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2. Speaking for Wilderness
- University of Washington Press
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43 2 / Speaking for Wilderness F ew ideas have a more storied history in American environmental thought than wilderness. Henry David Thoreau, the ascetic author, naturalist, and thinker, explored the wilds of New England, retreated to Walden Pond, and famously proclaimed, “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”1 John Muir, the popular nature writer, excited the nation’s passion for wild lands with books like My First Summer in the Sierra. He helped found the Sierra Club in 1892, served as its president until his death, and led a national campaign to protect Yosemite National Park. His cathedral was the soaring peaks of the Sierra Nevada, which he described as the “Range of Light.”2 Aldo Leopold, forester , hunter, philosopher, and writer, first proposed protecting wilderness areas in 1921. His masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac, has become a touchstone in environmental thought.3 Howard Zahniser, the Wilderness Act’s champion and executive director of the Wilderness Society, celebrated wilderness as part of the community of life. There are many others, including Mary Austin, Ansel Adams, Edward Abbey, David Brower, and Olaus and Mardy Murie. Each was a formative thinker and activist on behalf of wilderness protection. Another name should be added to this list: Stewart Brandborg. He succeeded Howard Zahniser as the Wilderness Society’s executive director, taking the organization ’s helm in the summer of 1964, just before the Wilderness Act became law. Brandborg was a bear of a man: tall, handsome, deep voiced, and devilishly charismatic. He could give a busy taxi cab driver reason to care about wilderness and he could hold the attention of a senator on a street corner. His personality was magnetic, drawing activists in, inspiring them, and sending them home with a sense of personal and public purpose. Brandborg himself was evidence of the broad appeal of wilderness, even in the rural West. He grew up in a small logging town south of Missoula, Montana, and his father worked as the forest supervisor of the Bitterroot National Forest. He spent his summers fishing, hiking, and hunting, experiences that would steel him for the fights ahead.4 Brandborg joined the Wilderness Society’s staff as Zahniser’s assistant speaking for Wilderness 45 in 1960 and for the next twenty years was a central pillar in the national wilderness advocacy community.5 Unlike Leopold or Zahniser, who spoke with eloquence and passion about the values of wilderness, such rhetoric was never Brandborg’s hallmark. His contribution was an evangelical faith in the role of citizen activists in protecting the nation’s wilderness. In the late 1960s, the Wilderness Society measured success not only by the acres of wilderness saved but also by the number of wilderness activists trained. To meet Wayne Aspinall’s requirement that each new wilderness area be approved by Congress, the Wilderness Society re-created itself as a catalyst 2.1 Stewart Brandborg, executive director of the Wilderness Society between 1964 and 1976, in Canyonlands National Park. Photograph by Clif Merritt, August 1965. Courtesy the Wilderness Society. 46 chapter 2 to a growing citizens’ movement for wilderness protection. Thousands of Americans took part in the agency wilderness reviews required by the Wilderness Act in the 1960s and 1970s, surveying potential wilderness areas in the field, attending wilderness advocacy training programs in local communities and in Washington, D.C., and testifying at agency hearings and before congressional committees. This strategy laid the foundation for a coordinated model of wilderness advocacy, in which both the Wilderness Society’s leadership and the contributions of citizen activists were essential. For people like Doug Scott, Helen Fenske, Dave Foreman, Bart Koehler, and Bob Hanson—several of whom have made their life’s work protecting the public lands—this was the beginning. The new political energy raised many questions about which public lands should be designated wilderness. The Wilderness Society did not take its work as an opportunity to champion a narrow vision of what wilderness might be. Instead, a growing wilderness movement consolidated a more expansive and flexible vision of wilderness within the environmental community, the federal government , and, ultimately, Congress. By 1976, Congress had acted to establish 108 new wilderness areas and, at the behest of citizens, often protected more and a greater variety of land—from swamps to mountains to small islands—than recommended by the federal land agencies. The Wilderness Society’s approach to advancing its agenda between 1964 and the mid-1970s is notable for two reasons: First, the Wilderness Act...