Rupert Cutler's presentation
at the VWC 50th Anniversary Celebration
on Saturday, August 3, 2019
at the Ivy Creek Natural Area Education Building in Charlottesville
Slide 1 (title)
The Struggle for Wilderness
A Presentation at the 50thAnniversary Celebration
Of the Virginia Wilderness Committee
August 3, 2019
Presented by Rupert Cutler
Roanoke, Virginia
Good afternoon. It’s great to be with you. Your invitation to review with you the history of the struggle for wilderness--including the hard work done on this score in Virginia over the years--has given me an opportunity to delve back into American environmental history and into my own history, and it’s been fun to do.
One unique aspect will be my showing of photos of a man I think you all regard as your patron saint or esteemed early leader, and that is the late Ernie Dickerman. Ernie and I worked for The Wilderness Society at the same time. I took a few photos of him then that I’ve had digitized, so I can show them to you today.
Slide 2 (RC with LBJ)
So I’ll be taking you in a virtual time machine back to when Lyndon Johnson was President. Back then, passage by Congress of laws to protect clean air, clean water, wildlife and wilderness was relatively easy. It was widely understood that protecting the natural resources on which we depend on for a healthy life was a good idea. President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act and the Wild Rivers Act (shown here), and President Nixon a signed the endangered species act and created the EPA, so it was a bipartisan—really, a nonpartisan--issue then.
That’s when I worked in Washington, during what I think of as the “golden age” of environmental-protection legislation!
Jumping right into it, you all know Virginia Wildlife magazine.
Slide 3 (Phelps and RC)
I was its editor 60 years ago, from 1958 until 1962.
One of my assignments as Game Commission spokesman back then was to go around the state speaking in opposition to construction of the Gathright Dam on the Jackson River, to try to save a state wildlife management area from being flooded. We know how that turned out. The paper mill at Covington wanted the dam and reservoir to dilute its pollution in the summertime, and Congress and the Corps of Engineers were happy to oblige. Then I became managing editor of the National Wildlife Federation’s brand new magazine, National Wildlife.
Slide 4 (Kennedys)
It was while working for the NWF that I attended the White House Conference on Conservation at the State Department and was in the audience when President Kennedy spoke in favor of passing a Wilderness Bill.
That topic has occupied my attention for six decades now.
Slide 5 (Olson)
When I edited National Wildlife magazine, I published an article on the need for a national wilderness system written by Sigurd Olson of Ely, Minnesota, who is known for his books on the northern Minnesota canoe country.
Slide 6 (Brandy)
Wilderness Society Executive Director Stewart Brandborg offered me the position of Assistant Executive Director of that organization, and I jumped at that opportunity.
Slide 7 (RC WVHC)
I devoted every waking moment for five years to the political process of adding areas to the National Wilderness Preservation System. (Here I’m speaking at the organizational “camp meeting” of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy on Spruce Knob in 1967.)
Slide 8 (Wilderness map)
Now I’ll backtrack to tell you the story of how America came to have a unique federal system of designated wilderness areas on national forests, national parks, and wildlife refuges.
As you know, wilderness areas are federal land areas that are open to public use, for hiking, horseback riding, canoeing, camping, hunting and fishing but closed to roads, development, and mechanical means of transportation.
When I joined the The Wilderness Society staff in 1965, my boss Stewart Brandborg said that representing in Washington the views of local “grassroots” wilderness committees like yours was “Job One” of our small Wilderness Society staff. Unlike some national lobbying groups, we were not going to be “top down.” We didn’t think we knew best just because we were based in the holy city of Washington.
Slide 9 (RC at ANILCA hearing)
We wanted to know what citizens who lived near potential wilderness system additions, thought, and we’d follow their advice. Our job was to help them carry the day in Washington for site-specific wilderness-designation legislation that contained their home-grown citizens’ boundary proposals. And we succeeded in a big way
I became--like Barack Obama in Chicago--a community organizer. I helped to create, and listened to, local wilderness committees all over the eastern United States. Another fellow on staff, Clif Merritt, did the same for all the states west of the Mississippi.
Ernie Dickerman came on the scene from Knoxville in 1968 and picked up where I left off, when I went back to university to get my graduate degrees in 1969. It was actually Ernie and Doug Scott who led the campaign for eastern wilderness and under whom the Virginia Wilderness Committee got its start.
Slides 10, 11, 12 (Dickerman)
Let me tell you a little about Ernie Dickerman. I met Ernie in 1967 when Clif Merritt and I were driving around Great Smoky Mountains National Park holding livingroom meetings in small towns to let conservationists there know the the National Park Service had come up with a wilderness proposal for that park that had shortcomings. It fell short by including too little of the park in wilderness. Ernie came to our meeting in Gatlinburg and fell in love with the wilderness campaign Clif and I were conducting. A few weeks after we met in Tennessee and Clif and I were back in our Washington, D.C. office, Ernie strode into our office with his carpetbag and announced that he was coming to work for The Wilderness Society. Brandborg found him a desk and eventually found salary money for him, and he became a unique and well-known figure on Capitol Hill, lobbying for wilderness for several years before he moved to the Shenandoah Valley. He was a tough wilderness hiker and a determined advocate for wilderness. I enjoyed my association with him.
The need for local advocacy groups like the Virginia Wilderness Committee and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy to defend every wilderness area will continue as long as there is a wilderness system, or else the system will be degraded—its “wilderness character” will be lost--by pressures for development.
Slide 13 (First Wilderness System)
Now let’s review the history of the American Wilderness Movement. The naturalists and writers who first described North America’s natural beauty to the rest of the world, back in the 18thcentury, blazed a trail for the political activists who won protection under law of that wilderness legacy in the 20thcentury.
Those who fought for and won passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, and all the follow-on legislation required to increase the size of the National Wilderness Preservation System from 9 million acres to to 111 million acres are--in spirit, one might say--depending on today’s local conservation groups to protect that hard-won legacy.
Slide 14 (Indian effects on vegetation)
The land now called the United States was notcovered from sea to shining sea by an old-growth forest unaffected by human influence when European settlement began. Much of its original forest had been manipulated for centuries by the native inhabitants—burned on purpose, for example, to create better grazing for elk and bison. They favored fruit- and nut-bearing species of trees for obvious reasons.
Slide 15 (San Francisco Peaks)
To native people, the land they lived on was sacred. They saw the earth, the heavens, and the cardinal directions as supernatural forces. The San Juan Pueblo’s world was circumscribed by four sacred mountains. The Hopis hold sacred the San Francisco Peaks above Flagstaff.
I think the native peoples’ sacred mountains and other sacred places across our continent could be called our first wilderness system.
Slide 16 (Trailblazers)
Slide 17 (Daniel Boone)
American frontiersmen shared the Indians’ semi-nomadic life style. In 1799, Daniel Boone, when asked: “Why are you leaving Kentucky?” reportedly exclaimed: “Too many people! Too crowded! I want more elbow room!”
The movement to preserve American wilderness was begun early in the 1700s by the naturalists and artists who first explored America’s backcountry and documented our continent’s natural splendor. Henry Savage, Jr., in his book Lost Heritage, calls those who ventured beyond the narrow strip of settled Atlantic Coast “the realdiscoverers of America.”
Slide 18 (Bartram)
These “discoverers” of America included John Lawson, Mark Catesby and John Bartram in the early 1700s…
Slide 19 (Wilson)
and Andre and Francois Michaux and Alexander Wilson in the latter half of the 1700s.
Slide 20 (Audubon)
They blazed a trail for John James Audubon, who published his magnificent The Birds of Americabetween 1827 and 1839.
Slide 21 (Lewis & Clark)
The Corps of Discovery led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark stirred the Nation’s soul about the wilderness of the Louisiana Purchase and beyond.
Slide 22 (Thoreau)
Those intrepid naturalists and explorers created a public awareness of the existence of our beautiful wild lands that was underscored and elevated in the writings and speeches made in the 1800s by the Transcendentalists in New England--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sarah Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau--and by George Perkins Marsh. In an 1851 speech in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Slide 23 (Marsh)
George Perkins Marsh’s book, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action,published in 1864, documented the effects of human action on theenvironment.
Slide 24 (Giants)
Who were the most important actors in America’s wilderness-preservation drama? Mike Matz answered this question in his essay “On the Shoulders of Giants.” “Those who want to protect America’s public lands,” Matz says, “have benefited from the giants of conservation, like John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, and Howard Zahniser. These people worked to define the concept of wilderness, put it into law, and protect it in perpetuity.” Perpetuitywas a word Howard Zahniser liked. It means “time without end,” sort of “forever and then some.” It also means “eternity,” too religious a word for the 1950s U.S. Congress.
Slide 25 (Muir)
InWilderness and the American Mind, Rod Nash calls John Muir the publicizer of wilderness. Muir’s biographer Frank Burke says “[Muir] gave the natural world back to the people of America.” Muir helped found the Sierra Club, won creation of Yosemite National Park, and fought the Hetch Hetchy dam.
Iowa Republican Congressman John F. Lacey won passage of the 1894 Yellowstone Protection Act that made the Secretary of the Interior responsible to protect the wildlife and resources of the national parks.
Slide 26 (Pinchot)
Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the newly created Forest Service in 1905, encouraged President Theodore Roosevelt to proclaim millions of acres of forest reserves.
Using the 1891 Forest Reserves amendment to the General Land Revision Act, they expanded the national forests by 100 million acres, within which wilderness could be designated later. Today there are 445 wilderness areas on national forests.
One of the great public lands conservation tools is the 1906 Antiquities Act. It gives the President authority to proclaim national monuments on federal public lands without action by Congress. President Theodore Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to protect the Grand Canyon.
Slide 27 (eastern national forests)
The 1911 Weeks Act provided another important public land conservation tool.Introduced by Congressman John W. WeeksofMassachusetts, it authorized theSecretary of Agricultureto buy the land that became our precious easternnational forests including the George Washington, Jefferson and Monongahela National Forests we all enjoy.
Slide 28 (Mather)
Stephen Mather won passage of the Act of Congress creating the National Park Service in 1916. Later, the Park Service was reluctant to embrace the Wilderness Act but was required to identify potential wilderness areas across the park system. That process gave citizens a point of departure for taking their own wilderness boundary proposals to Congress. There are now 61 wilderness areas in the National Park System totaling over 44 million acres, much of it in Alaska.
Slide 29 (Carhart, Olson)
Art Carhart proposed wilderness status for the Quetico-Superior country of northern Minnesota in 1919. It became the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness with the help of Sigurd Olson.
Slide 30 (Leopold)
In 1922, Aldo Leopold proposed creating the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico “to preserve at least one place in the Southwest where pack trips shall be the dominant play.” Rod Nash calls Leopold the prophet of wilderness.
Slide 31 (RC at shack)
In 1925, Leopold published “Wilderness as a Form of Land Use,” providing the rationale for wilderness preservation in American land-use policy. Leopold became a co-founder of The Wilderness Society in 1935.
Slide 32 (Marshall)
Robert Marshall was the first to call for “an organization of spirited people to fight for the freedom of the wilderness.” In 1930 he outlined his argument for wilderness in an article, “The Problem of the Wilderness,” in Scientific Monthly. His call for a new conservation group was heeded in 1935 when he--together with Benton MacKaye, who conceived of the Appalachian Trail--and six others founded The Wilderness Society. As head of the Forest Service lands division, Bob Marshall advocated for wilderness within the Forest Service. The Forest Service set aside many wilderness reserves on national forests on its own before the Wilderness Act was passed.
Slide 33 (Darling)
In 1934, Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling, became director of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, later renamed the Fish and Wildlife Service. Darling ran the continent-wide National Wildlife Refuge System that Theodore Roosevelt started by creating the Pelican Island refuge in 1903.
Slide 34 (Great Swamp)
Today there are 71 wilderness areas on national wildlife refuges including the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey that I had a hand in getting designated as wilderness.
Slide 35 (Manasseh)
In 1946 the Bureau of Land Management was created by combining the Grazing Service and the General Land Office. Today, there are 222 wilderness areas on BLM lands. My cousin Manasseh Cutler got the ball rolling with regard to how the Nation’s public lands were to be administered by drafting the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. You can read all about him in David McCullough ‘s new book, The Pioneers.
Slide 36 (Brower)
David Brower began editing the Sierra Club Bulletinin 1946 and became executive director of the Sierra Club in 1952. He made the Sierra Club into a national political force to be reckoned with, joining Howard Zahniser in advocating passage of the Wilderness Bill.
Slide 37 (Zahniser)
At the head of my list of wilderness protectors is Howard Zahniser. “Zahnie,” whom I knew well, came to the Wilderness Society in 1945 and drafted the Wilderness Bill in early 1956.
Slide 38 (Humphrey, Saylor)
Wilderness Bills were introduced in the U.S. Congress that year; in the House of Representatives by Congressman John P. Saylorof Pennsylvania and in the Senate by Hubert Humphreyof Minnesota. Howard Zahniser was the main proponent of the Wilderness Act through the next eight years that it took to pass the legislation.
Howard Zahniser died of heart failure on May 5, 1964, just four months before PresidentLyndon B. Johnsonsigned the Wilderness Act into law that September.
The purpose of the 1964 Wilderness Act was to “secure for the American people the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.” The act required the federal land agencies to review all of their lands that might meet the Wilderness Act’s requirements and submit recommendations to Congress by 1974. Once an area was legislatively added to the wilderness system, the agency was bound by law to protect it as wilderness in perpetuity.
The Forest Service tried to define wilderness as only the most pristine and untouched wild lands—what we called “rocks and ice” to leave all the good timber available for cutting. The Wilderness Society, working closely with local wilderness advocates, advanced an alternative, pragmatic vision for the future of the wilderness system that took into account the potential healing over time of minor man-made scars for all the wilderness legislation that followed. That position, advocated by Ernie Dickerman and Doug Scott, was ultimately adopted by the Congress and made eastern wilderness possible.
When the Wilderness Act was passed,9.1 million acres were immediately designated as wilderness, all managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The National Wilderness Preservation System now spans 111 million acres in some 760 areas in 44 states and Puerto Rico.
Slide 39 (Alaska)
The largest single contribution to the Wilderness System by acreage came during the presidency ofJimmy Carter, in which I served as the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in charge of the Forest Service. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act that he signed in December of 1980—and I was in the audience in the East Room of the White House--added 56 million acres of wilderness to the system and protected 100.7 million acres of national parks, forest reserves, and wildlife refuges as well.
Slide 40 (Mardy)
Among the first to advocate for the protection of the Alaksan wilderness were Olaus and Mardy Murie. I met Mardy at her home near the Tetons in Wyoming.
Slide 41 (Alaskan river)
We’re talking about this kind of Alaska wild country—surely worth fighting for to protect!
Slide 42 (Obama)
President Barack Obama signed into law the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 that designated 52 new wilderness areas and added acreage to 26 existing areas. On March 12 of this year, President Donald Trump signed into law the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act that added another 1.2 million acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System.
Slide 43 (map)
A 111-million-acre National Wilderness Preservation System is a landmark accomplishment by the American conservation movement, yet only about 2.7 percent of the contiguous 48 states—an area about the size of Minnesota—is protected as wilderness.
Slide 44 (Maine)
Now, just for fun as a kind of postscript, I’ll provide a little personal history. As a teenager, I experienced wild ocean coastline as a kitchen boy at the National Audubon Society’s camp on an island off the Maine coast (in 1951),
Slide 45 (lookout)
as a Forest Service lookout in a national forest in northern Idaho in 1952 (this cabin was burned down a couple of years ago),
Slide 46 (RC Alaska)
and as a Fish and Wildlife Service stream guard on a bay in Katmai National Monument in Alaska in 1953. So I got the wilderness bug early on.
Slide 47 (JFK)
As a National Wildlife Federation employee I attended President Kennedy’s 1962 White House Conference on Conservation speech in which he said,” I’m hopeful that we can move far faster in the more traditional kinds of conservation—the wilderness bill [and] the [land and water conservation] fund we have set up for the maintenance of the conservation resources.”
Slide 48 (SMB)
And as a member of Stewart Brandborg’s Wilderness Society staff team from 1965 to 1969, I was able to help implement President Kennedy’s call for the protection of “wide-open spaces.” I hosted local grass roots activists when they came to Washington for subcommittee hearings on the wilderness bills--helped them find lodging, meet with their representatives and senators and key members of the subcommittees, and write their hearing statements.
As you may recall, the Wilderness Act not only directed the Forest Service to review its remaining primitive areas. It required the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service to review all their lands for wilderness potential within ten years after the Wilderness Act passed. We on The Wilderness Society staff tried to make sure the Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service met this tight deadline and be ready with our own boundary recommendations when those agencies completed their reviews of candidate areas and scheduled public hearings.
Slide 49 (Cutler and McGuire)
My imprint on wilderness policy continued when I became President Carter’s Assistant Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1977. (I had been an assistant professor of resource development at Michigan State University prior to my presidential appointment.) I served on the While House task force that drafted the Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act, taking care to see that Admiralty Island, Misty Fiords, and Copper River Delta were included in that legislation as Forest Service-administered national monuments.
Between 1977 and 1980, I initiated and oversaw a review of the entire 193-million National Forest System for wilderness-designation opportunities. That review recommended allocations of all the “roadless” lands to wilderness or other “multiple uses.” This was the agency’s second Roadless Areas Review and Evaluation, or RARE II. It identified 62 million national forest acres as roadless. We proposed that 15 million acres be classified as wilderness and that 36 million acres be released for other “multiple uses,” leaving 11 million acres in a “further planning” status.
These recommendations and the RARE II roadless areas inventory became the basis of a long series of congressional acts that added hundreds of national forest areas to the wilderness system. It is still being used today, here in Virginia and elsewhere, as the process of adding areas to the wilderness system continues.
Designation by Congress of an area as Wilderness is not enough, however, to ensure its protection. Stewardship by federal staff and volunteers is essential to ensure the protection of “wilderness character.
Slide 50 (people do)
Citizen wilderness advocates continue to have an important role to play. As this Arizona Wilderness Coalition slogan says so well: “Designations don’t protect wild places – people do.”
Slide 51 (LBJ signing Wilderness Act)
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964, a major legislative victory for those of us “who cannot live without wild things.”
Some of the best words in books are found in their Forewords. Here is an example about wilderness from Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac:
“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot…. Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free….”
Only deep and passionate love and understanding of wilderness and wildness can protect the National Wilderness Preservation System.
I’ll conclude this review of the national wilderness preservation campaign by quoting Howard Zahniser closing a speech he called “Wilderness Forever.” Zahnie was talking about the frustrating campaign to win passage of the Wilderness Bill, but his words speak to us today as well:
“We should never lose heart. We are engaged in an effort that may well be expected to continue until its right consummation, by our successors if need be. Working to preserve in perpetuity is a great inspiration. We are not fighting a rearguard action, we are facing a frontier. We are not slowing down a force that inevitably will destroy all the wilderness there is. We are generating another force, never to be wholly spent, that, renewed generation after generation, will be always effective in preserving wilderness. We are not fighting progress. We are making it. We are not dealing with a vanishing wilderness. We are working for a wilderness forever.”
I salute the Virginia Wilderness Committee for its effective work in carrying on the torch, lit so many years ago, to protect our remaining wild lands!
Slide 52
The Struggle for Wilderness
A Presentation at the 50thAnniversary Celebration
Of the Virginia Wilderness Committee
August 3, 2019
Presented by Rupert Cutler
Roanoke, Virginia
Good afternoon. It’s great to be with you. Your invitation to review with you the history of the struggle for wilderness--including the hard work done on this score in Virginia over the years--has given me an opportunity to delve back into American environmental history and into my own history, and it’s been fun to do.
One unique aspect will be my showing of photos of a man I think you all regard as your patron saint or esteemed early leader, and that is the late Ernie Dickerman. Ernie and I worked for The Wilderness Society at the same time. I took a few photos of him then that I’ve had digitized, so I can show them to you today.
Slide 2 (RC with LBJ)
So I’ll be taking you in a virtual time machine back to when Lyndon Johnson was President. Back then, passage by Congress of laws to protect clean air, clean water, wildlife and wilderness was relatively easy. It was widely understood that protecting the natural resources on which we depend on for a healthy life was a good idea. President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act and the Wild Rivers Act (shown here), and President Nixon a signed the endangered species act and created the EPA, so it was a bipartisan—really, a nonpartisan--issue then.
That’s when I worked in Washington, during what I think of as the “golden age” of environmental-protection legislation!
Jumping right into it, you all know Virginia Wildlife magazine.
Slide 3 (Phelps and RC)
I was its editor 60 years ago, from 1958 until 1962.
One of my assignments as Game Commission spokesman back then was to go around the state speaking in opposition to construction of the Gathright Dam on the Jackson River, to try to save a state wildlife management area from being flooded. We know how that turned out. The paper mill at Covington wanted the dam and reservoir to dilute its pollution in the summertime, and Congress and the Corps of Engineers were happy to oblige. Then I became managing editor of the National Wildlife Federation’s brand new magazine, National Wildlife.
Slide 4 (Kennedys)
It was while working for the NWF that I attended the White House Conference on Conservation at the State Department and was in the audience when President Kennedy spoke in favor of passing a Wilderness Bill.
That topic has occupied my attention for six decades now.
Slide 5 (Olson)
When I edited National Wildlife magazine, I published an article on the need for a national wilderness system written by Sigurd Olson of Ely, Minnesota, who is known for his books on the northern Minnesota canoe country.
Slide 6 (Brandy)
Wilderness Society Executive Director Stewart Brandborg offered me the position of Assistant Executive Director of that organization, and I jumped at that opportunity.
Slide 7 (RC WVHC)
I devoted every waking moment for five years to the political process of adding areas to the National Wilderness Preservation System. (Here I’m speaking at the organizational “camp meeting” of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy on Spruce Knob in 1967.)
Slide 8 (Wilderness map)
Now I’ll backtrack to tell you the story of how America came to have a unique federal system of designated wilderness areas on national forests, national parks, and wildlife refuges.
As you know, wilderness areas are federal land areas that are open to public use, for hiking, horseback riding, canoeing, camping, hunting and fishing but closed to roads, development, and mechanical means of transportation.
When I joined the The Wilderness Society staff in 1965, my boss Stewart Brandborg said that representing in Washington the views of local “grassroots” wilderness committees like yours was “Job One” of our small Wilderness Society staff. Unlike some national lobbying groups, we were not going to be “top down.” We didn’t think we knew best just because we were based in the holy city of Washington.
Slide 9 (RC at ANILCA hearing)
We wanted to know what citizens who lived near potential wilderness system additions, thought, and we’d follow their advice. Our job was to help them carry the day in Washington for site-specific wilderness-designation legislation that contained their home-grown citizens’ boundary proposals. And we succeeded in a big way
I became--like Barack Obama in Chicago--a community organizer. I helped to create, and listened to, local wilderness committees all over the eastern United States. Another fellow on staff, Clif Merritt, did the same for all the states west of the Mississippi.
Ernie Dickerman came on the scene from Knoxville in 1968 and picked up where I left off, when I went back to university to get my graduate degrees in 1969. It was actually Ernie and Doug Scott who led the campaign for eastern wilderness and under whom the Virginia Wilderness Committee got its start.
Slides 10, 11, 12 (Dickerman)
Let me tell you a little about Ernie Dickerman. I met Ernie in 1967 when Clif Merritt and I were driving around Great Smoky Mountains National Park holding livingroom meetings in small towns to let conservationists there know the the National Park Service had come up with a wilderness proposal for that park that had shortcomings. It fell short by including too little of the park in wilderness. Ernie came to our meeting in Gatlinburg and fell in love with the wilderness campaign Clif and I were conducting. A few weeks after we met in Tennessee and Clif and I were back in our Washington, D.C. office, Ernie strode into our office with his carpetbag and announced that he was coming to work for The Wilderness Society. Brandborg found him a desk and eventually found salary money for him, and he became a unique and well-known figure on Capitol Hill, lobbying for wilderness for several years before he moved to the Shenandoah Valley. He was a tough wilderness hiker and a determined advocate for wilderness. I enjoyed my association with him.
The need for local advocacy groups like the Virginia Wilderness Committee and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy to defend every wilderness area will continue as long as there is a wilderness system, or else the system will be degraded—its “wilderness character” will be lost--by pressures for development.
Slide 13 (First Wilderness System)
Now let’s review the history of the American Wilderness Movement. The naturalists and writers who first described North America’s natural beauty to the rest of the world, back in the 18thcentury, blazed a trail for the political activists who won protection under law of that wilderness legacy in the 20thcentury.
Those who fought for and won passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, and all the follow-on legislation required to increase the size of the National Wilderness Preservation System from 9 million acres to to 111 million acres are--in spirit, one might say--depending on today’s local conservation groups to protect that hard-won legacy.
Slide 14 (Indian effects on vegetation)
The land now called the United States was notcovered from sea to shining sea by an old-growth forest unaffected by human influence when European settlement began. Much of its original forest had been manipulated for centuries by the native inhabitants—burned on purpose, for example, to create better grazing for elk and bison. They favored fruit- and nut-bearing species of trees for obvious reasons.
Slide 15 (San Francisco Peaks)
To native people, the land they lived on was sacred. They saw the earth, the heavens, and the cardinal directions as supernatural forces. The San Juan Pueblo’s world was circumscribed by four sacred mountains. The Hopis hold sacred the San Francisco Peaks above Flagstaff.
I think the native peoples’ sacred mountains and other sacred places across our continent could be called our first wilderness system.
Slide 16 (Trailblazers)
Slide 17 (Daniel Boone)
American frontiersmen shared the Indians’ semi-nomadic life style. In 1799, Daniel Boone, when asked: “Why are you leaving Kentucky?” reportedly exclaimed: “Too many people! Too crowded! I want more elbow room!”
The movement to preserve American wilderness was begun early in the 1700s by the naturalists and artists who first explored America’s backcountry and documented our continent’s natural splendor. Henry Savage, Jr., in his book Lost Heritage, calls those who ventured beyond the narrow strip of settled Atlantic Coast “the realdiscoverers of America.”
Slide 18 (Bartram)
These “discoverers” of America included John Lawson, Mark Catesby and John Bartram in the early 1700s…
Slide 19 (Wilson)
and Andre and Francois Michaux and Alexander Wilson in the latter half of the 1700s.
Slide 20 (Audubon)
They blazed a trail for John James Audubon, who published his magnificent The Birds of Americabetween 1827 and 1839.
Slide 21 (Lewis & Clark)
The Corps of Discovery led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark stirred the Nation’s soul about the wilderness of the Louisiana Purchase and beyond.
Slide 22 (Thoreau)
Those intrepid naturalists and explorers created a public awareness of the existence of our beautiful wild lands that was underscored and elevated in the writings and speeches made in the 1800s by the Transcendentalists in New England--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sarah Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau--and by George Perkins Marsh. In an 1851 speech in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Slide 23 (Marsh)
George Perkins Marsh’s book, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action,published in 1864, documented the effects of human action on theenvironment.
Slide 24 (Giants)
Who were the most important actors in America’s wilderness-preservation drama? Mike Matz answered this question in his essay “On the Shoulders of Giants.” “Those who want to protect America’s public lands,” Matz says, “have benefited from the giants of conservation, like John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, and Howard Zahniser. These people worked to define the concept of wilderness, put it into law, and protect it in perpetuity.” Perpetuitywas a word Howard Zahniser liked. It means “time without end,” sort of “forever and then some.” It also means “eternity,” too religious a word for the 1950s U.S. Congress.
Slide 25 (Muir)
InWilderness and the American Mind, Rod Nash calls John Muir the publicizer of wilderness. Muir’s biographer Frank Burke says “[Muir] gave the natural world back to the people of America.” Muir helped found the Sierra Club, won creation of Yosemite National Park, and fought the Hetch Hetchy dam.
Iowa Republican Congressman John F. Lacey won passage of the 1894 Yellowstone Protection Act that made the Secretary of the Interior responsible to protect the wildlife and resources of the national parks.
Slide 26 (Pinchot)
Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the newly created Forest Service in 1905, encouraged President Theodore Roosevelt to proclaim millions of acres of forest reserves.
Using the 1891 Forest Reserves amendment to the General Land Revision Act, they expanded the national forests by 100 million acres, within which wilderness could be designated later. Today there are 445 wilderness areas on national forests.
One of the great public lands conservation tools is the 1906 Antiquities Act. It gives the President authority to proclaim national monuments on federal public lands without action by Congress. President Theodore Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to protect the Grand Canyon.
Slide 27 (eastern national forests)
The 1911 Weeks Act provided another important public land conservation tool.Introduced by Congressman John W. WeeksofMassachusetts, it authorized theSecretary of Agricultureto buy the land that became our precious easternnational forests including the George Washington, Jefferson and Monongahela National Forests we all enjoy.
Slide 28 (Mather)
Stephen Mather won passage of the Act of Congress creating the National Park Service in 1916. Later, the Park Service was reluctant to embrace the Wilderness Act but was required to identify potential wilderness areas across the park system. That process gave citizens a point of departure for taking their own wilderness boundary proposals to Congress. There are now 61 wilderness areas in the National Park System totaling over 44 million acres, much of it in Alaska.
Slide 29 (Carhart, Olson)
Art Carhart proposed wilderness status for the Quetico-Superior country of northern Minnesota in 1919. It became the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness with the help of Sigurd Olson.
Slide 30 (Leopold)
In 1922, Aldo Leopold proposed creating the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico “to preserve at least one place in the Southwest where pack trips shall be the dominant play.” Rod Nash calls Leopold the prophet of wilderness.
Slide 31 (RC at shack)
In 1925, Leopold published “Wilderness as a Form of Land Use,” providing the rationale for wilderness preservation in American land-use policy. Leopold became a co-founder of The Wilderness Society in 1935.
Slide 32 (Marshall)
Robert Marshall was the first to call for “an organization of spirited people to fight for the freedom of the wilderness.” In 1930 he outlined his argument for wilderness in an article, “The Problem of the Wilderness,” in Scientific Monthly. His call for a new conservation group was heeded in 1935 when he--together with Benton MacKaye, who conceived of the Appalachian Trail--and six others founded The Wilderness Society. As head of the Forest Service lands division, Bob Marshall advocated for wilderness within the Forest Service. The Forest Service set aside many wilderness reserves on national forests on its own before the Wilderness Act was passed.
Slide 33 (Darling)
In 1934, Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling, became director of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, later renamed the Fish and Wildlife Service. Darling ran the continent-wide National Wildlife Refuge System that Theodore Roosevelt started by creating the Pelican Island refuge in 1903.
Slide 34 (Great Swamp)
Today there are 71 wilderness areas on national wildlife refuges including the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey that I had a hand in getting designated as wilderness.
Slide 35 (Manasseh)
In 1946 the Bureau of Land Management was created by combining the Grazing Service and the General Land Office. Today, there are 222 wilderness areas on BLM lands. My cousin Manasseh Cutler got the ball rolling with regard to how the Nation’s public lands were to be administered by drafting the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. You can read all about him in David McCullough ‘s new book, The Pioneers.
Slide 36 (Brower)
David Brower began editing the Sierra Club Bulletinin 1946 and became executive director of the Sierra Club in 1952. He made the Sierra Club into a national political force to be reckoned with, joining Howard Zahniser in advocating passage of the Wilderness Bill.
Slide 37 (Zahniser)
At the head of my list of wilderness protectors is Howard Zahniser. “Zahnie,” whom I knew well, came to the Wilderness Society in 1945 and drafted the Wilderness Bill in early 1956.
Slide 38 (Humphrey, Saylor)
Wilderness Bills were introduced in the U.S. Congress that year; in the House of Representatives by Congressman John P. Saylorof Pennsylvania and in the Senate by Hubert Humphreyof Minnesota. Howard Zahniser was the main proponent of the Wilderness Act through the next eight years that it took to pass the legislation.
Howard Zahniser died of heart failure on May 5, 1964, just four months before PresidentLyndon B. Johnsonsigned the Wilderness Act into law that September.
The purpose of the 1964 Wilderness Act was to “secure for the American people the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.” The act required the federal land agencies to review all of their lands that might meet the Wilderness Act’s requirements and submit recommendations to Congress by 1974. Once an area was legislatively added to the wilderness system, the agency was bound by law to protect it as wilderness in perpetuity.
The Forest Service tried to define wilderness as only the most pristine and untouched wild lands—what we called “rocks and ice” to leave all the good timber available for cutting. The Wilderness Society, working closely with local wilderness advocates, advanced an alternative, pragmatic vision for the future of the wilderness system that took into account the potential healing over time of minor man-made scars for all the wilderness legislation that followed. That position, advocated by Ernie Dickerman and Doug Scott, was ultimately adopted by the Congress and made eastern wilderness possible.
When the Wilderness Act was passed,9.1 million acres were immediately designated as wilderness, all managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The National Wilderness Preservation System now spans 111 million acres in some 760 areas in 44 states and Puerto Rico.
Slide 39 (Alaska)
The largest single contribution to the Wilderness System by acreage came during the presidency ofJimmy Carter, in which I served as the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in charge of the Forest Service. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act that he signed in December of 1980—and I was in the audience in the East Room of the White House--added 56 million acres of wilderness to the system and protected 100.7 million acres of national parks, forest reserves, and wildlife refuges as well.
Slide 40 (Mardy)
Among the first to advocate for the protection of the Alaksan wilderness were Olaus and Mardy Murie. I met Mardy at her home near the Tetons in Wyoming.
Slide 41 (Alaskan river)
We’re talking about this kind of Alaska wild country—surely worth fighting for to protect!
Slide 42 (Obama)
President Barack Obama signed into law the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 that designated 52 new wilderness areas and added acreage to 26 existing areas. On March 12 of this year, President Donald Trump signed into law the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act that added another 1.2 million acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System.
Slide 43 (map)
A 111-million-acre National Wilderness Preservation System is a landmark accomplishment by the American conservation movement, yet only about 2.7 percent of the contiguous 48 states—an area about the size of Minnesota—is protected as wilderness.
Slide 44 (Maine)
Now, just for fun as a kind of postscript, I’ll provide a little personal history. As a teenager, I experienced wild ocean coastline as a kitchen boy at the National Audubon Society’s camp on an island off the Maine coast (in 1951),
Slide 45 (lookout)
as a Forest Service lookout in a national forest in northern Idaho in 1952 (this cabin was burned down a couple of years ago),
Slide 46 (RC Alaska)
and as a Fish and Wildlife Service stream guard on a bay in Katmai National Monument in Alaska in 1953. So I got the wilderness bug early on.
Slide 47 (JFK)
As a National Wildlife Federation employee I attended President Kennedy’s 1962 White House Conference on Conservation speech in which he said,” I’m hopeful that we can move far faster in the more traditional kinds of conservation—the wilderness bill [and] the [land and water conservation] fund we have set up for the maintenance of the conservation resources.”
Slide 48 (SMB)
And as a member of Stewart Brandborg’s Wilderness Society staff team from 1965 to 1969, I was able to help implement President Kennedy’s call for the protection of “wide-open spaces.” I hosted local grass roots activists when they came to Washington for subcommittee hearings on the wilderness bills--helped them find lodging, meet with their representatives and senators and key members of the subcommittees, and write their hearing statements.
As you may recall, the Wilderness Act not only directed the Forest Service to review its remaining primitive areas. It required the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service to review all their lands for wilderness potential within ten years after the Wilderness Act passed. We on The Wilderness Society staff tried to make sure the Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service met this tight deadline and be ready with our own boundary recommendations when those agencies completed their reviews of candidate areas and scheduled public hearings.
Slide 49 (Cutler and McGuire)
My imprint on wilderness policy continued when I became President Carter’s Assistant Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1977. (I had been an assistant professor of resource development at Michigan State University prior to my presidential appointment.) I served on the While House task force that drafted the Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act, taking care to see that Admiralty Island, Misty Fiords, and Copper River Delta were included in that legislation as Forest Service-administered national monuments.
Between 1977 and 1980, I initiated and oversaw a review of the entire 193-million National Forest System for wilderness-designation opportunities. That review recommended allocations of all the “roadless” lands to wilderness or other “multiple uses.” This was the agency’s second Roadless Areas Review and Evaluation, or RARE II. It identified 62 million national forest acres as roadless. We proposed that 15 million acres be classified as wilderness and that 36 million acres be released for other “multiple uses,” leaving 11 million acres in a “further planning” status.
These recommendations and the RARE II roadless areas inventory became the basis of a long series of congressional acts that added hundreds of national forest areas to the wilderness system. It is still being used today, here in Virginia and elsewhere, as the process of adding areas to the wilderness system continues.
Designation by Congress of an area as Wilderness is not enough, however, to ensure its protection. Stewardship by federal staff and volunteers is essential to ensure the protection of “wilderness character.
Slide 50 (people do)
Citizen wilderness advocates continue to have an important role to play. As this Arizona Wilderness Coalition slogan says so well: “Designations don’t protect wild places – people do.”
Slide 51 (LBJ signing Wilderness Act)
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964, a major legislative victory for those of us “who cannot live without wild things.”
Some of the best words in books are found in their Forewords. Here is an example about wilderness from Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac:
“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot…. Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free….”
Only deep and passionate love and understanding of wilderness and wildness can protect the National Wilderness Preservation System.
I’ll conclude this review of the national wilderness preservation campaign by quoting Howard Zahniser closing a speech he called “Wilderness Forever.” Zahnie was talking about the frustrating campaign to win passage of the Wilderness Bill, but his words speak to us today as well:
“We should never lose heart. We are engaged in an effort that may well be expected to continue until its right consummation, by our successors if need be. Working to preserve in perpetuity is a great inspiration. We are not fighting a rearguard action, we are facing a frontier. We are not slowing down a force that inevitably will destroy all the wilderness there is. We are generating another force, never to be wholly spent, that, renewed generation after generation, will be always effective in preserving wilderness. We are not fighting progress. We are making it. We are not dealing with a vanishing wilderness. We are working for a wilderness forever.”
I salute the Virginia Wilderness Committee for its effective work in carrying on the torch, lit so many years ago, to protect our remaining wild lands!
Slide 52