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RESOURCESContinued from our print-edition Winter 2008 newsletter feature article, American Beauty: The History Behind Our Love for Wilderness...
In an era of super-abundance and national growth, public resources owned by everyone were, in practice, the responsibility of no one. Throughout the 1800s, timber resources were in high demand and seemed limitless. Advances in technology—such as circular saws and steam mills—helped Americans chop and process timber faster and easier. By the late 19th century, Western forests were under assault and people began to fear a shortage of timber and loss of water supplies. In 1891, Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act, which allowed the President to set aside lands that were part of the “public domain” and protect them as forest reserves. This was hugely significant because it was the first time Americans took a political step to protect lands for something other than exploitation. The act later forms the basis for development of a full-fledged National Forest System. Still, it was the overall government policy throughout the 19th century to “dispose” of lands by luring settlers out west to tame them, promising of abundant crops and fertile soil. The ravages of the Civil War left Americans seeking hope and new beginnings out West. The Homestead Act, the Northwest Ordinance, and other government measures helped populate the interior of the continent by the end of the 20th century. The lure of mineral riches, the freedom of open range lands, and abundance of wild game further drew people westward, taking a toll on the very wild lands Americans idealized. But as early as the 1830s, localities were already taking steps to preserve natural curiosities and beautiful landscapes. A Vermont farmer named George Perkins Marsh published a book in 1864 that highlighted the devastating effects of logging on his and neighboring properties. Man and Nature promoted preservation of forest lands for their intrinsic value to humans as regulators of stream flows and clean water supplies. Marsh’s arguments for preserving forests were compatible with progress and economic development, and thus were popular among the public. In addition to the Romantic justifications of artists and writers, there was now an economic reason for protecting wild lands. Also in 1864, Yosemite Valley was granted by the federal government to the state of California to manage for “public use, resort, and recreation.” Frederick Law Olmsted was one of the Valley’s first commissioners and ultimately became the father of the “park idea”—a form of constructed nature. He went on to design many famous parkscapes in America, most notably Central Park in New York City, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, and Niagara Falls. Olmsted’s forms of nature were untidy compared to the rigid, structural gardens of the Enlightenment period, but they were accessible and therapeutic, especially for fast-paced city dwellers who could not afford the leisure time of more elite classes to experience the wilds of the western interior.
In a symbolic defeat of railroad interests who wanted to privately own and develop the Yellowstone area, the United States government established its first national park in 1872. Yellowstone was set aside not only for its wilderness qualities, but also for the “remarkable curiosities” and “rare wonders” explorers found there: mud pots, hot springs, and geysers. Preservation and public good had won out over private interests and the push of industrial progress. Rekindling Rugged Individualism The end of the 19th century is also referred to as the Gilded Age in America—with great wealth amassed from the harvest of the nation’s prized timber and iron ore, and expansion of the railroad enterprise. Civilization had largely subdued the continent; wilderness was no longer a dominant force in people’s lives. New machinery and industrial improvements caused a surge in urban jobs, and with a steady influx of immigrants, cities had become crowded centers for poverty, gambling, and crime. The Gilded Age symbolized the opulent self-indulgence of upper classes—the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Carnegies—and it also led to the rise of American philanthropy. Progressive reformers tackled social issues like a woman’s right to vote, child labor, and health care. They wanted to enable American citizens (especially the wage laborers) to have more political clout and rid Washington of corruption. Theodore Roosevelt rose to center stage during the Progressive Era in America and brought principles of efficiency and responsibility to the political arena at a time when many Americans distrusted the federal government. At the turn of the century, and beginning his term as president, Roosevelt everywhere saw waste and over-indulgence in American society, which to him, was the equivalent of moral weakness. Roosevelt took the White House by storm and began cleaning house. Although a sickly child, Roosevelt was offspring of a wealthy New York family. He spent many days of his youth outdoors, hoping to overcome illness and grow stronger. His zeal for nature carried over into the White House, where as a Republican, he designated 150 national forests, the first 51 federal bird reservations, 5 national parks, the first 18 national monuments, and the first 4 national game preserves: a sum of federal protection totaling almost 230 million acres, a land area equivalent
Roosevelt’s administration also saw the beginnings of the United States Forest Service as we now know it, led by Gifford Pinchot, whom many consider the father of utilitarian forestry and the originator of the “conservation idea.” Emblematic of Progressive thought, Pinchot felt that pure preservation of forest lands was wasteful and that they had usefulness to the greater good of mankind. What had originally been set aside as a handful of “forest reserves” beginning in 1891, Pinchot’s Division of Forestry—managed within the Department of Agriculture as it is today—reclassified them in 1905 as “national forests,” to be managed for the American public for multiple uses, timber harvest being their main purpose. With the passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906, Roosevelt used his presidential power to protect places of great cultural significance as national monuments with the stroke of a pen and without congressional approval. Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest national parks were first established as national monuments under the Antiquities Act. Most recently in Arizona, President Clinton used the act to set aside five new national monuments—Vermilion Cliffs, Grand Canyon-Parashant, Ironwood Forest, Agua Fria, and Sonoran Desert national monuments—all of which contain remarkable wilderness characteristics that the Arizona Wilderness Coalition is working to protect.
Despite such remarkable conservation accomplishments during his tenure in the White House, Roosevelt was ambivalent about the purpose of America’s forest reserves—feeling on one hand that they should be preserved for their beauty and wild character, but also recognizing the need to use the valuable resources the forests and watersheds supplied a growing nation. This ambivalence would later be at the center of the first great American controversy over natural resources and would begin the debate between preservationists and conservationists that continues today.
Wilderness Prophet While Roosevelt worked to save what was left of the American wilderness through political channels, another man worked on shaping public sentiment. No other figure did more to win American sympathy for wilderness than John Muir. And he did it at a time when wilderness landscapes were disappearing at an alarming rate. A Scotsman by birth, and embittered by what he saw as senseless consumerism and preoccupation with the “almighty dollar” in 19th century America, Muir spent a great deal of his adult life in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, wandering for weeks at a time and living off the land. His writings, published in popular periodicals such as Scribner’s, Overland, and Atlantic Monthly, echoed with passion and righteousness about the sanctity of the wilderness: going to the woods was “going home” to Muir; trees were “psalm singing;” and primitive forests were “temples.” By the late 1800s, Muir had risen to the foremost advocate for America’s remaining wild lands. He threw his support behind government stewardship and management of natural resources, and encouraged Roosevelt to set aside such crown jewel parks as Sequoia and Yosemite national parks. He also supported the 1891 Forest Reserve Act, which helped set aside America’s first publicly owned forest lands and eventually gave rise to the U.S. Forest Service as we know it today.
Unfortunately, Muir’s passion for wilderness clashed directly with Theodore Roosevelt’s forest chief, Gifford Pinchot, who saw natural resources as wasted if they weren’t used in some way “for the greater good.” While Pinchot’s conservation principles were strictly utilitarian, Muir, the preservationist, saw wild forests as something that should be saved from the greedy hands of man at all costs. The two men met head to head on the issue of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir—which juxtaposed the city of San Francisco’s need for water against the beauty and pristine qualities of Muir’s Yosemite National Park. Although protected in 1890 as part of Yosemite National Park, Hetch Hetchy canyon and the Tuolomne River that flowed through it were targeted by the city of San Francisco as a reliable water source after a devastating earthquake and fire in 1906. For the first time in history, the conflict between what humans need and what nature can and should provide drew national attention. Muir used his publicity connections to fire up the American public and turn people against the concept of destroying a national park for human need. “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism,” Muir wrote, “seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the almighty dollar.”
Led by the two prominent advocacy groups of the day, the Sierra Club (which Muir helped to found) and the Appalachian Mountain Club, letters poured into Congress and to Roosevelt’s Oval Office, decrying the reservoir and echoing Muir’s wilderness rhetoric. Unfortunately, the votes in Congress were not enough to save the valley and a dam was built, flooding Muir’s treasured valley. For conservationists, however, there was a silver lining to the Hetch Hetchy cloud: because of the great public outcry and the devastating effect the dam had on the character of the Tuoloumne River valley, no one has successfully been able to build a dam within a national park since. Muir’s passion for wild places, it seems, has persisted in today’s preservation advocates.
America’s Greatest Idea Much like the handful of forest reserves lacked a cohesive management body to oversee them, the national parks were similarly disorganized until 1916, when Congress passed the National Park Service Organic Act. Signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, the Organic Act established the often problematic dual mandate for national parks: promoting use and enjoyment of the parks while requiring preservation of their natural resources and unique characteristics.
In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt transferred management of all battlefields, memorials, military cemeteries, and other historic landmarks to the National Park Service, greatly expanding the reach of the system and raising awareness among the American public that natural and cultural history was important to protect for future generations. With 391 units today, the National Park Service is charged with protecting and interpreting many irreplaceable pieces of American social, political, military, and cultural history, along with more than 84 million acres of prime real estate—from the vast wild landscapes of Alaska to the steamy swamplands of the Everglades, the rocky shorelines of New England to the arid open deserts of the southwest. Each year, more people visit the national parks than the total number of people that attend all major league baseball games in a single season. Their popularity and significance is timeless. The National Park Service manages more than 44 million acres within its system as wilderness—roughly 53% of its entire system lands. In essence, the national parks are the mirror of the United States as a nation—to see into its past and reflect on what lies ahead in the future. With the very first park—Yellowstone, established in 1872—the parks have played a central role in shaping American ideas and ideals—and many call them our “greatest idea” as a nation. And they have often been, and continue to be, at the very heart of many conservation debates. Nurturing an Ecological Conscience
With the advent of the automobile in America, much began to change—and rapidly—for the wild areas that were left in the early part of the 20th century. The Park Service and Forest Service actually rolled out campaigns to encourage Americans to get into their cars and see their magnificent wild lands—using federal dollars to build roads into the very heart of the parks and forests that were newly protected.
The spider web of roads that had begun to spread across the American landscape altered wilderness lands more drastically than ever before. Aldo Leopold was one of the first to notice and used his role with the U.S. Forest Service to garner special protections for lands that were still “roadless.” Educated like Gifford Pinchot at the Yale School of Forestry in the concepts of progressive conservation, Leopold went to work for the Forest Service in the southwest in 1909. Building on the Forest Service’s desire to stay competitive with the National Park Service for visitors, Leopold argued that non-commodity values of the forests, such as scenery, wildlife, and recreation—as opposed to the commodity value of timber—were just as appealing and valuable to visitors and should be protected with the same priorities as board feet of timber. Leopold hoped to preserve these non-commodity “products” of the forests with special wilderness protection. For the first time, an advocate within the agency stepped forward to argue for the value of wilderness independent of human needs. Leopold tried to define wilderness to his agency colleagues in 1921: “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two week's pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.” He began lobbying the Forest Service to limit development on roadless areas of the national forests to help preserve the last core wild areas left in America. In 1924, he succeeded: the first official wilderness area in the nation was established on the Gila National Forest. The Gila Wilderness encompasses nearly 600,000 acres of wild lands at the western border of New Mexico, offering sanctuary for a rich array of birds and other species. In 1929, the agency adopted regulations to protect “primitive areas” in their existing wild condition. To this day, the Blue Range Primitive Area in eastern Arizona stands as a tribute to Leopold’s work. Both the Gila and the Blue Range are reintroduction sites for returning the Mexican gray wolf to the Southwest. Indeed, it was an encounter with a dying wolf that helped cement Leopold’s belief that the forests, watersheds, wildlife and all natural entities were interconnected as a community all its own. As he looked into the eyes of a female wolf that fell victim to his shotgun, Leopold realized that human interference with the predator-prey relationship had been the cause for so many deer starving on the forest and that wolves were a necessary part of the larger, healthy ecosystem.
“When we attempt to say an animal is … ‘ugly’ or ‘cruel’, we are failing to see it as part of the land,” Leopold wrote. “We do not make the same error of calling a carburetor ‘greedy.’ We see it as part of a functioning motor.” As his work with the Forest Service progressed, Leopold began piecing together the tenets of what would define his career: the Dust Bowl of the 1930s blew across the prairies and into Manhattan sandwich shops, Leopold saw land use as directly connected to American quality of life. Poverty and disillusionment from the Great Depression fueled questions about where Americans had gone wrong in settling the West and using its natural resources. Leopold knew that the solution was to find a balance and his writings have formed a lasting legacy for wilderness advocates. His “land ethic” argues that tradition taught us arrogance toward use of the land; we must now enlarge the boundaries of the community around us to include soils, waters, plants, and animals. Our neighbors are not just the humans next door, but all living things that thrive in the natural world around us. This concept of “thinking like a mountain” brought the science of ecology into the argument for preserving wilderness. To ensure our survival and improve our quality of life, Leopold wrote that we must acknowledge that humans are part of a greater circle of life, not superior to one creature or another. “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” Leopold wrote. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” His tribute to wilderness and ecological conscience is captured in the classic Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, which describes the lands around Leopold’s home in Wisconsin and his thoughts on developing a land ethic for America. Leopold, along with fellow wilderness lover Bob Marshall, was one of the founding members of The Wilderness Society in 1935, which today uses science, analysis, and advocacy to save, protect, and restore America’s wilderness areas. Finally, an Act In 1939, the Forest Service overhauled its regulations to more specifically define wilderness in terms of size based on three management categories that included roadless areas. But no criteria yet existed for defining wilderness character or the specifics of what types of recreational activities were appropriate across the different land management agencies. More importantly, there was no assurance that any or all of the wilderness areas that had been created up to this point—by administrative decree—couldn’t one day be abolished by the same method: the stroke of a pen. As Izaak Walton League leader Kenneth Reid pointed out: “They [wilderness areas] exist by sufferance and administrative policy—not by law.” The wilderness movement itself, still small and newly organized, was stuck playing defense and there was no national commitment to preserve wilderness lands in perpetuity.
Standing on the shoulders of vociferous wilderness advocates like Leopold, Arthur Carhart, and Bob Marshall, Howard Zahniser entered center stage—recruited from a government job by The Wilderness Society to fill the shoes of Robert Sterling Yard. Zahniser’s personality and lobbying skills were ideal for making the concept of a permanent wilderness system imperative in American life. During the mid 1940s, wilderness was threatened like never before by the postwar economic boom—dams, logging, roads, and ever-growing infrastructure all put America’s last wild lands at risk in a dangerous interplay between a growing population and a growing love for recreation on public lands. Zahniser’s vision percolated under this pressure and, from the very beginning, was focused on crafting a federal wilderness law. As happened 100 years earlier, artists helped to keep America’s focus on the beauty of its wild lands that were at risk of disappearing. Ansel Adams’ photographs—stark and honestly portraying the magnificent landscapes of Yosemite, Grand Teton, and other western lands—helped rally many wilderness supporters throughout the mid 20th century. An avid mountaineer, Adams became an active advocate himself, joining the Sierra Club and writing letters and testifying on behalf of national parks and wild areas in Congress. There were many hurdles to overcome before Zahniser’s vision and law would become a reality—not the least of which was a plan in 1950 by the Bureau of Reclamation and western water interests to build a dam and reservoir in the beautiful, rugged backcountry of Dinosaur National Monument on the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado. The plan was part of a larger scheme to build 10 federal dams across the Colorado Plateau—and the obscurity of Echo Park, part of the monument, made the plan appealing to water development interests.
Unfolding like a Hetch Hetchy all over again, conservationists argued that if a dam could be built in any unit of the national park system—even a unit as unknown as Dinosaur—it compromised the integrity of the entire system and set a dangerous precedent for public lands, including wilderness, in the years that would follow. As notable wilderness historian Doug Scott writes in his book The Enduring Wilderness: “The Echo Park campaign was to prove epochal in its impacts on the character and capabilities of America’s nascent environmental movement. It became by far the most significant conservation lobbying campaign of the twentieth century.” In essence, Echo Park became a prime symbol of America’s magnificent wilderness and the modern pressures that threatened to destroy it once and for all. Luckily, after a 5-year battle in Washington and in the rural communities surrounding the monument, the dam proposal was abandoned and a provision was passed that prohibited dams in any national park unit. Originally outgunned by a powerful water lobby from the west, the conservation movement—and John Muir’s ghost—had reason to celebrate. Throughout the Echo Park controversy, Zahniser used public appearances to stress the need for a wilderness law—for it was precisely the threats facing Echo Park that underscored the necessity of permanently protecting America’s remaining wild lands. There would always be more development interests seeking new dams, roads, energy sources, or other natural resources in the last patches of wilderness that belonged to the American people. Seventeen drafts later and after countless conversations with Zahniser’s close friends and conservation allies, the Wilderness Bill was introduced to the House and Senate in June of 1956. Zahniser wisely had the draft legislation printed up in booklet form and mailed out to thousands of conservation group members—so that average Americans could read the bill’s language and become passionate supporters for wilderness and the words that would save it.
The legislation took 8 years to pass the House and Senate because of adamant opposition from the extractive industries. But Zahniser—savvy political lobbyist that he was—proved unrelenting in his quest to get every member of Congress to support wilderness; he was known for pushing a slide cart down the halls, past offices of each senator and representative, enticing them to view images of the beautiful places the Wilderness Bill would forever protect. Zahniser convinced a Geogetown tailor to custom-make a coat with four supersized inside pockets in which he would keep books, wilderness bill propaganda, Wilderness Society membership information and applications, and other items to hand out all over Capitol Hill--or wherever he happened to be. His persistence, and that of all his fellow wilderness advocates, paid off. American historian, novelist, and conservationist Wallace Stegner captured the clarity and beauty of the West and its people in many of his works—often using fiction to narrate our conflicting emotions about wild places. It was Stegner, in 1960, who wrote one of the most poignant arguments for wilderness in a letter he submitted to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (ORRC)—likely prompted to do so by friend and fellow conservationist David Brower. The ORRC was preparing an inventory of what remained of the American outdoors; Stegner opted to weigh in on the significance of wilderness as the creator of our unique American character.
Finally, in 1964, for the first time in history, there was a law on the books that acknowledged wilderness as valuable resource to the American people. The Act immediately established the National Wilderness Preservation System, made up of more than 9.1 million acres of lands that had been only protected piecemeal and generally by the whim of whichever land agency was in charge. It also established a clear, unambiguous policy to protect wilderness nationwide and a definition of its attributes to avoid confusion over what kinds of lands qualified as wilderness. In an ironic and unfortunate twist of fate, Howard Zahniser died of heart failure just a few months before he could see his legislation signed into law by President Johnson in the Rose Garden. But there have been more than 100 separate wilderness bills signed into law since 1964—all backed by Zahniser’s eloquent prose. Every United States president since then has signed substantial wilderness legislation while in office—testament to the nonpartisan appeal of saving special wild places. If Not for History... And so, as the system continues to grow—today protecting more than 107 million acres in 702 wilderness areas—we can thank American history for unfolding a diverse fabric of influences that changed our predecessors’ attitudes toward wild nature. In approximately 350 years, Americans went from utter fear and loathing of wilderness to passage of a law to protect its beauty, ecological importance, and inspiration in our lives. To the Spanish explorers and pilgrims who first laid eyes on wild America and the native people who taught us how to endure it, to the founding fathers who expanded settlement into the interior, the first artists and writers to call attention to the beauty and uniqueness of American wilderness, political and social winds of change, and to the successive advocates who built their arguments on the aesthetic, spiritual, therapeutic, and ecological benefits of wilderness: our love for wild places—indeed, their very survival into the 21st century and beyond —owes its gratitude to these forces and faces of history.
The author is AWC’s communications director and holds a degree in American Studies from the University of Virginia and an environmental law degree from Vermont Law School. She also works as a faculty associate at Arizona State University, where she teaches “The History of Parks and Wilderness in America” to undergraduates.
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