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101 I n the fall of 1971, Michael McCloskey took the podium at the Sierra Club’s Twelfth Biennial Wilderness Conference. It was the first time the prestigious gathering had been held east of the Mississippi. For three days, hundreds of professional conservationists, government employees, congressional staffers , and citizen activists convened in the fancy halls of the Washington Hilton Hotel, not far from Capitol Hill. The theme of the conference was “Action for Wilderness,” but McCloskey, the Sierra Club’s executive director, had come to ask, “Is the Wilderness Act working?”1 His answer was no. Despite the swell of citizen activism across the nation, the booming interest in wilderness recreation , and a growing environmental movement, McCloskey described the wilderness movement as at a “crossroads.” He warned: “the movement to save America’s surviving wilderness is in decline at the very moment that enthusiasm for the environment has reached an all-time high.”2 The most immediate problem was the slow progress expanding the wilderness system. In 1971, seven years into the ten-year reviews, Congress had added only 33 of 179 potential areas to the wilderness system. Together, they amounted to 1.4 million acres, a small fraction of the 53 million acres scheduled for review. In public, McCloskey blamed the “agonizingly slow pace” of the ten-year reviews on the long process of reviews, hearings, and legislative action Congress required for each area.3 But, in private, McCloskey faulted Stewart Brandborg’s citizen-oriented and pragmatic strategy for the Wilderness Act.4 Where Brandborg saw each new wilderness area, such as San Rafael, Isle Royale, and Great Swamp, as setting important precedents for an expansive wilderness system, McCloskey saw nit-picking over minor boundaries that slowed the review process. Where Brandborg saw a citizens’ movement that empowered individuals, McCloskey saw a tediously slow and inefficient process that would “exhaust” the wilderness movement’s “energies.”5 And where Brandborg saw an increasingly pragmatic and coherent approach to wilderness 4 / New Environmental Tools for an Old Conservation Issue 102 chapter 4 designation, McCloskey saw a movement increasingly devoid of “any momentum and unity of focus.”6 Behind those specific concerns, McCloskey had grander visions for the future of wilderness. By 1971, the future of the “roadless areas” had taken center stage in discussions of wilderness politics. Initially, when wilderness advocates discussed roadless areas, they referred specifically to places like the Alpine Lakes and the Dolly Sods, which were outside the scope of the Forest Service’s ten-year reviews. But events in the early 1970s thrust a much broader set of roadless areas to the forefront of wilderness politics. Wilderness advocates began to work actively to expand the wilderness reviews beyond the initial ten-year reviews to include all eligible public lands managed by the federal land agencies: the vast expanses of Alaska, from its coastal rainforests to the steppes of the Arctic coastal plain; the national forest land that remained roadless and undeveloped nationwide; and the public domain overseen by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which stretched from the mountainous deserts of California to the canyon country of Utah to the sagebrush country of eastern Oregon. The wilderness movement had deferred efforts to protect these lands in the 1960s for fear of antagonizing western politicians and the resource industries. Many advocates hoped to press their political advantage in the wake of Earth Day. McCloskey was unsure how well that strategy would work. As he put it in 1971, “in the context of the new environmental movement”—one preoccupied with pollution, population, and pesticides—“wilderness preservation appears to many as parochial and old-fashioned.”7 McCloskey was a careful observer of the changing landscape of American environmental politics in the afterglow of the inaugural Earth Day. He sensed that the surge of popular interest and environmental legislation had changed both the issues and the strategies at the heart of American environmentalism. McCloskey saw the wilderness movement as a whole, and the Sierra Club in particular, poised between a past rooted in the conservation movement and a future hitched to the rising star of American environmentalism. He questioned if “the new environmental enthusiasts would rally to another major campaign to save America’s wilderness.”8 But Stewart Brandborg read the events surrounding Earth Day differently. In the early 1970s, Brandborg saw the emerging environmental movement as a catalyst for the Wilderness Society’s citizen campaigns for wilderness. He remained steadfast in his focus on citizen activism and wilderness protection. Neither...

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