Preservationists and the Struggle to Preserve Wilderness in the West

Question for Discussion: According to , Stegner
why do Preservationists want to preserve vast
wilderness areas in the West? What are the
driving forces behind wilderness preservation?

Reading: Stegner, "A Capsule History of
Conservation": Marston, "Cutting the Apron Strings";
Wright, "Why I am Against It All"; Adams, "Freedom
is another word for Snowmobiles"

Video: Forest Service DVD: Roadless Areas, Reagan's Policies; Snowmobiles in Yellowstone Park

The Wilderness System and
National Parks in the U.S.

Map of the National Forests ( in-class)
Map of National Parks in the U.S. (in-class)
National Wilderness Preservation
System Map (in-class)

The Struggle for Wilderness Protection

The Wilderness Society: About the
Wilderness Campaign
(in-class)
The Wilderness Society: Why We Need
Wilderness (in-class)
Wallace Stegner: The Wilderness Letter
(1960)
The Wilderness Act of 1964 (in-class)
Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic (1949)
Driven Wild: How the Fight against
Automobiles Launched the Modern
Wilderness Movement (2002) (in-class)
Wilderness.net
National Wilderness Preservation System
National Wilderness Preservation System
Map
U.S. Agency control of National Wilderness
areas

The National Park System
The National Park Service (in-class)
The National Park Service Story:
A Brief History
The National Park Service Emerges (in-class)
Map of National Parks in the U.S. (in-class)
Number of Visitors to the National Parks (in-class)
The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations
of the West, by John Muir

The Wilderness Society
The Wildeness Society (in-class)
Who Manages Wilderness?
Values and Benefits of Wilderness
Common Misperceptions about Wilderness
The Wilderness Society: Fact Sheets
and Analysis

The Sierra Club
The Sierra Club (in-class)
Sierra Club Zoom: Get Environmental Facts
about your local Environment
History of the Sierra Club
Highlights of the Sierra Club's History (in-class)

Mainstream Environmental Groups
The Sierra Club
The Wildeness Society
World Wildlife Fund
The Nature Conservancy
National Audubon Society
Environmental Defense
World Resources Institute
Union of Concerned Scientists
Earth First! Homepage
Earth First! of the United Kingdom
Greenpeace USA

Snowmobiles in the National Parks
YellowStone National Park (in-class)
Snowmobile YellowStone: Tours (in-class)
Federal Judge Strikes down YellowStone Snowmobile Ban (in-class)
President Bush Snowmobile Policy (in-class)
Ban Snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park
(in-class)
Sierra Club: Snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park (in-class)
Tranquility for Yellowstone;
Snowmobiling to decrease, Nov. 2008
Judge Overturns Bush Snowmobile Rules (in-class)

The Roadless Area Rules Debate
Our Roadless Areas (in-class)
Roadless Areas FAQs (in-class)
PieChart of Forest Use (in-class)
Inventoried Roadless Areas on National
Forest Lands (in-class)
USDA Roadless Area Conservation Maps
Roadless Areas by State
USDA Announces Roadless Area Rules
Bush RARE Rules 2005 (in-class)
Roadless Area Conservation Act (in-class)
Wild Forests: Roadless Areas: Good
for Recreation and Business (in-class)
Petition Drive to Reinstate RARE rule (in-class)
Earth Justice: The Roadless Area Conservation
Rule
The Wilderness Society on the Roadless
Rule
Logging Industry response to the
Roadless Area rule

Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
Stegner: A Capsule History of Conservation
(in-class)
Wright, Why I Am Against It All (in-class)
Marston, Cutting the Apron Strings (in-class)
The Wilderness System and National Parks
in the United States
Stegner, The Wilderness Letter (1960)
What is Wilderness and Why do We need
Wilderness ?
The Struggle for Wilderness Protection
Obama Signs Bill Protecting Wilderness Area:
See Wilderness Protection by State (2009)
Rocky Mountain National Park is
designation a Wilderness Area (2000)
The National Park System
Mainstream Environmental Groups
The Wilderness Society
The Sierra Club
Driven Wild: How the Fight against
Automobiles Launched the Modern
Wilderness Movement (2002) (in-class)
Adams, Freedom is Just Another Word for
Snowmobiles (in-class)
The Debate over Snowmobiles in the National Parks (in-class)
The Roadless Areas Rules Debate (in-class)

What is Wilderness?

"Wilderness is manifested in physical places but it also has to do with the mind, with expression, with self....All of this is especially true in the American West. Wilderness is a peculiarly western institution. The existence of the wilderness system is an elemental statement by this region [the West] of how it differs from other parts of the country, and of the world."
....Charles Wilkinson, The Eagle Bird (85)

Native westerners had spent their lives thinking of the wilderness as an antagonist to be overcome. To them, the preservationists, who saw it as a sacred temple, were almost beyond comprehension.
...Robert Athearn, The Mythic West(198)

“In wilderness is the preservation of the world.”
-Henry David Thoreau

The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease....rejoicing in deep, long-drawn breaths of pure wildness. This is fine and natural and full of promise. So also is the growing interest in the care and preservation of forests and wild places in general, and in the half wild parks and gardens of towns.
...John Muir (1910)

[For Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall] the preservation of the wilderness was a "productive" use of the land, just as much as farming and ranching and timbering. It kept us sane, recharged our souls, reminded us of the beauty beyond man's making...The West could always teach us these lessons, so we need to keep it as wild as we could, Leopold and Marshall were arguing. Like coal and oil, the wilderness was a nonrenewable resource, but there was a lot less of it, and unlike other resources, there was no subsitute for it.
.....Robert Athearn, The Mythic West (203)

Without wilderness, we will eventually lose the capacity to understand America.

Our drive, our ruggedness, our unquenchable optimism and zeal and elan go back to the challenges of the untrammeled wilderness. Britain won its wars on the playing fields of Eton. America developed its mettle at the muddy gaps of the Cumberlands, in the swift rapids of its rivers, on the limitless reaches of its western plains, in the silent vastness of primeval forests, and in the blizzard-ridden passes of the Rockies and Coast ranges.
.....Harvey Broome, Co-founder of the Wilderness Society

Paul 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)

The jewel in the preservationists' crown was the Wilderness Act of 1964....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.
....Robert Athearn, They Mythic West (213)

[To Wilderness Evangelists] 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.
..... Athearn (220)

Stegner, The Wilderness Letter (1960)

I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. ...Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.....

These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
...Wallace Stegner, The Wilderness Letter (1960)

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 chapter 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
Visitors to the National Parks

After years of steadily increasing, visitation to national parks boomed. Since the 1950s, the number of visits to the parks has jumped 500 percent. Officials recorded more than 260 million visits last year.

Despite the increase, the National Park Service says there are only a handful of places where overcrowding is a serious problem.
....The National Park Service

Earth First! is working hard on many levels to save the earth's remaining sacred natural land and it's inhabitants from the destructive greed of corporations. EF! campaigns are always consistent with our slogan: 'No compromise in defence of the Earth'. For example, when other green groups respond to a new road project by coming up with an alternative route or tunnel, we campaign for no road at all. When other groups have backed down to court injunctions or police threats, we refuse to be intimidated into inaction. EF! believes in using all the tools in the toolbox. EF!ers quite often have to break the law (especially thanks to the CJA) to achieve their ends, but this is not a drawback - it's fun!
....Earth First website

Stegner, A Capsule History of Conservation

"For Thoreau, wildness was a passion. "In wildness is the preservation of the world," he wrote, and meant it. Repudiating his countrymen's concerns -- progress, betterment, accumulation -- and their predatory habits in the wild, he made his most characteristic gesture by building a shack on Walden Pond and living in it in spartan circumstances for two years." (121)

"Virtually all conservation activity up to the mid-twentieth century was concerned with saving something precious in our national heritage. Thus, as George Perkins Marsh, and later and more narrowly Gifford Pinchot, galvanized the impulse to protect what remained of our forests, so George Bird Grinnell, a hunting companion and boyhood friend of Theodore Roosevelt's, devoted his time and his magazine, Forest and Stream, to the protection of wildlife." (125)

"In 1892, two years after the Sierra parks were created, [Muir] formed the Sierra Club to look after their interests and enjoy their beauty. In 1905 he and the club finally persuaded California to cede back to the federal government Yosemite Valley itself, which had badly deteriorated under state control, so that it could become the heart of the park it belonged in." (126)

"By 1916 there were thirteen national parks, crown jewels without an adequately stated purpose or an adequate keeper. Those that were managed at all were managed by the Army. But in that year the National Park Act gave these reserves their stated purpose, public enjoyment, public use without impairment, and created the National Park Service to carry it out." (127)

"If the national park idea is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea. Parks are designed for careful human use -- they could be justified by a Pinchot. But wildernesses are something else. Preservation of wilderness implies agreement with Marsh's observation that wherever man plants his foot, nature 's harmonies are turned to discords. As the culminating aspect of the preservation sentiment, the wilderness movement differs from the park and forest and wildlife movements in its repudiation of most kinds of human use. What it wants is the continuation of that healthy, natural web of life that Chief Standing Bear and others revered; and if there are human uses implicit in this long-range continuation--watershed protection, protection of genetic variety, the preservation of natural laboratories by which the deteriorating man-managed world can be judged and perhaps saved--the sentiment for wilderness, our creature-love for the natural world, is probably as important." (129)

"The wilderness movement has had its prophets, early and late; of the late ones, Aldo Leopold seems to me the greatest. It has developed its organization, the Wilderness Society, one of the most effective of the environmental groups. It has had its landmark legislation, the Wilderness Act of 1964, which authorized hands-off protection for areas carved out of the national forest, national park, and Bureau of Land Management lands." (133)

"In the forty-one years since its publication, A Sand County AImanac has become a kind of holy book in environmental circles. It is a superb distillation of what many Americans had been groping toward for more than a century. Leopold loved land, all kinds, but the wilder the better, and over his lifetime of experience with land and its creatures he had come to look upon land as a community, not a commodity. " (135)

"[Leopold] Without denying the human need to use natural resources -- cut trees, plow prairies, shoot game, whatever -- he wanted a portion of the land left wild, for ultimately all human endeavor has to come back to the wilderness for its justification and its new beginnings. He said he would hate to be young again without wild country to grow up in. And he was no lover of public recreation as usually practiced. Recreation could be as dangerous as logging or any extractive use. "Recreational development," he wrote, "is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind." (135)

"Fifteen years after the publication of A Sand County Almanac (1949), and after the extraordinary effort of many people, politicians as well as environmentalists, and especially of Howard Zahniser, executive director of the Wilderness Society, Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964 ." (136)

"The passage of the Wilderness Act, and its immediate designation of 9.1 million acres of wilderness in national park, national forest, and wildlife refuge land, marked the climax of preservationist environmentalism. The wilderness designation process, clogged with controversy and sullen with turf battles among the bureaus, and shrilly resisted by resource interests, would go on--still goes on. But a corner had already been turned. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, in 1962, had already made it plain that pollution, not preservation, was to be the principal concern of the future. " (137)

Marston, Cutting the Apron Strings

"Moreover, it is hard to imagine a region less ready for the twenty-first century. It is still looking around, getting its bearings, at a time when previously prominent landmarks are fading from view. For example, there are strong signs that the global economy may have permanently lost its appetite for commodities, throwing the West's traditional extractive industries into permanent decline. And the other part of the West's economy the federal presence -- is also weakening. Nationally, the treasury is squeezed by huge debt and deficits. Dams, subsidized energy projects, and rural development programs are all under close scrutiny. No longer does the West automatically receive a share of an ever-larger pork barrel." (232)

"Wherever responsibility lies, the West approaches the millennium cut off from many national resources, and without the institutions--good education, competent media, citizen reformers--developed regions take for granted. The West will have lots of time to demonstrate whether its antipathy toward the federal government, toward regulation, and toward polyglot America will do it harm or good. Meanwhile, it has been thrown back -- it has thrown itself back -- on its resources.

What are those resources? Landscape, clear air, and, for those willing and able to conform, wonderful communities and a relaxed way of life. But there are also vast expanses of ravaged land: overgrazed, over-roaded, polluted by radioactive tailings, littered with official and unofficial Superfund sites. Wildlife refuges are often toxic sinks; some irrigated land produces more salt than food; and hundreds of reservoirs are either silting up or unsafe." (233)

"Many of those who are in the West by choice came for landscape, air, and recreation, but stayed because of small, livable communities. Those communities now being re-settled were established and shaped by people who worked the land, or who provided services to those who worked the land. Those rural activities are in retreat, or have been routed. Inevitably, their loss will mean transformation of the towns they established. A town may be in the Rockies, but if it is dominated by computer-program writers and tourist-industry workers, its character will be urban, not rural. A mix of newcomers and rural people can be healthy, injecting a place with hybrid vigor. But that mixing requires the survival of rural ways of life." (234)

"One answer, perhaps the only answer, is reclamation: deroading forests, dealing with ubiquitous mining wastes, recovering overgrazed land, repairing or dismantling dams, pushing out weeds, restoring damaged streams, detoxifying wildlife refuges, and re-introducing wildlife habitat and wildlife.

A regional commitment to restoration would do much for the West as a place; it would do even more for Westerners. Although restoration is rural, it is not a rural activity that fits today's West. Rather, restoration is "rural" in the sense of the Amish, or of Wendell Berry. The massive work of regional restoration cannot be done with the present Western mindset or skills. Commitment to this task will require commitment to change from the bottom up. "(236)

"Once the West decides that the land, streams, and, where necessary, the air must he reclaimed, ways to do it will be found. In places, and quietly, that process is under way. As a first step, a large number of communities has turned to long-neglected, long-abused river-fronts. For the most part, this work goes forward under the cloak of economic development. " (236)

"So there is more than one way to pay for the restoration of the West, and those various ways will be discovered once the decision is made to get on with the job. If the restoration decision is made, the rural West will clean itself up over the next century.
If the decision is not made, the West will continue its ecological and social decline. Those declines will continue together because they are linked. Unhealthy land reflects unhealthy human communities. Timing is everything, and today is uniquely right for undertaking restoration. Because of the bust, the West has lost those who came here for a conventionally comfortable American life. The bust has left behind a disproportionate number of believers in its landscape, air, and wildlife, whatever other beliefs tend to divide them. The West also has time on its hands, for the old dreams of instant wealth are dead." (237)

Wright, Why I am Against it All

"It wasn't hard work, really. I just rambled on for 600 words each week about the rugged Iandscape around us and then offered some helpful observations and suggestions: that housing developments really aren't good elk habitat, that the local ski area is big enough already, that the Forest Service shouldn't execute one of the area's last old-growth ponderosa stands, that the Bureau of Reclamation shouldn't insert yet another concrete suppository in yet another nearby river, and so on. "

"It connected me to the many other labeled
"newcomers " who have migrated to the West and dared to point out the waste, stupidity, and greed dismantling this fantastic place.

Still, I'm not afraid to admit I wasn't born a westerner. And I am not afraid to admit--as even many "environmentalist" are for fear of weakening their credibility -- that I am against most of the changes happening here: bigger airports, new roads, the widening and straightening and grading of old roads, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Qwik Marts, corporate resorts, ski-area expansions, water developments, golf courses, casinos, marinas, campgrounds, trailhead parking, brochures, maps, promotional websites, and about anything any chamber of commerce anywhere does. And on and on."

"With every incremental "improvement" in the West, there are a dozen people for whom that improvement makes it just easy enough to live here. "

"I' m not saying we should shut the door. Anyone can live here if they want, as long as they're willing to do it on this place's terms. If folks don't want to give up nice roads, easy access to air transport, bluegrass lawns, tee times, specialty coffee shops, shopping malls, and on-ramps to the information superhighway, then there's most of the rest of the country already paved over, roaded through, and wired up for them. "

Like many native westerners, there's a class of us newcomers who love small working towns and wild country. Call us rural refugees. We're from different states, but we're from the same state of mind -- we worship the precious back-country and close-knit communities that still survive in the West, and we settled here willing to sacrifice urban conveniences, high-tech luxuries, and fat paychecks to have those things. We would've been happy to stay wherever we're from, but we saw our native rural towns and landscapes crushed by the glassy-eyed cult of economics that chants "Growth Is Good" and whose vision extends only to the end of the next fiscal year.

And so I say to the longtime lovers of the West who resent all newcomers, if you listen to us we can offer valuable, hard-earned lessons that you'll never hear from a politician, real-estate developer, chain-store corporation, or mega-resort."

"That is why we can't keep quiet when we hear again the familiar optimistic and hypnotic hymns: Growth is good. We can control growth. We'll all get rich. Just a little more improvement. There's another valley over the ridge, and another river over the hill.

And that is why I'm against it all."

Adams, Freedom is Just Another Word for Snowmobiles

"I'm sensitive to the charge that environmentalists want to lock up the West and make it into some kind of huge, empty preserve where, clad in polar fleece, we can freely seek hot springs, quaint cappuccino shops, and a mare with the right kind of trust fund. Still, I believe we could do worse to the West; we could turn it into a 50-million-acre amusement park with a Wall Drug in every town, jetboats on every river, and snowmobiles on every mountain."

"Freedom, Wallace suggests, is making your own rules and conquering the backcountry without ever getting off your butt. Driving a machine through America's last wildlands is a shorthand claim to outdoor skills, self-reliance, and other frontier virtues. Instead of spending a lifetime in the woods, now all it takes to become Jim Bridger is the money to rent a Yamaha Wolverine four-by-four."

"If the ORV/theme park experience were simply one choice of many available in the West, its rise would be less disturbing. Unlike hikers, hunters, equestrians, and others who prefer "quiet trails," however, ORVs do not complement existing use; they replace it. In a I994 University of Montana survey, 91 percent of trail hikers said walking is incompatible with motorcycles, and three-quarters of cross-country skiers couldn't stomach the presence of snowmobiles."

"If we are acting out our national myths astride snowmobiles, if we accept that driving an incredibly pollutive machine through the last wildlands of the Lower 48 is "freedom," then we are dooming ourselves and our children to a future as consumptive, insubstantial, and debilitatingly mindless as those very rides. "