AUTO CAMP
The period between the two world wars witnessed a boom in outdoor recreation. Companies selling everything from tents to packaged food sprung up to cater to the American passion for auto camping. This camp, photographed in 1923, was located near or in Yellowstone National Park. (Library of Congress)
This commercialized approach to nature triggered the first calls for wilderness preservation. After World War I, a preservation movement arose that lobbied for the setting aside of undeveloped “wilderness areas.” A wildlife biologist named Aldo Leopold played a leading role in the effort. Born in 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, Leopold went on to study at Yale University’s School of Forestry, which existed courtesy of a gift made by none other than Gifford Pinchot. After receiving his master’s degree in 1909, Leopold took a job with the Forest Service and, in the 1920s, succeeded in getting it to establish wilderness locales within its holdings, places off-limits to automobiles, roads, and other forms of development. Leopold is far better known, however, for writing A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, a year after he collapsed and died while fighting a fire that broke out near his home in central Wisconsin. “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” he wrote. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” In the book he argued that planners must transcend narrow economic considerations in decisions over land use and instead adopt a broader ethical interest in preserving trees, insects, and other living organisms for their own sake. Adopting such a “land ethic,” he believed, meant resisting the temptation of preserving individual wildlife species—the focus of most conservation efforts to that point—for the sake of the health of the larger ecosystem. “A thing is right,” he concluded, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”6
Critical of the trend toward transforming nature into a commodity and selling it to would-be tourists, Leopold and other early wilderness advocates were some of the culture of consumption’s most ardent foes. During the 1930s, the packaging of the natural world as a recreational resource gained momentum, as the New Deal, through organizations such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, added roads and campgrounds to the country’s national parks and forests. In 1935, plans to build a parkway across a part of the Appalachian Mountains galvanized preservation advocates and led Leopold, forester Robert Marshall, and several others to form the Wilderness Society, a group opposed to the commercialization of nature represented by auto-centered tourism.7
Whatever the threat that tourism posed to wilderness, it was far outweighed in the postwar period by the pressure placed on the nation’s forests and rivers by suburban development and economic growth. By the 1940s, private forest holdings in the Pacific Northwest, the country’s last lumber frontier (with the Midwest and South already logged out), were edging toward exhaustion. This trend, combined with the postwar suburban building boom, drove the timber industry to call on Washington to open up the federal forests to logging. Logging required roads, and the Forest Service dutifully complied. Between 1940 and 1960, road mileage in national forests doubled from 80,000 to 160,000, or more than three times the extent of the present-day interstate highway system. The amount of timber harvested from the national forests between 1950 and 1966 amounted to twice what had been cut in the prior four and a half decades. And as road-building and timber-cutting mounted, wilderness areas became increasingly fragmented and open to abuse.8
In the mid-1950s, the Wilderness Society pressed Congress to protect the nation’s forests in the face of this mounting assault. Eight years later, Congress complied, passing the Wilderness Act, legislation that gave the Forest Service the power to sequester some nine million acres of land from development. The act made the preservation of wilderness into national policy and, in this respect at least, represented a signal achievement. The legislation also had some significant flaws. It set aside just 9 million of the 14 million acres that the Forest Service had designated as wilderness and allowed mining in such areas until 1983—a move that sped up development in the places Congress sought to “preserve.”9
Simultaneously with the assault on forests, more than four decades’ worth of efforts to tame western rivers were about to reach their zenith. In 1911, the first major dam went up across the Colorado River. Twenty-five years later, Hoover Dam, a colossal 700-foot structure, rose up in the Colorado valley. By 1964, there were 19 large dams impeding this one river’s journey to the sea.
Leading the charge for dams was the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. In the 1940s, the bureau began building what it called “cash register” dams, profit-making structures for generating valuable electricity. The proceeds went to subsidize the bureau’s irrigation projects, which sold water cheaply—and at taxpayer expense—to agribusiness. An early such dam was to go up on the Colorado in Echo Park, one of Utah’s most scenic canyons and a part of the Dinosaur National Monument.10
Wilderness advocates, however, cried out, and no one more so than David Brower. As a child growing up in Berkeley, California, Brower had heard about the famed controversy over the Hetch Hetchy valley, dammed in 1913, despite the efforts of the preservationist John Muir, to serve the imperial dreams of San Francisco’s business community. Brower was determined not to let history repeat itself. As executive director of the Sierra Club, he joined with other wilderness advocates to mount a massive publicity effort. They launched a direct mail campaign that asked such questions as, “Will You DAM the Scenic Wildlands of Our National Park System?” They produced a color movie; New York publisher Alfred Knopf put out a slick book of photographs titled This Is Dinosaur. All the attention created such a stir that tourists descended in droves on the canyon, some 45,000 in the summer of 1955 alone. In the end, Brower and the conservationists prevailed. There would be no Echo Park Dam. But to save Dinosaur, the wilderness advocates agreed to plans for a dam at Glen Canyon, also on the Colorado. Brower considered the Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1963, one of the biggest mistakes of his life; as the dam filled, some of his friends worried that he might even commit suicide.11
HOOVER DAM
Completed in 1936, Hoover Dam, which rises to a height of 726 feet, took five years to build and claimed the lives of over 100 workers. It was the first in a long line of dams built along the powerful Colorado River by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. (U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)
Never again, Brower said to himself. In 1966, the Bureau of Reclamation announced that it would build two dams and flood the Grand Canyon. Brower and the Sierra Club flew into action. When the bureau suggested that the dams might actually afford tourists a better opportunity (because of the lake they would create) to see the area in question, the wilderness advocates took out full-page advertisements that blared: “SHOULD WE ALSO FLOOD THE SISTINE CHAPEL SO TOURISTS CAN GET NEARER THE CEILING?”12 Their efforts paid off; no dams went up along that stretch of the Colorado.
To Brower goes the credit for transforming environmental issues into the focus of a national campaign. Not surprisingly, Sierra Club membership grew from 7,000 in 1952 to over 77,000 in 1969. He succeeded in large part because of his media savvy. But he also prevailed because his brand of pull-out-all-the-plugs environmentalism struck a chord among those Americans fed up with life in an affluent, materialistic society where economic logic trumped everything else. “Objectivity,” Brower once said, “is the greatest threat to the United States today.” Brower opposed objectivity because he was for moral absolutes, for the position that being reasonable about building dams and other environmental issues was simply another way of saying, “Let’s compromise for the sake of the greater economic good.”13
SIERRA CLUB FLOAT TRIP
Wilderness advocates flocked to remote and previously unknown sections of the Colorado River in the mid-1950s as conflict erupted over plans to build the Echo Park Dam. (National Park Service, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia)
And yet, des
pite such high-mindedness, it is surely ironic that Brower and his colleagues saved Dinosaur by transforming it into a tourist attraction, packaging and selling its virtues in print and on film. Glen Canyon, meanwhile, a place unknown to most, took on water because no such sales job ensued. Brower was for moral reason, but to garner support he felt compelled to engage in the same sales techniques employed by Madison Avenue. The success of his publicity campaign attracted flocks of tourists, placing stress on the very wilderness—Dinosaur National Monument—that he was trying to save.
Brower also succeeded because he was able to tap into some fertile cultural terrain. Postwar America was a world where nature had increasingly come to be seen as an amenity, an object of leisure-time pursuit, as much as something employed in the service of production. Nature films are a case in point. In the 1950s, Walt Disney Studios produced a series of films shot in open prairies and ancient forests, perceived by many as pristine wilderness areas removed from both urban and suburban life. The Vanishing Prairie (1954), for instance, was set “before civilization left its mark upon the land.” In such films and others, Disney packaged nature for mass audiences, transforming wilderness into a commodity that anyone able to afford the price of a movie ticket could enjoy. Wilderness advocates, in turn, capitalized on the public’s evident fascination with unsullied nature. In 1955, the Audubon Society went so far as to award Walt Disney a medal for his role as a conservationist.14
Disney’s version of the wilderness experience resonated in the thoroughly contrived suburban developments that had sprung up in the postwar years, where the homogeneity of the lawn replaced indigenous plant life. With the advent of television—more than 40 million sets were sold between 1946 and 1955 alone—nature shows such as Wild Kingdom (premiering in 1963) offered suburbanites an avenue of escape from the tedious landscape outside their picture windows. Hollywood reinforced the sense that nature existed somewhere far away, out beyond the reach of land developers and real estate agents. From such a perspective, it was all too easy to justify more development in urban and suburban locales, where untouched nature no longer seemed to exist. If nature shows aided Brower and his cause, they implicitly said that nonwilderness areas were unimportant, legitimating further economic growth in those terrains.15
DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE
It took the work of a marine biologist named Rachel Carson to change the terms of the debate over environmental reform. Wilderness was at the heart of Leopold’s and Brower’s environmentalism. Carson, however, took ecology as her main point of departure.
Carson resurrected and breathed new life into a very old intellectual tradition dating back at least to John Muir (1838–1914). Muir believed that the natural world existed in a complex, interdependent harmony. Any disturbance by human beings to this smooth functioning relationship threatened to send out dangerous ripple effects, potentially undermining all semblance of natural order. In the 1950s, the influential ecologist Eugene Odum provided a scientific defense of much the same view. Odum held that ecosystems—all plant and animal organisms together with their habitat—always evolved toward, if they had not already achieved, a state of order or “homeostasis.” Interfere with the ecosystem in some fundamental way, and this intricate interrelation of species and habitat might begin to unravel.
Carson’s genius was to take these views and effectively popularize them in her 1962 book Silent Spring, a stinging critique of America’s chemical dependency. She embraced the idea that all of nature was bound up in an interdependent web of life, which humankind had the potential to destroy. She then took this concern and tapped into the Cold War political climate, arguing, in effect, that the threat from pesticide use, her main concern in the book, was no different than the danger that radioactive fallout posed to human life. Touted by industry as nothing short of miraculous, pesticides boomed, their use increasing an astounding 168 percent per year between 1949 and 1968. And yet, very little scientific information existed on their possible ecological and health effects. It was this lack of knowledge that Carson sought to address in her book, calling attention to the ways in which pesticides upset nature’s balance. “We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song,” she wrote, “not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle.” Such a sequence of events reflected “the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology.”16
Although she used the word sparingly in her book, Carson helped to transform ecology into the rallying cry of the environmental movement. Unlike wilderness, conceived as a world apart, the word ecology suggested, in a sense, the reverse—that all life was bound up in an intricate, interconnected web. Human beings, she believed, were thus part of the balance of nature, not divorced from it in the way that some wilderness advocates implied.
Needless to say, the pesticide industry mounted a massive attack against Carson and her book, at one point threatening to sue her publisher. They dismissed her as just another hysterical woman with a “mystical attachment to the balance of nature,” even going so far as to brand her a Communist. But the assault did little to undermine the popularity of the book, which remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 31 weeks. In fact, the book, in the opinion of some, did more to galvanize the modern environmental movement than any other single publication. One historian has even called the work “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of modern environmentalism.”17
In the mid-1960s, Americans received an object lesson in the meaning of ecological interdependence. A drought began in the year Carson published her book, the worst dry spell since the 1930s. This time, the precipitation deficit battered not the Southern Plains but the northeastern part of the country, from Maine south to Virginia and west to Ohio and Michigan. The drought lasted four years, focusing increasing public attention on the nation’s supply of water, especially in the Great Lakes, the largest body of freshwater in the world. Lake Erie alone contains nearly 10,000 square miles of water—more than six times the size of Rhode Island. It is a vast lake, a body of water so large that it must have seemed as if nothing humankind could do would affect it in any profound way.18
But with the lake level falling because of the lack of precipitation, the true cost of the culture of consumption became readily apparent. Residents living in the area near Lake Erie learned that they drew their water from what amounted to one huge cesspool. Cities such as Detroit and Buffalo allowed tens of thousands of tons of untreated sewage to drain into the body of water. But it was soapsuds—skeins of foam 300 feet in places, clinging to the shore like so much cotton on Santa Claus’s cheeks—that really captured the public’s attention. The use of synthetic detergent ballooned over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s as more households installed automatic washing machines. The suds that washed up on the shores of Lake Erie, that had turned the lake into what Time magazine called “a North American Dead Sea,” came from something as simple as doing the laundry.19
In truth, the suds were just a symptom of a far more serious problem. Detergents contained phosphates, a nutrient that, as we have already noted, caused algae to bloom like mad on the lake, only to die, decay, and drain oxygen from the water, oxygen that other life forms needed to live. By the 1960s, Lake Erie was indeed on its way to the funeral parlor and people could not help but notice.
David Blaushild, the owner of a Cleveland auto dealership, started a petition drive; when it was over about one million people lent support to his Save Lake Erie campaign. He passed the pages and pages of signatures on to Ohio Governor James Rhodes, who himself sent the package to the federal government, calling on the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to intervene immediately. “We want action, and we want it now!” he wrote. Public outrage over the degradation of Lake Erie was boiling over. In 1969, one scientist involved in assessing the lake’s ecology probably spoke for many Americans when he said: “In this day and age, in a society which is so affluent—t
o have to paddle in its own sewage is just disgusting.”20
The flames that lapped the banks of the Cuyahoga River that same year confirmed for many that the nation’s environmental problems had gone so far as to turn a body of water into a fire hazard. Even California, once looked on as the land of hopes, dreams, and untrammeled natural beauty, was feeling the impact of modern petroleum-based life. Several months before the Cuyahoga went up in flames, an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, combined with strong winds to defile about 20 miles of white sand beach in this affluent community. One year after the disaster, Roderick Nash, a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, appeared on television to lecture on the ecological ills of life in modern America, calling his message a “declaration of interdependence.”21
The tumultuous political context of the late 1960s drew even more attention to the ecological concerns raised by Carson and others. As the Vietnam War escalated, widespread suspicion of government and established, corporations like Dow Chemical, makers of napalm, dovetailed with Carson’s warnings about pesticides. The feminist press, meanwhile, took to criticizing the “male-feasance” of American agribusiness, focusing on the perils of DDT, a chemical Carson singled out as especially troubling. One feminist publication lampooned the high levels of DDT found in the bodies of new mothers with a cartoon showing a woman squirting a fly with breast milk. In 1969, the Rat, a radical underground newspaper, observed that “the word ‘ecology’ had been lifted from the dusty academic shelves of abstract scientific definition.” It was now “a powerful breathing consciousness … that no radical could avoid.” In 1970, economist Robert Heilbroner declared simply, “Ecology has become the Thing.”22
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