Remaining True to the Intent of Wilderness

(Editor's Note: The following speech was delivered by Michael Frome, one of our conservation giants. See his bio at the end of his speech)


“Remaining True to the Intent of Wilderness”
Keynote address of Michael Frome, Ph.D.
Utah Environmental Congress
Salt Lake City, Utah, November 13, 2004


I welcome your invitation to speak on “Remaining True to the Intent of Wilderness,” a subject, or theme, or purpose, that has meant much to me for many years, and I appreciate being identified in the program as “author, educator and tireless champion of all things wild and free.” I hope that I may be able to live up to the billing.

Simply stated, I believe that wilderness is the heart of the American ideal, that those slender, choice fragments of earth still wild, mysterious and primeval nourish the soul and spirit of the nation and its people. That we have set aside these special places is known throughout the world; wilderness preservation as part of our way of life makes a far better and more welcome calling card to other nations than all the armed might we can muster and release abroad.

I remember expressing this idea when I spoke at a symposium on wilderness at Utah State University on Earth Day 1990. What I said was:

“The time is long overdue to apply the principle of stewardship, real stewardship, to our entire planet, with public lands in the United States as the exemplars. Society should have its choices, but one choice should be wilderness, whether embodied in a single plant or a great virgin forest, whether a desert or a mountain, a California condor, grizzly bear, or spotted owl, but that image is possible because somewhere the image exists in fact. There can never be enough of it.

“I see wilderness as sanctuary of the spirit, the heart of a moral world governed by peace and love. Nuclear weapons will never force nations to join in recognizing the limitations of a fragile earth. Stealth bombers and Trident submarines cannot bring people together as brothers and sisters caring for each other in our common destiny. We should give up the illusion of military solutions and redirect funding to constructive humanitarian purposes. Let us commemorate Earth Day 1990 with yet a new beginning on a broad front, and pledge allegiance to a green and peaceful planet.”

To say it another way: The very idea of wilderness enriches my body, mind and spirit, but it also elevates me to look beyond my own wants and needs. The American tradition has sought the transformation of resources; materialism prevails as the dominant paradigm. But there is more to America and its people than manufacture, merchandise and marketing. Nature, unspoiled, opens avenues of discovery, exploration, healing, spiritual enrichment and growth to us all. The Wilderness Act stimulates a fundamental and older tradition of relationship with resources themselves. A river is accorded its right to exist because it is a river, rather than for any utilitarian service. Through appreciation of wilderness, I perceive the true role of the river, as a living symbol of all the life it sustains and nourishes, and my responsibility to it.

This concept was suggested to me the first time I read about the Wilderness Act. It was in the New York Times of May 15, 1956. In the column headed simply “Conservation,” John B. Oakes reported that Senator Hubert Humphrey, of Minnesota, was sponsoring a new bill to establish a national wilderness preservation system. "The idea is certainly worth exploring," Oakes wrote, "if what is left of our country in a natural state is worth saving, as many of us believe it is." He outlined the problem as follows: "This isn't just a question of city folks seeking outdoor recreation, or enjoying spectacular scenery, or breathing unpoisoned air. It goes much deeper; it springs from the inextricable relationship of man with nature, a relationship that even the most insensitive and complex civilization can never dissipate. Man needs nature; he may within limits control it, but to destroy it is to begin the destruction of man himself. We cannot live on a sterile planet, nor would we want to."

John Oakes was voicing a viewpoint deeply rooted in American culture and history, manifest in earlier days through the works of William Bartram, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, John J. Audubon, George Catlin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Muir felt uplifted and exalted in the wild sanctuary: Wilderness to him was an expression of God on earth -- the mountains, God's temples; the forests, sacred groves. In our own age the idea was beautifully expressed by Ansel Adams, the celebrated photographer: “Here are worlds of experience beyond the world of aggressive man, beyond history, beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the relations of great art are difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.”

These lofty expressions have come from statesmen, too, statesmen of both major political parties. One hundred years ago Charles Evans Hughes, Republican governor of New York and later chief justice of the Supreme Court, declared at the dedication of Palisades Interstate Park: “Of what avail would be the benefits of gainful occupation, what would be the promise of prosperous communities, with wealth of products and freedom of exchange, were it not for opportunities to cultivate the love of the beautiful? The preservation of the scenery of the Hudson is the highest duty with respect to this river imposed upon those who are the trustees of its manifest benefits.” In Maine, Governor Percival Baxter, the son of a wealthy family, found in Mount Katahdin the gift he wished to give with his own money to the people of Maine. By stipulating that the area “forever shall be held in its natural wild state,” Governor Baxter passed on his understanding of the need for wild places in modern civilization. “The works of men are short-lived,” he declared on November 30, 1941. “Monuments decay, buildings crumble and wealth vanishes, but Katahdin in its massive grandeur will forever remain the mountain of the people of Maine. Throughout the ages it will stand as an inspiration to the men and women of this State.”

Attainments in preservation, as in any manifestation of ethics and idealism, do not come easily. In the case of the Wilderness Act, fruition came after eight years of discussion and debate by the Senate and House of Representatives, and after eighteen separate hearings conducted by Congressional committees around the country. The bill was rewritten time and again, passed in the Senate, then bottled up in the House. The very idea of legitimizing wilderness was aggressively opposed by the timber industry and by the oil, grazing and mining industries. The National Park Service and Forest Service opposed it, too: The public may own the land, but the administrators prefer to exercise their own prerogative without sharing decision-making authority. But the people, all kinds of people, rallied to the wilderness cause. The very effort surrounding passage makes the Wilderness Act impressive as a statement of national purpose. For it plainly evoked the feeling of countless individuals throughout the country -- and likely throughout the world -- who would speak for wilderness if given the chance and would say that natural islands within our expanding civilization are essential to the spirit of humankind.

I think of the campaigners for the Wilderness Act as true patriots. Howard Zahniser, the principal author and advocate of the Wilderness Act of 1964, was studious, articulate and compassionate. "We are not fighting progress," Zahniser said. "We are making it. We are not dealing with a vanishing wilderness. We are working for a wilderness forever." In 1956 Representative John P. Saylor of Pennsylvania introduced the Wilderness Bill in the House of Representatives. In many ways he was a conservative Republican. Nevertheless, for eight years Saylor led the uphill legislative battle and never gave up. In 1961, when the going was tough, he declared: “I cannot believe the American people have become so crass, so dollar-minded, so exploitation-conscious that they must develop every last little bit of wilderness that still exists.”

I was privileged to be on the scene in those years and years to follow and to know the principals like Saylor and Zahniser and to write about their activities and about the issues. I was lucky to know Arthur Carhart, David Brower, William O. Douglas, Margaret Murie and Harvey Broome, they and others who should not be forgotten. I remember Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, as one of the courageous conservationists in Congress, recalling in particular the battle over reclassification of the old Idaho Primitive Area as the River of No Return Wilderness, when Senator Church conducted hearings in different sections of Idaho, and people who had never spoken publicly before stood up and responded to him, opening their hearts in praise of an area larger and wilder than Yellowstone. The designation of this great area as the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness certainly is a deserved recognition of Senator Church’s service to his own state and the nation.

My favorite heroes of this period are my own breed, writers who were activists, like Sigurd Olson, Richard Neuberger, Wallace Stegner, Paul Brooks and Bernard DeVoto, and a little later Edward Abbey, and journalists, notably John Oakes, a champion of wilderness, civil rights and all good causes, who rose to be editor of the editorial page of the New York Times. I knew and worked with able scientists, like John and Frank Craighead, the experts on the grizzly bear, and with committed wilderness advocates in the federal agencies, like Bill Worf, a public servant who never quit, establishing the wonderfully constructive organization Wilderness Watch after he retired. A pal of mine, Tom Kovalicky, when he was supervisor of the Nezperce National Forest in Idaho, took me into the wilderness and lectured me on what it was all about: "You get away from your tradition and lifestyle in a wilderness and you find out in a heluva hurry who you are and what you're capable of, what are the real issues in life. What really frightens you will come to the surface. Wilderness is my lifestyle. Wilderness is necessary. It represents that part of America that once was and always will remain. Wilderness is forever. We don't have to be like the Europeans. We don't have to wish for that type of land representation. We'll have it." I think also of the late Paul Fritz. He was a feisty, stocky New Yorker, who came west to study landscape architecture at Utah State University, worked for a time for the Forest Service, then transferred to the National Park Service. In 1966 he was placed in charge of Craters of the Moon National Monument, a striking Idaho landscape of lava fields studded with cinder cones. Disregarding bureaucratic admonitions in his own agency, he gained support from local communities and environmental groups for the Craters of the Moon wilderness, established in 1970 as the first national park unit added to the National Wilderness Preservation System. Following his retirement, Paul came to many meetings like this one – I vision him in the audience cheering me on – and contributed money to good causes like the Utah Environmental Congress.

I like to think the wilderness cause appeals to the best in people, and to the best people, who give of themselves with commitment and compassion, like Dick Carter and Margaret Pettis, who have made the country conscious of the special qualities of the High Uintas. Stewart Brandborg, who succeeded Howard Zahniser as executive director of the Wilderness Society following Zahniser’s death and who served in that capacity for fifteen years, and Brock Evans, a longtime leader of the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society and the Endangered Species Coalition, have been close friends of mine for forty or fifty years. I daresay that efforts to remain true to the intent of wilderness have rewarded me greatly in lasting, treasured friendships.

Martin Litton, who spoke at the Utah Environmental Congress last year, has also been a friend of mine for fifty years, possibly even longer. Martin was a journalist, working for the Los Angeles Times and then for Sunset magazine before becoming a river runner operating his famous dory trips on the Colorado, Green, Snake and other rivers of the West. In 1952 Martin wrote a series of articles critical of the dams proposed in Dinosaur National Monument here in Utah. David Brower in San Francisco read that series and was greatly impressed. Brower had lately become the Sierra Club’s first full-time executive director and subsequently was largely responsible for converting an essentially social organization devoted to outdoors play and pleasure into a force for conservation activism. Brower invited Martin to join the Club and made him a member of the board of directors. Working together with other citizen groups, they scored a major triumph in saving Dinosaur National Monument. Many years later Martin told me, “If we hadn’t believed in ourselves, we never would have stopped the dams in Dinosaur. If we had believed in ourselves enough, we would have stopped Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River.”

There is a great lesson there. Brower’s genius lay in his clarity of purpose. It wasn’t so much that he believed in himself but that he believed in his cause. In 1966 I was at a forum at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon considering whether the Colorado River flowing far below us should be dammed. The Bureau of Reclamation had all the power that comes from pork barrel politics. The Secretary of the Interior, Stewart L. Udall, was one of the conservation heroes of the period, but nowhere near infallible. He was a principal advocate of the proposed dams on the Colorado River and of environmentally destructive power development in the Southwest. The Sierra Club had actually endorsed the dams in the Grand Canyon. “The knowledge of the directors was so fuzzy and thin,” Martin Litton told me later, “they didn’t even know where the Grand Canyon was.” Brower was unfazed. At the rim of the Grand Canyon he argued fervently that the Colorado River should not be defaced and degraded. Martin Litton was present there, too, and was very active in opposing the plans of the Bureau of Reclamation. The following year, 1967, without consulting the board, Brower took an advertisement in the New York Times comparing damming the Colorado River with flooding the Sistine Chapel. That advertisement stirred the nation. Saving the Grand Canyon was an absolutely monumental achievement. Stewart Udall said, “The Sierra Club didn’t save the Grand Canyon, the American people did.” Maybe so, but it was Brower who lit the torch and mobilized America. He was always creative and daring, no mountain too high to climb, no battle of principle too tough to fight.

I want to cite one other case history of defeat turned into victory. In 1966 the National Park Service chose the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina-Tennessee as the site of its first proposal for wilderness designation under the Wilderness Act of 1964. It was a terrible plan, designed to destroy rather than defend wilderness, but it too seemed like a done deal, with all the political power behind it. Harvey Broome, of Knoxville, Tennessee, however, felt otherwise. He was my friend and mentor. He earned a law degree at Harvard and had a successful law practice, but he was committed to the work of the Wilderness Society, of which he was one of the founders and subsequently president. So he accepted a job as clerk to a judge with the understanding he would be allowed time off when needs of the Wilderness Society required it. With his right-hand man, Ernie Dickerman, Harvey led in mobilizing defense of the Great Smoky Mountains. Newspapers from the New York Times to the Portland Oregonian responded with powerful editorials; thousands of citizens wrote letters demanding better stewardship from the National Park Service. It took six years but ultimately the agency withdrew its horrendous anti-wilderness plan.

Looking back, I remember environmental leaders of forty or fifty years ago as missionaries. Those people gave us broad shoulders to stand on: like Brower, the most militant and effective of his day, and like Zahniser, who drafted the Wilderness Bill, creating reality out of a dream. I’m sorry to say that in the years since then I have watched various leaders of national environmental organizations change from missionaries to corporate CEOs. Brower, later came back to the Sierra Club as a member of the board of directors, but in May 2000 resigned out of frustration. “The world is burning and all I hear from them is the music of violins,” he declared. “The planet is being trashed, but the board has no real sense of urgency. We need to try to save the earth at least as fast as it’s being destroyed.”

In my book he was right as rain: We still are subject to Nero’s fiddling while Rome and the world burn. Something has happened between then and now. In 1985 the National Audubon Society, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society all were shopping for new executive directors. Those organizations were at mid-life, facing marked transformation from volunteer efforts to business enterprise. They didn’t look to grassroots wilderness campaigners for their new executives. No, all three engaged professional search companies, specifying that they were looking for leaders strong in fund raising, finance and budget; they wanted management specialists – and were willing to pay high prices for them. These and other national environmental organizations, I fear, have grown away from the grassroots to mirror the foxes they had been chasing. They seem to me to have turned tame, corporate and compromising, into raging moderates replacing activism with pragmatic politics, and a willingness to settle for paper victories.

It grieved me deeply four years ago to read a statement by a Wilderness Society representative calling the new management plan for Yosemite National Park “an elegant balance between park protection and visitor use and enjoyment.” It sickened me when this plan clearly would turn Yosemite Valley into a pricey crowded commercial resort benefiting above all the park concessionaire and other corporate interests. Likewise, it distressed me to learn that national environmental organizations actually endorsed the proposed giveaway of 272 acres of the Kaibab National Forest at the gateway to Grand Canyon National Park for construction of 1270 hotel rooms and 270,000 square feet of retail mall shopping, the equivalent of four large department stores. Our public agencies, the Forest Service and National Park Service, have lost their way. They want to think of themselves as “marketers” of mass recreation as a commodity, building “partnerships” with commercial interests, the bigger the better, and treating the public as “customers.” Environmentalists need to bring the agencies back on track as resource stewards in committed public service.

The leadership now in wilderness preservation, as I see it, comes from Wilderness Watch, a wise and courageous outfit that remains true to the intent, and from Wild Wilderness, run by Scott Silver as a one-man band in Bend, Oregon, and from grassroots groups like the Utah Environmental Congress. The good old Wilderness Society, if you ask me, is weak and worn out, content with paper victories while wilderness is endangered.

These indeed are tough and trying times. We need to sound the alarm and to alert the public to the “new” face of wilderness bills in Congress, highly questionable pseudo-wilderness proposals, like the Owyhee Initiative and the Boulder-White Clouds in Idaho and the Lincoln County (Nevada) Conservation, Recreation and Development Act. When you read of conservation, recreation and development in the same package, you can bet your bottom dollar that wilderness protection will come last and least. Those bills include harmful trade-offs, giving away more wilderness and public land than they protect; they bypass environmental laws with dangerous new precedents privatizing public lands for the benefit of commercial developers, favoring the use of motorized equipment inside wilderness, releasing large and significant areas from wilderness study, and with legislative negotiations conducted behind closed doors. That isn’t right and it is not in the best interest of the country.

We should not allow the mismanagement of our public lands, whether in wilderness or not, for public lands are the heart and body of the West, and maybe the soul too. Public lands are the source of Western art, literature, history, and mystery, the mystery of people trying to relate to the earth around them, failing at times, and falling, picking up to try again. Take away the public lands from the environs of Albuquerque, Boise, Denver, Salt Lake City, Portland and Seattle, and they would be the most ordinary of places. Take away the public lands and there wouldn’t be much to the economy either. Public lands are the last open spaces, last wilderness, last wildlife haven. Without public lands the West would be an impoverished province.

Maybe the most important role of the public lands is to safeguard wilderness. Wilderness is at the core of a healthy society. Wilderness, above all its definitions, purposes and uses, is sacred space, with sacred power, the heart of a moral world. Wilderness preservation is not so much a system or a tactic, but a way of understanding the sacred connection with all of life, with people, plants, animals, water, sunlight, and clouds. It’s an attitude and way of life with a spiritual ecological dimension.

The best defense clearly is an aware, alert and involved public. Yes, these are hard times, especially following the recent election. There may be room for gloom, but not for doom. Two weeks before the election I received a lovely letter from my close friend Brock Evans. He had been afflicted three years ago with bone marrow cancer, which is usually fatal, but Brock refused to die and fought his way back. He wrote to me: “I am envious of the Brazil trip” – which June and I had just taken – “but your travels are reminders to not worry so much about the shadows still hanging out there after my brush with Eternity, and to just go on, savoring all the precious moments. After all, it is still a beautiful little planet, so worth saving; and we are the blessed generation, because it is given to us to fight to save it while there is still a lot left TO save; and we DO win a lot-- just look at those 220 million green protected areas on the map. So, I say, even if the worst happens in November, what are we going to do-- go home? No! We will stand and fight, as we have always done; we will bear witness and fight back, we cannot, must not, let our country be turned over to these fascistic plunderers.” Following the election I heard from another friend, Nathaniel P. Reed, who had been a high government official in a Republican administration and had done great work in the public interest. This is what he wrote: “Stay the course, head high. We must spread the word, educate, motivate and encourage change. It is going to be tough, but there is no other choice. “

To sum up: Shortly after Harvey Broome died in 1968, Representative John P. Saylor paid tribute to him on the floor of the House of Representatives with these words: “ We must resolve never to falter, as he never faltered, and to take inspiration from his life to fight all the harder for the future of the wilderness. His spirit knows no boundaries and will be with us in the years ahead.” Then Saylor went on to say he was proud to consider himself a fellow to Robert Marshall, Olaus Murie, Howard Zahniser, and Harvey Broome: “They were all great leaders,” he said, “for the saving of wilderness for our time, for all time. They have passed on, but their legacy falls to new leaders, as their spirit lives on.” Yes, their spirit lives on and the legacy is ours, yours and mine.

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Michael Frome, Ph.D., began his writing career as a newspaper reporter for the Washington Post. Over the years he has been a featured columnist in Field & Stream, Los Angeles Times, American Forests and Defenders of Wildlife. He has written eighteen books (including Greenspeak, Green Ink, Battle for the Wilderness, Chronicling the West and Strangers in High Places). After years as a journalist, he began a new career in higher education, training others at the University of Idaho, University of Vermont, Northland College and Western Washington University. He earned a doctorate in 1993 from the Union Institute and University (which in 1999 named him Outstanding Alumnus of the Year). He retired in 1995 from the faculty of Western Washington University, at Bellingham, Washington, where he directed a pioneering program in environmental journalism and writing, but continues to lecture at various institutions. He has received many awards and honors. Former US Senator Gaylord Nelson, of Wisconsin, said of him: “No writer in America has more persistently argued for the need of a national ethic of environmental stewardship.” He lives with his wife, June Eastvold, at Port Washington, Wisconsin.

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