks grew a mixture of cottonwoods, sycamores, and willows. Higher up, in the semidesert climate, were oak groves, scrubby hardwoods, and a mixture of juniper and piñon pines. And above this, coating the mountains that burst forth from the landscape, stood endless stands of ponderosa pine. For Leopold, it was a magical setting: rugged and unbroken, its streams flush with trout, its forests full of wild game and trophy-worthy predators. In a word, the land could be best described as wilderness.
Leopold spent most of his next fifteen years working for the Forest Service in District 3. It was a period of vital development for the young naturalist, both personally and professionally. Once he got his bearings in the region (and suffered through the growing pains of a tenderfoot in a strange land), he began to demonstrate the sort of unerring competency that had marked his time at Yale. By 1913 he was put in charge of the Carson National Forest, one the district’s most beautiful landscapes, nestled between the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the east and the San Juan Mountains in the west. During this same time, he also met Estella Bergere, the elegant daughter of one of New Mexico’s most distinguished families. Leopold courted her with the same passion he brought to the study of the natural world, and in 1912 the two married, marking the beginning of a companionship that lasted the rest of his life. By 1919, Estella had given birth to four children, and Leopold had risen to second in command of District 3.
While this was a prosperous decade for the young forester, the same could not necessarily be said of the lands that he was helping to manage. They were beginning to lose the wild character that had so endeared them to Leopold. Loggers and grazers, who had been exploiting the region long before Leopold’s arrival, were expanding their activities, largely with the consent and license of the Forest Service. And the predators that stalked the land were beginning to fall victim to the keen-eyed riflework of farmers, herders, and rangers—this “varmint” eradication policy was something that Leopold had wholeheartedly endorsed but would later come to regret and publicly denounce. But most troublesome, at least from Leopold’s perspective, was the arrival of motor tourist roads, which progressively sliced the landscape into thinner and thinner strips. When he had begun working in District 3, there had been, in his words, “six immense roadless areas in the Southwestern forests, each larger than half a million acres,” but these, too, like the predators, were beginning to disappear. As he explained, “Part of the lost areas were justifiable sacrifices to timber values; part, I think, were the victims of poor brakes on the good roads movement.”
Seeking to keep his beloved wild forests from becoming further tamed, Leopold began working to formulate a policy proposal that might offer a way to curb the invasion of motor roads before they had wholly colonized the Southwest. In 1921, he set forth his ideas in a short article that appeared in the Journal of Forestry and was titled “The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreational Policy.” This article would eventually become one of the most influential pieces ever written on forestry and trees. Its power, in many respects, derived from one sentence, tucked away in the center of the piece, that provided a precise definition of what Leopold aimed to protect: “By ‘wilderness’ I mean a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”
This language marked a new era for a concept with a very long history. The first English settlers in America had frequently employed the word “wilderness” to describe the entirety of their newfound landscape, and not often in a positive light. William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote in 1620 that New England contained nothing “but a hidious & desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts & willd men.” The term’s meaning gradually shed its more nefarious connotations as settlement continued and the threat of Indian attacks diminished. By the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau was able to write: “[I]n Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild.” John Muir, whom many saw as a successor to the transcendentalist tradition, took the idea even further, claiming that “[t]he clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
When Muir spoke of wilderness, he meant it largely as a counterweight to the idea that trees were provided to man for economic exploitation. Leopold, however, had a much different agenda attached
to his definition. As he explained of his view of wilderness, “Very evidently we have here the old conflict between preservation and use, long since an issue with respect to timber, water power, and other purely economic resources, but just now coming to be an issue with respect to recreation.” As a member of the Forest Service, Leopold accepted that timber mining was a necessary and inevitable use of the nation’s trees. But the field of recreation—source of so many discussions in the era of Fordism and autocamping—had opened a new lens through which to understand forests. The question was whether recreational use included something greater than motorized tourism. For Leopold, the answer was obvious. Wilderness, therefore, did not mean “nonuse” (as it might have been understood by Muir) but a particular type of recreational use. Leopold wondered: “[Does] the principle of highest use . . . not itself demand that representative portions of some forests be preserved as wilderness[?]”
Seeing wilderness as a type of forest use was a fairly radical proposition. But Leopold tempered his argument with a host of qualifications. As he wrote in his 1921 article,
First, such wilderness areas should occupy only a small fraction of the total National Forest area—probably not to exceed one in each State. Second, only areas naturally difficult of ordinary industrial development should be chosen. Third, each area should be representative of some type of country of distinctive recreational value, or afford some distinctive type of outdoor life, opportunity for which might disappear on other forest lands open to industrial development.
