It wasn’t until 1969, when NBC presented the prime-time documentary Wolves and the Wolf Men, that the public turned against this cruel practice. Eventually, the federal Airborne Hunting Act of 1971 forbade it. But numerous states-rights activists, including the future governor Sarah Palin, were unenthusiastic about the federal law, insisting that killing wolves was an all-American sport, a way of life in Alaska.
Chapter Fourteen - William O. Douglas and New Deal Conservation
I
Sitting at his desk in his U.S. Supreme Court office, William O. Douglas was swamped with legal work, including writing decisions on such issues as why trees had standing and why wildlife deserved legal rights to protected habitats. During his tenure as an associate justice of the Court—which began on April 15, 1939, and extended until November 12, 1975—the great civil libertarian would also become the most historically significant pro-wilderness American political force since Theodore Roosevelt. From the Great Depression to Watergate, Douglas composed vivid prose sketches about the American valleys and mountain ranges that had stolen his heart. The Olympics, Wallowas, and Brooks Range consumed his imagination even when the Court was in session. A glint in his eye indicated to his colleagues that he was thinking about fly-fishing in the Middle Fork of the Salmon or on the Quillayute River. Douglas, who had climbed in the high Himalayas, encouraged groups like the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society—he was an active member of both nonprofit societies—to bring class-action suits against despoilers of the American landscape. When Douglas received the John Muir Award from the Sierra Club in June 1975, he noted that his “view” of “policy in environmental matters” came from the “powerful influences” of Buddhism, Gifford Pinchot, Clarence Darrow, and John Muir. “I thought so well of Muir and his works that in 1961 I wrote a book about him,” Douglas boasted, “Muir of the Mountains.”1
In a series of books, articles, and letters, Douglas proudly argued that tramping around the unspoiled wilderness, as Muir had done, was part of a noble American tradition that dated back to the transcendentalists of Concord. What could be more American than rediscovering the natural world to offset urban angst? Wasn’t it essential to leave some areas unmapped, so that wanderers could get lost in the wild? Shouldn’t young Americans be encouraged to answer the “call to adventure” represented by white-water rivers, unbounded tundra, and dense forest reserves? Citizens needed retreats in the natural world from the degradation of city life. “The distant mountains make one want to go on and on and on,” Douglas wrote after exploring the Brooks Range of Alaska in 1956, “over the next ridge and over the one beyond.”2
Always an iron-willed individualist, Douglas was concerned that the freedom associated with exploring the wilderness, hitchhiking, backpacking, camping, and mountain climbing was being constricted by anti-vagrancy laws. (The novelist Kurt Vonnegut later supported this belief, saying that the Constitution protected our right to “fart around.”) During the Great Depression, Douglas had been a hobo, traveling the rails from Yakima to Chicago, west to east, living out of a rucksack. Disappearing down the open road and shedding the shackles of the nine-to-five workday was—to Douglas’s mind—an American right just as surely as free speech or equal education. Douglas worried that national parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite were being corporatized. Visitors in the mid-twentieth century encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic, gift shops, asphalt parking lots, uniformed rangers, and firework displays—and at Yosemite, the Hetch Hetchy valley had been destroyed by the construction of a reservoir. As Thoreau had complained in Walden, many stouthearted Americans, seeking regeneration in wild places, were fleeing the “desperate city” only to arrive at the “desperate country.”3 What demon, Douglas asked, had possessed the National Park Service to turn natural wonders like Old Faithful into sites for gewgaw shops? What fools would hollow out a redwood tree in Mariposa Grove so automobiles could drive through it? “When roads supplant trails,” Douglas wrote, “the precious unique values of God’s wilderness disappear.”4
Although he admired Pinchot, Douglas dissented, as he matured, from the whole concept of “multiple use” of natural resources. He saw Americans’ mania for constructing roads in national parks and forests as “evidence of our decline as a people.” Habitats for wildlife, he argued, should be left alone. All the national forests, as far as he was concerned, should be redesignated as wildernesses. Douglas, agitated, predicted that the world of 2200 would be choking on concrete, smog, industrial blight, and the withered wastelands left by clear-cut forests and oil spills. If Americans were wise, he believed, they would understand the importance of preserving roadless wilderness for its own sake: wilderness was more valuable than all the gold bars in Fort Knox. Without the possibility of escaping into the noiseless backcountry, the United States would become merely a tacky version of tourist-packed Europe. “There is no possible way to open roadless areas to cars and retain a wilderness,” Douglas asserted. “This is one diabolic consequence of the ‘multiple use’ concept as applied. The Forest Service recognizes, of course, that the application of the ‘multiple use’ principle means that some areas must be devoted exclusively or predominantly to a single purpose. The difficulty is that, in the Pacific West, ‘multiple use’ in practical operation means that every canyon is usually put to as many uses as possible—lumber operations, roads, campsites, shelters, toilets, fireplaces, parking lots and so on.”5
Repeatedly, throughout his life, Douglas rallied to the defense of pristine Pacific Northwest and Alaskan landscapes. During the 1930s it was the Olympics; in the 1940s, the Cascades; in the 1950s, the Brooks Range; and in the 1960s, the redwoods of California. As his biographer Bruce Allen Murphy noted in Wild Bill, Douglas helped launch the modern environmental movement in 1960 by dissenting to a denial of certiorari in a dispute over DDT being sprayed in Long Island.6 Douglas, never idle, continually thought of legal ways to help save America from ruin. Later in Douglas’s legal career, following the oil spill near Santa Barbara of January 28, 1969, he stoutly refused to let Union Oil get away with impunity for fouling the Southern California coastline from Goleta to Rincon, and all of the northern Channel Islands. Since his young adulthood, Douglas had fought to protect American wilderness and coastlines. Now, in 1969, more than 10,000 birds had died because of a faulty blowout preventer on Union Oil’s platform A in Santa Barbara, and a furious Douglas wanted justice.
This oil spill impelled Douglas to put some of his long-held judicial beliefs into writing. He was, after all, the leading light of the wilderness movement. Douglas famously held, in a Supreme Court case, that trees, oceans, and rivers had legal standing. (Look up his dissenting opinion: Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727, 1972.) As a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Douglas had somehow found time to read an obscure essay by Christopher D. Stone in the Southern California Law Review: “Should Trees Have Standing?”7 Stone, a former Supreme Court clerk, thought the article was a breakthrough argument on behalf of the environment. Douglas used Stone’s argument to go after Walt Disney. In 1969, when Disney received approval to build a huge $35 million ski and swim resort at Mineral King Valley in Sierra Nevada courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service, Douglas dissented. What infuriated Douglas was that the state of California was going to build a twenty-mile asphalt road through the heart of Sequoia National Park to reach Disney’s high-country resort.
Drawing on Aldo Leopold’s ennobling notion of a land ethic, Douglas firmly believed that a sequoia tree, a barrier island, or a sand beach should be allowed to be a litigant. He wrote that “inanimate objects” about to be “despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage” could fight for their constitutional rights. Excoriating the U.S. Forest Service for being a patsy of the timber industry, Douglas maintained that before these “priceless bits of Americana (such as a valley, an alpine meadow, a river, or a lake) are forever lost or are so transformed as to be reduced to the eventual rubble of our urban environment, the
voice of the existing beneficiaries of these environmental wonders should be heard.” What mattered to Douglas was that flora and fauna had rights: “Perhaps they will not win. Perhaps the bulldozers of ‘progress’ will plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land. That is not the present question. The sole question is, who has standing to be heard?”8
War against anything associated with Mickey Mouse had become a sport for Douglas. With typical brio, he called the “Disneyfication” of America a deleterious trend aimed at turning children into slaves of television. There was more magic in one’s backyard woods or fields, Douglas believed, than in all the rides at Frontierland, part of the Disney theme park in Anaheim, California. The thought that Disney might build a $35 million resort in the Sierra Nevada, the heart of John Muir country, next to Sequoia National Park, repulsed Douglas; he considered the very notion grotesque. And the fact that the resort was to be called Mineral King—in the land where redwoods ruled—added insult to injury. The Wilderness Society naturally concurred, deeming Douglas’s opinion as “important judicial history.”9
When the attorneys for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund adopted Stone’s concept of environmental law—that if sequoias were going to be cut down, then they could indeed be plaintiffs—Douglas did the same. Both as a Supreme Court justice and as a public intellectual, Douglas fought to protect the Mineral King area from Disney bulldozers. His colleagues on the conservative Burger Court, however, saw this situation far differently. The other eight justices decided that the Sierra Club didn’t have a genuine stake in the Mineral King resort and thus had no standing to sue.10
Douglas’s stirring opinion in Sierra Club v. Morton, in fact, became a distillation of his lifelong convictions about preserving nature. By the twenty-first century it had been adopted as a manifesto by nonprofit groups including the National Audubon Society, Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., founder of Riverkeeper, recalled hiking, as a young boy, with Douglas along the C&O Canal in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s. “Bill was legalistically way out in front in his dissent,” Kennedy said. “Sierra Club v. Morton has only grown in relevance. When the BP spill occurred, I immediately thought of that case.”11 Douglas’s carefully crafted dissent is taught in classes in environmental law from Harvard to Berkeley.
The corporation sole—a creature of ecclesiastical law—is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases. . . . So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it. People who have a meaningful relation to that body of water—whether it be a fisherman, a canoeist, a zoologist, or a logger—must be able to speak for the values which the river represents and which are threatened with destruction. I do not know Mineral King. I have never seen it nor travelled it, though I have seen articles describing its proposed “development.” The Sierra Club in its complaint alleges that “one of the principal purposes of the Sierra Club is to protect and conserve the national resources of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” The District Court held that this uncontested allegation made the Sierra Club “sufficiently aggrieved” to have “standing” to sue on behalf of Mineral King. Mineral King is doubtless like other wonders of the Sierra Nevada such as Tuolomne Meadows and the John Muir Trail. Those who hike it, fish it, hunt it, camp in it, frequent it, or visit it merely to sit in solitude and wonderment are legitimate spokesmen for it, whether they may be few or many. Those who have that intimate relation with the inanimate object about to be injured, polluted, or otherwise despoiled are its legitimate spokesmen.12
From the 1920s to the 1970s, any reckless clear-cutting in the American West got Douglas’s dander up. He had seen the deep scars that this unsavory practice left on slopes: a mountaintop would be shaved bald and left with only debris; torrential runoffs of water then occurred, transforming a biosphere into a dead zone. Should the landscape surrounding Sequoia National Park be so cruelly scarred for the sake of a Disney park? The menace of hyperdevelopment was everywhere in the West. At a meeting of the U.S. Forest Service that Douglas once attended by happenstance in Wyoming, rangers were preparing to aerially spray chemicals to kill weeds growing on sagebrush land. “They roared with laughter when it was reported that a little old lady opposed the plan because the wild flowers would be destroyed,” Douglas recalled with incredulity. “Yet was not her right to search out a painted cup of a tiger lily as inalienable as the right of stockmen to search out grass or of a lumberman to claim a tree? The aesthetic values of the wilderness are as much our inheritance as the veins of copper and coal in our hills and the forests in our mountains.”13
II
Douglas was born in Maine, Minnesota, on October 16, 1898. His first name was Orville; when he grew up, he dropped it in favor of his middle name, William. When he was three years old his parents—Julia Fisk Douglas and the Reverend William Douglas (a Presbyterian minister) moved the family to Estrella, California. They had heard that the California sunshine was good for the nerves and the elder Douglas had vicious stomach ulcers. However, Douglas’s father died in 1904 from a botched ulcer operation. Julia moved her three children to Yakima, in the agricultural belt of south central Washington, to be near her sister. The Douglases moved into a tiny house a stone’s throw from the Columbia Grade School. Unfortunately, Julia invested her small inheritance in a scheme to irrigate the Yakima valley; it failed; and crushing poverty fell upon the family. William, only seven years old, had to scrounge in the industrial yards of Yakima, collecting scrap iron in burlap apple bags to sell at a market. No menial task was beneath him. Seasonally, he picked fruit and threshed wheat. His biographers have claimed that his hard youth poisoned his trust in companies, rich people, and class privilege. But Douglas himself rejected this theory in his 1974 autobiography Go East, Young Man, saying that he never felt “underprivileged.” In any case, though, at an early age he was an advocate for the underdog. (Douglas did admit that he sometimes felt wounded because God had placed him on the “wrong side of the railroad tracks.”)14
Douglas’s life was changed when he contracted polio as a child.* A doctor in Yakima predicted that he might be permanently paralyzed. All Douglas could do was soak his legs in warm saltwater and get lower-body massages. When he returned to school, other children mocked him mercilessly; he was a puny misfit. So he started venturing outside Yakima, hiking the sagebrush trails and lava rock and backcountry, hoping to develop physical vigor. Ten miles soon increased to twenty. Every day Douglas could walk beyond the outskirts of town, high up into the Cascades, away from schoolyard taunts, learning the calls of birds, chatting with subsistence farmers and woodchoppers, singing old hymns like “Shall We Gather at the River?” He hiked through broad valleys and past anxious watchdogs. His shock of brown hair was fine and unruly. The more Douglas walked, the stronger his legs got. “The physical world loomed large in my mind,” Douglas recalled. “I read what happened to cripples in the wilds. They were the weak strain that nature did not protect.”15
Happiness engulfed Douglas whenever he was outdoors. Believing that fresh air was a curative, he started writing secret odes to the high lakes of the Wallowa Mountains, giving each a distinctive personality as if it were a new friend. When Douglas discovered Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, he became devoted to fly-fishing for trout. “And of all fly-fishing, the dry fly is supreme,” Douglas said. “The dry fly floats lightly on the water, going with the current under overhanging willows or riding like a dainty sailor on the ruffled surface of a lake. It bounces saucily, armed for battle but looking as innocent as any winged ins
ect that rises from underneath the surface or drops casually from a willow or sumac into a stream or pond.” The sight of a trout rising never failed to make Douglas’s heart stand still.16
Remembering his childhood fishing and the glory of sunshine, Douglas decided that his life, no matter what his employment was, would be centered on protecting America’s fishing streams and forests. Conservation became his electric wire, which would produce the brightest sparks throughout his storied intellectual career. “Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt were in my eyes romantic woodsmen,” Douglas wrote in Of Men and Mountains, his 1950 autobiography, the first of several. “I did not then know about Pinchot’s ‘multiple use’ philosophy, which, as construed, allowed timber companies, grazing interests, and even miners to destroy much of our forest heritage under the rationalization of ‘balanced use.’ I only knew that Pinchot was a driving force behind setting aside wilderness sanctuaries in an effort to save them from immediate destruction by reckless loggers. I was so thrilled by Pinchot’s example that I perhaps would have made forestry my career had the choice been made in my high school days.”17
Devoted to scholarship, Douglas received top grades at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, a first-rate liberal arts institution where he was on a full scholarship. Now he started coming into his own, intellectually. While at college, he joined the ROTC and Beta Theta Pi. But the clannishness of such outfits didn’t really appeal to him. He adopted the stance of an iconoclast, a lone mountaineer, a skirt-chaser, an impatient doer eager to see the great wide world. As a hobo, he traveled from hopyard to forest camp to orchard to earn money during the Great Depression.18 He was a young man willing to take risks—a fact historians should not ignore.
Upon graduating from Whitman College in 1920 with a BA in English and economics, Douglas became a high school teacher and debate coach. Thoreau, Emerson, and Muir became his inspirations. Impressed by their transcendentalist philosophy, he wanted to chase the sky and learn about every part of the wild Wallowa Mountains in northeastern Oregon. Pinchot stayed on his shoulder like a good angel, informing his views about the stewardship of forestlands. Douglas watched many of his friends in Yakima sinking into tedium, logging and mining for the minimum wage. Having licked polio, and having developed an iron will and newly strong legs, Douglas wanted much more out of life. Teaching English and Latin for two years at Yakima’s high schools bored him. “Finally,” he recalled, “I decided it was impossible to save enough money by teaching and I said to hell with it.”19
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 Page 38
