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7. Epilogue: A Living Wilderness
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239 Epilogue: A Living Wilderness Modern wilderness emerged as a new preservationist ideal during the interwar years because of the profound changes wrought by the automobile , road building, a growing leisure-based attachment to nature, and a federal government increasingly willing to fund recreational development on the nation’s public lands. The founding of the Wilderness Society , which was triggered by New Deal developments but had its roots in the 1910s and 1920s, represented the coalescence of individual concerns about these forces. As such, it was an important moment in the history of the American environmental movement. But it was not a simple moment , for the founders brought to the new organization unique experiences and varied perspectives that shaped their wilderness thought. The wilderness idea that would guide the Society’s political future, and that eventually found legislative validation in the Wilderness Act of 1964, had to be negotiated. “One of the greatest obstructions to progress today in all land causes,” Robert Sterling Yard wrote to Benton MacKaye in October 1934, “is the difference in meaning conveyed by essential words.” Yard had just received the news from Bob Marshall of the Wilderness Society’s provisional formation, and he was pleased to be among the founding members . But he also had reservations about the term “wilderness”; he preferred “primitive.” As Yard understood it, wilderness and primitive were kindred concepts, but they were not synonyms. “Not all wilderness is primitive,” he wrote, “but all primitive is wilderness.”1 Both primitive and wilderness were terms with multiple meanings, even among this small group of advocates. For Yard, the defining characteristic of wilderness was that it was roadless and otherwise uninvaded by the sights and sounds of modernity. Primitive nature, on the other hand, was synonymous with primeval or pristine nature. A large roadless area could be second growth, selectively logged, or grazed; it could be wilderness, in other words, without being primitive. But a primitive area could not be affected substantially by such processes, or by roads for that matter. Because his advocacy was still strongly shaped by national park standards, Yard hoped to make preservation of the primitive the primary focus of the new organization. Indeed, just months before, he had proposed to John C. Merriam that they form an “Organization to Preserve the Primitive.”2 For Yard, wilderness was a concept that was useful primarily as a sanction against recreational development and the political, commercial, and rhetorical abuses that came with it. He wanted both sorts of preservation, but he privileged the primitive. Not all of the founders agreed with Yard’s priorities, let alone his definitions . Like Yard, both Leopold and Marshall thought that wilderness was largely defined by roadlessness, but both adhered to a definition that also required substantial acreage. In other words, not all primitive, as Yard used the term, was wilderness; smaller untouched areas, though deserving of preservation, did not qualify as wilderness for reasons of scale. Here again was the major difference between the preservation of natural conditions proposed by ecologists and wilderness preservation. Because Leopold and Marshall valued recreational solitude, the ability to lose touch with modern civilization, such scale was an essential part of what they sought to preserve. But beyond this, they did not concur with Yard about what the word primitive meant. In his letter to MacKaye, Yard had mentioned that some people used the term primitive to describe areas in which “people entering them would have to travel in a primitive way.” Leopold, Marshall, and MacKaye all made such a quality central to their advocacy. For them, primitiveness was a recreational rather than an ecological condition. As this wrangling about terminology suggested, providing a precise definition of what they sought to preserve was not an easy task for the founders of the Wilderness Society. In the simplest sense, the founders wanted to protect both large, roadless areas and areas of relatively pristine nature. Ideally these would come in the same package, but the founders would also seek the preservation of these qualities separately, though with an emphasis on roadlessness. That they chose to call themselves the Wilderness Society reflected this emphasis. But their choice of the word wilderness was also a pragmatic one. They needed to settle on a single term with political resonance, and wilderness seemed the best 240 Epilogue: A Living Wilderness 241 Epilogue: A Living Wilderness option. It was a concept with which Americans were familiar, and it did a better job in highlighting what was distinct about...