Enivironmentalism, Wilderness Preservation, and Saving the West from the Future

Question for Discussion: What are the larger
causes that lead Americans in the 1920s and
1930s to want to "set aside the West as a
vast wildneress"?

Reading: Athearn, "The Wilderness Evangelists"; Athearn, "Eden is Jeopardized"

Video: The Forest Service DVD : "Forest Reserves",
"Hetch Hetchy", "National Parks"; Ansel Adams DVD ,
Carl Pope on the need for the Wild in America

Conserving Public Lands in the West

Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
Government Agency Land in the West:
See Forest Service Lands in Green (in-class)
Map of National Parks in the U.S. (in-class)
Wilderness Areas in the United States (in-class)
History of Wilderness Areas in the West (in-class)
Western Futures: Land Use in the West:
1960-2040 (in-class)
What is Wilderness? (in-class)
Protecting the West as Wilderness (in-class)
Driven Wild: How the Fight against
Automobiles Launched the Modern
Wilderness Movement (2002) (in-class)
Leopold's Idea of a Land Ethic (in-class)
Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic from
A Sand County Almanac (1949) (in-class)
Wallace Stegner: The Wilderness Letter (in-class)
(1960)
Excerpts from Kittredge's Owning It All
(1987) (in-class)
Wilderness Society: The Importance of
Wilderness (in-class)
Wilderness Society: Quotes
supporting Wilderness (in-class)
The Guardian: History of the EPA (in-class)
Environmental Management of Public Land
(in-class)
Athearn, Eden Is Jeopardized
Athearn, The Wilderness Evangelists
Environmentalism in the West
1940 Metropolitan Areas in the West
2000 U.S. Population Distribution
Growing Minority Populations in the West
People in the West: Racial Diversity
Encountering the West: Reading Western Literature
Government Agency Land in the West
Annual Rainfall in the West
Paul Sears and Deserts on the March
(1935)
Images from the Dust Bowl
Timeline of the Dust Bowl
North American Deserts Map

Wilderness Areas in the U.S.
1964 Wilderness Act (in-class)
Wilderness Areas in the United States (in-class)
Who Manages Wilderness and How (in-class)
The National Wilderness Preservation
System in the United States
Wallace Stegner: The Wilderness Letter
(1960)
Stegner's Geography of Hope (1980)
Wilderness Society: The Importance of
Wilderness
Wilderness Society: Quotes
supporting Wilderness

Environmentalism in the West
Environmental History Timeline
The Birth of the EPA
The Guardian: History of the EPA
Western Futures
Geographies of the New West
Non-economic factors in why people
move to and live in the American West
Women and the New West History
Cody, Wyoming: Buffalo Bill's Little Town
in the Rockies

Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
Environmental Management of Public Land:
Government Agencies and Laws that control the Management of Protected Lands
Map of the National Forests ( in-class)
Map of National Parks in the U.S. (in-class)
Wilderness Areas in the United States (in-class)
Definition of Wilderness (in-class)
Who Manages Wilderness and How (in-class)
Wilderness Facts (in-class)
Wilderness Areas in the United States (in-class)
President Theodore Roosevelt and the
creation of the National Forest System (in-class)
John Muir and the Battle to Save Hetch Hetchy
(1901-1913) (in-class)
Athearn, Eden Is Jeopardized (in-class)
Kittredge on the Mythology of Owning the West
Stegner, The Stickers in the West (in-class)
Leopold's Idea of a Land Ethic (in-class)
Athearn, The Wilderness Evangelists
The Wild West as Psychological Aid (in-class)
Protecting the West as Wilderness (in-class)
Driven Wild: How the Fight against
Automobiles Launched the Modern
Wilderness Movement (2002) (in-class)
The Wilderness Society Founded in 1935 (in-class)
Wilderness Society: Ecological Values of
Wilderness (in-class)
Wilderness Society: FAQs about Wilderness
Wilderness Society: Quotes
supporting Wilderness (in-class)
Growth and Development as a Driver
of Increased Desire to Protect Wilderness (in-class)
Calls for Protecting Nature from Man (in-class)
The Guardian: Origins of the EPA
Environmental Management of Public Land:
Government Manages Protected Lands

Protecting the West as Wilderness

"In the 1920s, many from the East "wanted to set the West aside, so to speak, as a vast wilderness.....The emergent notion...of maintaining the West as an oversized museum for the curious or the historically minded is
explainable....To those who sensed the change and thought it mattered, there was a realization that the growing industrialization and urbanization of the East made the necessity of having a traditional West...all the more apparent....To set aside the trans-Missouri West as a kind of national green belt was a proposition not without problems."

....Robert Athearn

Kittredge on the Mythology of Owning the West

And our mythology tells us we own the West, absolutely and morally--we own it because of our history. Our people brought law to this difficult place, they suffered and they shed blood and they survived, and they earned this land for us. Our efforts have surely earned us the right to absolute control over the thing we created. The myth tells us this place is ours, and will always be ours, to do with as we see fit....

In Warner Valley we thought we were living the right lives, creating a precise perfection of fields, and we found the mythology had been telling us an enormous lie, The world had proven too complex, or the myth too simple-minded. And we were mortally angered.

The truth is, we never owned all the land and the water. We don't even own very much of them, privately. And we don't own anything absolutely or forever. As our society grows more and more complex and interwoven, our entitlement becomes less and less absolute, more and more likely to be legally diminished. Our rights to property will never take precedence over the needs of society. Nor should they, we all must agree in our grudging hearts. Ownership of property has always been a privilege granted by society, and revokable.
.....William Kittredge (1987)

"We need to define a new and livable story; it's a story about staying put and taking care of what we've got, in which our home is named as sacred, a story that encourages us to take serious care, a story about making us of the place where we live without killing it"
......William Kittredge (1987)

Stegner, "The Stickers in the West"

"For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on Western ranches and in Western towns and even in Western cities. It is the product not of the boomers but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in ... I believe that eventually, perhaps in a generation or two, they will work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health to the earth, air and water ..."
....Wallace Stegner, Introduction to Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, 1992

Driving in the National Parks
In Driven Wild, Paul Sutter traces the intellectual and cultural roots of the modern wilderness movement from about 1910 through the 1930s, with tightly drawn portraits of four Wilderness Society founders - Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshall. Each man brought a different background and perspective to the advocacy for wilderness preservation, yet each was spurred by a fear of what growing numbers of automobiles, aggressive road building, and the meteoric increase in Americans turning to nature for their leisure would do to the country's wild places. As Sutter discovered, the founders of the Wilderness Society were "driven wild" -- pushed by a rapidly changing country to construct a new preservationist ideal.

Sutter demonstrates that the birth of the movement to protect wilderness areas reflected a growing belief among an important group of conservationists that the modern forces of capitalism, industrialism, urbanism, and mass consumer culture were gradually eroding not just the ecology of North America, but crucial American values as well. For them, wilderness stood for something deeply sacred that was in danger of being lost, so that the movement to protect it was about saving not just wild nature, but ourselves as well.
From book insert to Driven Wild (2002)

Leopold's Land Ethic

In the forward to A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote, "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture."

In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.

In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves.

The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.
.....from Aldo Leopold "The Land Ethic)

Definition of Wilderness:

(c) A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.

.....1964 Wilderness Act

The Current Size of the Wilderness System
The Wilderness system in the United States continues to grow every year from the original 9.1 million acres. Current figures show the size to be 105,772,197 million acres. Alaska contains 58,182,216 of the total acres, which is about 56%. 4.4% of the continental United States is protected as Wilderness. For a complete breakdown of Wilderness acres by agency,
click here.

Calls for Protecting Nature from Man

George Perkin Marshall, 1864, Man and Nature- environmental effects of poor land use.

Paul Sears, 1935, Deserts on the March - effects of land use.

William Vogt, 1948, Road to Survival - growing populations and the resource problem.

Fairfield Osburn, 1949, Our Plundered Planet - growing populations and resources.

Aldo Leopold, 1949, A Sand County Almanac - an ecological land ethic.

W. I. Thomas, 1956, Man's Role in Changing the
Face of the Earth - concern over the global
destruction of the environment

Rachel Carson, 1962, Silent Spring- chain effects of pesticides on the environment.

Bill McKibben, 1989, The End of Nature -
concern about global warming and the human
re-making of the natural world

B.L.Turner, et al., 1990, The Earth as Transformed by Human Action concern about
global development and the increasing destruction of the environment

Bill Meyer, 1996, The Human Impact on the Earth - concern about the increasing global
impact of development the the Earth

Theo Colburn et al., 1997, Our Stolen Future -
concerns over the chemical pollution of the
natural world

James Spaeth, 2004, Red Sky at Morning: America and the crisis of the Global Environment concern over increasing global
environmental crisis

E.O.Wilson, 2007, The Creation: An Appeal
to Save Life on Earth - concern over increasing
species extinction and the loss of global biodiversity

Growth and Development Leads People to Want to Preserve Remaining Wilderness

The Pacific Northwest is a fast growing region and will remain so. When considering how the region will change in the future, it is important to incorporate non-economic factors more directly into considerations of regional development. The ongoing and future growth of the Pacific Northwest will be driven by people who move into or within the region. (Jobs follow people, not vice versa.) Employment alone is insufficient to explain why people move and live where they do. An understanding of future economic and cultural trends must consider how and where people want to live the "good life." There is a strong link between protection of the environment and long-term stability and growth of local economies. What makes places in the Pacific Northwest unique is lots of public open space, a clean environment, wilderness, and a healthy social and cultural environment. The economic value of the Pacific Northwest can be enhanced by preserving, sustaining, and strengthening the physical and social environments.
...... Gundars Rudzitis (1999)
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From Denver to Tahoe, from Tucson to Missoula, the West is developing rapidly, its farms and ranches replaced by subdivisions, its small towns and big cities growing fast, and even its recent immigrants expressing, within just a few years of their arrival, a sense of loss as the places around them change. Much of this change is the papering of Western open landscapes with development. It may seem curious that the region with the most open space in the conterminus states is engaged in a debate about land development, but the logic is clear. Much of the region's attraction is its open landscapes, and every undeveloped parcel, public or private, is already somebody's viewshed, someone's open space. Thus, even as growing populations fill the West's landscapes, they will demand open land protection.
.....Bill Travis (2002)

Athearn, Eden is Jeopardized

"Tried-and-true members of the Old West cult gloomily clung to the conviction that western towns had gone soft and were copying the East even more than before; yet, these people continued to clutch at straws, as Will Irwin had done when he talked about riding a county or so away to take in a dance, and they held that the West still was a big place, too big to become civilized all that fast. "

"Members of the Old West fan club badly needed to believe that this process of rebirth was continuing somewhere, somehow, in the great spaces westward. They hoped so, but reluctantly many admitted that they had their doubts. Out toward the Rockies the picked breed of men that legend had provided them with was fast disappearing. Many worried that in place of the men who had wrested a wilderness from the savages and had established a western Eden, there now stood a run-of-the-mill people, stripped of individuality, devoid of the pioneer spirit."

"Space, the West's great and lasting resource, gave man room to breathe, provided him with freedom of movement and fertile ground for the growth of personal dignity, which was so rapidly being lost in the crowded concrete jungles of big eastern cities. There, men had surrendered their identities, but out in this still-untamed land, such words as stranger or pardner had that special meaning, one denoting an unfenced society or the scarcity of humans, and it acted as a flavor or a scent whose fragrance hinted at older times when the West was new and wholesome."

Athearn, The Wilderness Evangelists
"As for the wilderness, the pioneer gazed upon it with a respect born of fear, hostility, and frustration. For generations, his ancestors had defined their success or failure through the assault on the forest. Telling such a westerner to be kind to trees was like urging a southerner to save the mosquitoes. Most who had come from that tradition still clung to the notion that the wild places were meant to be conquered and that the land of plenty would always be the land of plenty. They rationalized that while wastefulness was bad, in the beginning it was necessary to the process of digging in, getting started, setting roots."

"Nonetheless, as the frontier days drew to a close, Americans in various walks of life began to have second thoughts about the "conquest" of the West. They were slowly discovering that the very condition which the pioneers had set themselves against -- the fact that the wilderness was beyond human control -- was part of the source of their excitement and affection for the West. This feeling grew stronger as the years passed, until it became an important force in political and social affairs. It evolved into something like a religion. "

"They miss the main point, however. John Muir was much more than an American Tarzan. He understood clearly that a good part of the public was stirring restlessly as it watched the "real West" begin to disappear, and more than anyone else of his generation he began to transform that vague uneasiness into a political force. He was convinced of the need for government help. God had always protected trees from drought and avalanches, he said, but "He cannot save them from fools--only Uncle Sam can do that."

"The results of all this were spectacular. About 750,000 visitors entered national parks in 1919. By 1931 that number had multiplied four times over. During the same years the number of automobiles that rolled annually through the gates grew from 97,721 to 897,038. Never again would Yellowstone, Glacier, or Crater Lake face the danger of being ignored to death."

"Aldo Leopold came to the Forest Service in 1909 as a believer in Pinchotism, but his early years in New Mexico and Arizona turned him away. He found that the government's conservation policies, like the pioneer's view of the land, rested on the false and dangerous belief that the world is man's personal possession." We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us, " he wrote later. " When we see the land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." Before and after he broke with the Forest Service in the late twenties, Leopold argued the need for a
"land ethic," a sense of responsibility toward the world and everything in it. Given our growing numbers and our precocity at changing the, environment, he warned, we are flirting with disaster unless we change our ways "

The Wild West as Psychological Aid

"During the thirties, first as director of forestry in the Office of Indian Affairs and later as head of the Forest Service's Division of Recreation and Lands, Bob Marshall preached an idea that would gain popularity in the years to come. The West, he said, was essential for our psychological survival. Everyone needed the emotional and spiritual balm that only time in the wilds could bring. The leafy and needled solitudes would be a kind of national sanitarium. "

"The preservation of the wilderness was a "productive" use of the land, he argued, just as much as farming and ranching and timbering. It kept us sane, recharged our souls, reminded us of beauty beyond man's making.

The West could always teach us these lessons, so we needed to keep it as wild as we could, Leopold and Marshall were arguing. Like coal and oil, the wilderness was a non-renewable resource, but there was a lot less of it, and unlike other resources, there was no substitute for it. It could never be increased, only diminished, and the shrinkage ought to stop. Shrewdly, Leopold and Marshall played on the jealousy of Forest Service officials over the growing popularity of the national parks. "

"The twenty years after Echo Park showed dramatically how preservationist values were finding their way into public-land legislation. At least as official policy, the government was committing itself to saving some of the dwindling wilderness for the next century. In 1960 the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act officially recognized the multiple-use doctrine and then expanded it to include the "judicious use of the lands" for outdoor recreation, wildlife, and fish, as well as the old standards of soil, timber, and watersheds. Five years later the Land and Water Conservation Act set aside money (initially from a tax on motorboat fuel) to expand national parks and to purchase private lands within them. In 1976 the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA, or "Flipma," to its familiars) finally gave the BLM a permanent charter and stewardship over nearly 300 million acres. FLPMA left the bureau with some sobering responsibilities---management according to the ideal of multiple use, for instance, as well as a fair return to the Treasury for the private use of the land, and long-range planning for its huge domain."

"The jewel in the preservationists' crown was the Wilderness Act of 1964. The product of eight years of lobbying, rewriting, and compromise, this law carved out fifty-four areas from the national forests -- 9.1 million acres, all of it in the West -- and decreed that they would be kept safe and secure from all development whatsoever. It further set up an inventory and review procedure by which this newborn National Wilderness Preservation System could be expanded. By 1980, 15 million acres had been added from the national forests and parks and from the BLM, and in that year an astonishing 56 million acres more were set aside in Alaska . "

"More than that, the government had bound itself, apparently for good, to an idea: there was a point at which the slightest tinkering with the land, even if done with maximum efficiency and for the greatest good for the greatest number, hurt us more than it helped us. If part of the national domain could be held apart, just as close as possible to its virginal state, America would be the better for it. It would be difficult to conceive of a notion that would clash more glaringly with the laws and popular philosophy that had directed the treatment of the western lands from Jamestown to the opening of the twentieth century."

"Buying such wares and taking to the new highways and airline routes, Americans set their eyes westward. A few statistics suggest the dimensions of what was happening. In 1950, national parks reported 33 million visitations -- that is, warm bodies passing through the gates. In 1983 there were 327 million, a number roughly equal to one and a half times the population of the entire country. Park tourism was increasing at a rate sixteen times that of the national population. In 1955, about 70 intrepid souls floated the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon ; in 1972, 16,428 persons made the trip. And so on, and on, and on."

"For their part, native westerners were becoming infected by the spreading sense of limits and loss. They always had thought of the opposite of growth as death, but now some of them were seeing full development of their country itself as a kind of dying. They found themselves pulled between a besieged way of life and all the possibilities offered by the swirl of changes after the war. A joke that made the rounds in the sixties summed it up. No rancher wanted to be the first to sell out to the coal companies, but there were quite a few who wouldn't mind being a close second. It was a situation that many found uncomfortable, but most were quick to assure all comers that they were as dedicated to their land's natural beauty as anyone else was."

"Evangelists of this new ecological gospel say that the land has always offered other sorts of opportunities -- the chance to learn what only the wilderness can teach, a feeding of the spirit as well as the belly, the hard-earned qualities of self-assurance and independence-- to name just a few. According to this dogma, the contact with the new land has given us both a better life and a distinctive national character. Looking for the first opportunity, we found the other too. Whether Americans realized it or not, it was part of the deal they had made. "

"More and more converts have flocked to this new gospel, particularly since the Second World War. According to its catechism, the surviving wild lands have come to stand for the special nature of American history and the special promise of its future. It follows that the disappearance of the wilderness will threaten much more than the chance to turn a profit. The most rabid go-getters, the most dedicated arm-waving developers of the modern West, admit as much, crowing about the untouched scenic marvels of the country and the ways in which living and doing business in the last of the " real West "will gird up the spirit and cleanse the soul."