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1. The Problem of the Wilderness
- University of Washington Press
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CHAPTER 1 The Problem of the Wilderness In October 1934, the American Forestry Association (AFA) held its annual meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee. Among those on the program was a young forester, then working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), named Bob Marshall. Marshall had distinguished himself as a strident critic of the timber industry and federal forestry policy. His 1933 book, The People’s Forests, made a forceful case for socializing the nation’s industrial timberlands. Yet among certain attendees of the AFA conference, Marshall was better known for a 1930 article, “The Problem of the Wilderness,” in which he called for the “organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness.”1 Benton MacKaye, a forester and regional planner who was living in Knoxville and working for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) at the time of the AFA meeting, had read and been moved by Marshall’s plea. Indeed, MacKaye was confronting his own problem of the wilderness. In 1921, he had proposed a visionary plan for “an Appalachian Trail.” Although his trail was nearing completion by 1934, it was threatened by a series of federally funded skyline drives being planned for and built along the Appalachian ridgeline.2 MacKaye and a number of his supporters were busy organizing a protest against these incursions, and they were eager to talk with Marshall about their efforts. They had their opportunity when, on October 19, Marshall joined MacKaye, Harvey Broome, and Bernard and Miriam Frank for an all-day field trip to a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp outside of Knoxville . The AFA had arranged the trip to give conference-goers a sense of the profound changes occurring in the upper Tennessee Valley. Broome knew the region well. He was a Knoxville lawyer and a leading member of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club, one of the groups most important to the construction of the Appalachian Trail (AT) in the South. Bernard 3 Frank, newer to the region, was a watershed management expert on the TVA’s forestry staff and, as Broome would later recall, “a genius at reading the landscape.”3 As the group drove north toward Norris Dam in the Franks’ car, they discussed forming the sort of organization that Marshall had proposed in 1930. In fact, they had broached the idea during a brief visit Marshall had made to Knoxville two months earlier, and in the interim someone—probably MacKaye—had drafted a constitution that became the focus of discussion during the drive. As the conversation became more animated, the group decided to pull over and get out of the car. They clambered up an embankment by the side of the road—“between Knoxville and Lafollette somewhere near Coal Creek,” Broome would later remember—and there they agreed upon the principles of what was to become the Wilderness Society, the first national organization dedicated solely to the preservation of wilderness. It was in just such a setting that the founders felt most keenly what Marshall had called “the problem of the wilderness.”4 The Wilderness Society’s roadside creation was rich with symbols of the founders’ motivating concerns. Foremost among those concerns were the road and the car. The group had come together to define a new preservationist ideal because of a common feeling that the automobile and road building threatened what was left of wild America. Wilderness, as they defined it, would keep large portions of the landscape free of these forces. And yet, despite their flight from the Franks’ car, a gesture evocative of their agenda, they could not escape the fact that, literally as well as figuratively , the automobile and improved roads had brought them together that day. The very conditions that had prompted their collective concern for protecting wilderness had also enabled their concern. That paradox gave wilderness its modern meaning. The larger setting was also of symbolic import: the roadside caucus occurred in a region being transformed by New Deal capital and labor. The unprecedented federal mobilization of resources in the name of conservation was a promising development to these advocates, most of whom had long argued for a greater (and often more radical) federal commitment to environmental protection. Yet New Deal conservation work projects , particularly by emphasizing road building and recreational development , threatened wilderness as these activists defined it. Indeed, the New Deal represented the climax of a two-decade-long effort to modernize the public lands for motorized recreation. These New Deal developments precipitated the founding of...