by Eric Rutkow
This was the plan of a forester and, above all, a pragmatist.
After Leopold published his first wilderness article, he began working to see his policy put into effect. Though most of his southwestern forests had already been traversed by automobile roads, one section of national forest, near the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico (which had gained statehood in 1912), remained unbroken. It was, according to Leopold, “an area of nearly half a million acres, topographically isolated by mountain ranges and box canyons,” and its remoteness ensured that “no net economic loss would result from the policy of withholding further industrial development, except that timber would remain inaccessible and available only for limited local consumption.” Of course, not everyone saw it this way. Leopold encountered staunch resistance from many of his colleagues in the Forest Service who believed that any potential development took priority over wilderness preservation. Leopold’s antagonists were, in many respects, simply pursuing the limited mandate of the 1897 Pettigrew Amendment. Leopold nonetheless managed to convince the regional district forester of the soundness of his plan, and on June 3, 1924, the section of the Gila National Forest that Leopold had personally mapped became the first federally designated wilderness area. It was placed under a ten-year wilderness recreation policy that prohibited everything but grazing, water power development, and fire-prevention trails.
At almost the exact same moment that the Gila Wilderness was created, the first National Conference on Outdoor Recreation (NCOR) was convening. Leopold had hoped that it would provide a chance for wilderness policy to gain national attention, but to his dismay the ideas he championed were unmentioned in the concluding resolutions. There had been plenty of talk about car camping, road building, hunting, and sports, but no one yet seemed interested in discussing the need to preserve some sites from the threats these activities posed.
Leopold subsequently determined to redouble his efforts, and in 1925 published a string of forceful articles in defense of wilderness, most notably “The Last Stand of the Wilderness.” It warned that “the remaining wild areas in both the Forests and Parks are being pushed back by road construction at a very rapid rate,—so rapid that unless something is done, the large areas of wilderness will mostly disappear within the next decade.” In this article, Leopold also demonstrated a new concern with the Lake States, where, he feared, “wilderness canoe trips are about to become a thing of the past, because of the extension of tourist roads and summer resorts into the remnants of wild country.” His change in geographical emphasis reflected the altered circumstances of his career. Shortly before the creation of the Gila Wilderness Area, he had been promoted to assistant director of the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. Though he would hold the position for only four years, he would stay in Wisconsin for the remainder of his life.
Leopold’s new round of advocacy helped to finally push the wilderness idea onto the national stage. When the second NCOR convened in 1926, Leopold was invited to attend. This time the delegates proposed the creation of twenty-one potential wilderness areas. That same year, the U.S. secretary of agriculture personally signed a plan to preserve a portion of Minnesota canoe country as wilderness. And the Forest Service soon initiated a set of policies, known as the L-20 regulations, which provided for the designation and maintenance of “primitive areas” that largely followed the blueprint that Leopold had first proposed.
By the late 1920s, Leopold began devoting less of his time to wilderness preservation and more to wildlife management, one of his other great passions. But new voices began to speak out in defense of wilderness. Perhaps most notable was Robert Marshall, a young New Yorker who shared Leopold’s love of the outdoors and contempt for the excesses of automobile tourism. In 1930, when Marshall was twenty-nine, he published an article in Scientific Monthly titled “The Problem of the Wilderness.” It rehashed many of the points that Leopold had first set forth (even quoting from him directly), but took the appeal a step further than the original wilderness thinker had ever attempted: “To carry out this program it is exigent that all friends of the wilderness ideal should unite. . . . There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness.” Five years after issuing this call to arms, Marshall—who had inherited a sizable fortune following the death of his father—used his wealth to found the Wilderness Society. The new organization brought together many of the leading thinkers on the subject of America’s disappearing wilderness. The founding members included Benton MacKaye, the main force behind the Appalachian Trail, Robert Sterling Yard, the executive secretary of the National Parks Association, and Leopold, who was brought in to serve as an advisor.
The formation of the Wilderness Society coincided with Leopold’s embarking on a new round of advocacy. He felt that his voice was needed to counteract a danger posed by Roosevelt’s Tree Army: In its crusade to improve the public forests, the CCC was threatening to destroy all the wilderness that remained there. The problem was not merely limited to public forests but affected all the public lands that fell under the jurisdiction of the New Deal’s many acronym-bearing agencies. As Leopold later observed, “A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.”
Leopold’s writings during the Depression continued to hammer away at the need to distinguish wilderness recreation from motorized tourism, but he also began to highlight a new rationale: that wilderness served as a “land laboratory.” As he explained:
All wilderness areas, no matter how small or imperfect, have a large value to land-science. The important thing is to realize that recreation is not their only or even their principal utility. . . . The science of land health needs, first of all, a base-datum of normality, a picture of how healthy land maintains itself as an organism.
In arguing this, Leopold was drawing on the emerging field of ecology, particularly the work of Frederic Clements, an American plant ecologist who argued that any given ecosystem must be understood as a living organism in which every component, from the soil to the animals to the trees, formed an interconnected superstructure. It was Leopold’s contention that foresters could not develop plans for the management of healthy and productive forests without understanding how they functioned in their most primitive state.
The expanded intellectual arguments for wilderness facilitated its growth as a matter of policy. Wilderness was no longer just a question of recreation, but also one of land use and science, where even a few thousand acres might justify special protection. Thanks in part to this shift, the nation’s budding roadless network saw great gains throughout the Depression years. The Forest Service promulgated new rules, known as the U Regulations, that allowed for increased amounts of “primitive areas.” The National Park Service embraced the wilderness concept as well (sometimes using it as a tool to wrest acreage away from national forests). And the Bureau of Indian Affairs created more than 1.5 million acres of wilderness, largely at the urging of Marshall, who worked there in the early thirties. (Marshall’s impact would likely have been even greater had he not died of heart failure in 1939, at age thirty-eight.)
While the amount of designated wilderness was growing steadily, it nonetheless lacked the protections that members of the Wilderness Society desired. The regulations put in place by the Forest Service, National Park Service, and other federal agencies did not have the force of law and failed to explicitly prohibit development. This became increasingly problematic in the postwar era when the demands on the forests for lumber and recreation exploded. In the mid-1940s, Leopold wrote, “Lumber shortages during the war gave the impetus of military necessity to many road extensions, legitimate and otherwise. At the present moment, ski-tows and ski-hotels are
being promoted in many mountain areas, often without regard to their prior designation as wilderness.”
This was among Leopold’s last pronouncements on wilderness. Shortly after writing it, he suffered a heart attack while fighting a grass fire that had broken out near his property in Wisconsin. By the time his neighbors discovered him, the great champion of wilderness was already dead. He was sixty-one years old.
Leopold’s death was mourned by all in the wilderness community, but it received little national attention. The New York Times buried the brief obituary on page 27 and described Leopold simply as “the author of several books and magazine articles on forest and game management.” Remarkably, the word “wilderness” appeared nowhere. Even after almost twenty-five years of advocacy, Leopold’s crusade hadn’t warranted a single mention. This glaring omission reflected the cold reality that wilderness preservation remained a concept unfamiliar to the average American.
But that was about to change. The Wilderness Society, at this point under the leadership of the indefatigable Howard Zahniser, planned to turn the cause into front-page news. Building public awareness would be the initial step in a long-term campaign, one whose ultimate goal was the passage of comprehensive federal wilderness legislation.
The organization set its focus on a controversy brewing in Dinosaur National Monument, a 320-square-mile region that stretched across the Colorado-Utah border. The area had been incorporated into the National Park System by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but in the late 1940s the Bureau of Reclamation began making plans for a billion-dollar dam project that would flood a portion of the region known as Echo Park. To those in the conservation movement, the situation was uncomfortably familiar. A nearly identical dispute had arisen almost forty years earlier, when John Muir and Gifford Pinchot had squared off over the potential construction of a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of the Yosemite National Forest. That conflict had raged in the headlines for months before Congress finally sided with Pinchot and authorized the project. Echo Park offered a chance for redemption.
Zahniser and the Wilderness Society mobilized all their resources, firing off polemics and lobbying congressmen. The issue quickly assumed national importance and morphed into a referendum on wilderness. At one of the early federal hearings, held in 1950, a conservationist stated bluntly: “[L]et’s open this to its ultimate and inevitable extent, and let’s settle . . . once and for all time . . . whether we may have . . . wilderness areas . . . in these United States.” The fight raged for more than five years, with the future of the wilderness movement hanging in the balance. At first, it seemed the dam would inevitably gain approval; there were simply too many corporate interests and too many western congressmen supporting it. But Zahniser ensured that the pressure from the wilderness lobby never subsided. An endless stream of articles, speeches, and mailers gradually turned public sentiment against the project. In 1955, one western congressman lamented that the dam’s proponents possessed “neither the money nor the organization to cope with the resources and mailing lists” of the opposition. The campaign concluded in mid-1956, when Congress passed legislation banning any dam building in Echo Park.
It was a moment of great celebration for the Wilderness Society. Historian Roderick Nash observed, “At this juncture the Echo Park victory gave promise that statutory wilderness preservation might be more than a dream.” Zahniser soon began lobbying his allies in Congress to endorse this next step, a federal Wilderness Act. The proposed legislation, which Zahniser had first drafted several years earlier, would call for the creation of a National Wilderness Preservation System to cover more than 60 million acres in 160 regions of the national forests, national parks and monuments, Indian reservations, and national wildlife refuges and ranges.
The issue reached the Senate floor in early 1957, but quickly became subsumed by the larger struggle over national forest recreation. The proposed Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act was intended to set forth broadly the permitted uses of the national forests, and many felt that this ipso facto covered wilderness. The Forest Service, in particular, endorsed this attitude, largely to preserve its discretion over wilderness zones—some argued that the agency’s support for MUSYA arose largely from the legislation’s potential to derail a Wilderness Act. As negotiations wore on, Zahniser’s bold plan was whittled down to a single insipid sentence tagged to the end of MUSYA’s first paragraph: “The establishment and maintenance of areas of wilderness are consistent with the purposes and provisions of this Act.” The leader of the wilderness movement had temporarily been outflanked.
But the fight was far from over. The Wilderness Bill continued to receive strong public support and gained a new ally in early 1961, when John F. Kennedy ascended to the presidency. Kennedy wanted wilderness preservation to be part of his ambitious domestic program. He found widespread support in the Senate but encountered intense resistance in the more conservative House. The stalemate dragged out through two legislative sessions and seemed unlikely to break, but then an assassin’s bullet pierced the young president’s skull, and a mourning nation began to demand that Congress push through the domestic agenda of the fallen leader. Leaders in the House and Senate worked throughout the first half of 1964 to resolve their differences. The final step was a backroom negotiating session in late summer, when New Mexico senator Clinton Anderson, who had been championing the bill for years, made a number of crucial concessions as the price of gaining permanent federal recognition of the wilderness ideal.
On September 3, 1964, at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law. Notably absent from the gathering was Howard Zahniser, the legislation’s most tireless advocate. He had died unexpectedly in April, four months shy of seeing his life’s work realized. As one House leader observed, “[L]ike the patriarch of old [he] was denied the opportunity to experience his moment of victory.” Of course, it was far from a total victory. Congressional negotiations had led to the inclusion of a twenty-year exemption for mineral prospecting and extraction. And Zahniser’s original wilderness network was reduced from 60 million acres to just 9.1 million acres, spread out over fifty-four sites in the national forests.
Still, those 9.1 million forest acres represented a remarkable achievement, a shift in the way that Americans conceptualized their relationship to nature, forests, and trees. President Johnson, in his first report on the new National Wilderness Preservation System, proclaimed,
Only in our country have such positive measures been taken to preserve the wilderness adequately for its scenic and spiritual wealth. In the new conservation of this century, our concern is with the total relation between man and the world around him. Its object is not only man’s material welfare but the dignity of man himself. . . . Generations of Americans to come will enjoy a finer and more meaningful life because of these actions taken in these times.
In the decades that followed, the National Wilderness Preservation System expanded dramatically. The original 9.1 million acres doubled and then doubled again as conservation advocates around the nation fought to have new lands protected from any form of development. Eventually, some in the environmental movement began to fear the statutory protection for wilderness had inadvertently facilitated an extremist reverence for unadulterated nature that failed to appreciate the curious paradox that modern wilderness was, by definition, land being actively managed by the government. As William Cronon wrote in 1995, “[T]he trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject.” Nonetheless, the wilderness program, largely unchanged since its inception in 1964, remains hugely popular, and today includes nearly 110 million acres in 757 sites.
THE POSTWAR YEARS had produced fundamental shifts in the American landscape. Farms and fields yielded to suburbs; private forests began to function as tree plantations; public forests became sites of leisure; and great swaths of land were transformed into official wilderness. The sum total of these chang
es affected hundreds of millions of acres across the nation.
This period had also seen a remarkable change in the way that people thought about trees. On the one hand, wood had become much less conspicuous in daily life. This was especially true in suburbia, where new homes masked the debt they owed to trees and tree products. On the other hand, the nation’s forests had grown much more accessible to the average American thanks to the automobile and the policies it inspired. Forests had become the subject of renewed political debate and broad publicity campaigns. Trees were beginning to seem part of a world segregated from domestic life but increasingly worthy of veneration.
These shifts in attitudes and in land use had arisen in large part due to the prosperity that followed World War II. But they were merely the preface to a major social movement, one inspired by trees and yet much more comprehensive in scope. Conservation was about to evolve into environmentalism.
10
The Environmental Era
Nelson’s New Day
THE UNITED STATES had enjoyed more than two decades of sustained economic growth following World War II. American corporations not only led the world in manufacturing, they produced more than 40 percent of the world’s finished products. The middle class swelled. Average living standards exceeded those of anywhere else on earth. It became commonplace to own a home, a car, a television, and countless other luxuries. But all of this producing and consuming had come with a hidden cost.
The first major wakeup call came with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Her book presented a devastating, frightening account of the toxins that had spread across the landscape in the postwar years. Dangerous chemicals, she warned, could be found everywhere. They were in the by-products of unregulated manufacturing, in the runoff from industrial agriculture, and in the pesticides that were used to control problems like Dutch elm disease.
