The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation

Chapter Two Roads to Protest

 31 chapter two Roads to Protest When roads supplant trails, the precious, unique values of God’s wilderness disappear. William O. Douglas, My Wilderness: The Pacific West.1 It was an automobile age and a time of widespread conformity. In the 1950s, most Americans did not expect people to protest the building of roads. And certainly they did not anticipate a Supreme Court Justice walking nearly two hundred miles on one occasion and almost thirty miles of rugged wilderness beach on another to rally support against highway construction. But in 1954 and 1958, William O. Douglas took his reputation to the public through two notable protest hikes, one on each coast. He acted on his conviction that roads destroyed something special about a place. Although not a new idea or a particularly radical position, that Douglas took the issue to the public suggested a new day was dawning both in his own activism and in the conservation movement at large. If his carefully crafted image created the public identity of a rugged outdoorsman, then these hikes formally launched Douglas on his path as a public intellectual and activist for conservation. Wilderness politics transformed in the 1950s from a struggling and quiet movement to a nationally important and conspicuous one. Justice Douglas advanced that transformation with two protests that captured media attention and made the need for wilderness apparent and public. The hikes targeted roads, those most sacred symbols of the automobile age and the constant bane of wilderness advocates.2 Along the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal in suburban Washington, DC, and the Pacific Beach in Washington State’s Olympic National Park, Douglas led groups of hikers who favored trails over roads, hiking over driving, and the unique values of wilderness over mass recreation. In the process, the justice made his outdoor pastime a political act and became a leading public spokesperson for wilderness. Prelude to Protests Douglas certainly did not start from scratch; prominent environmental protests enjoyed a history going back at least five decades in the United States. The justice and his allies learned lessons from earlier protests, 32  Environmental Justice employingsuccessfulstrategiesandadaptingtochangingpoliticalstructures and circumstances. Although seldom acknowledging these roots, Douglas acted within an evolving tradition of conservation activism. From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1950s, American conservationists evolved in myriad ways in how they challenged and shaped official policies. Understanding that critical context improves our understanding of these early Douglas hikes. Despite deep nineteenth-century roots, conservation achieved its first real institutional success at the turn of the twentieth century. Historian Samuel P. Hays has argued that the conservation movement represents an exemplary case of modernization in which centralization gradually triumphed over localism with decisions made further from the grassroots by a limited number of experts. As American politics and economics became more specialized, government gained greater control over the structures of American life, a tendency toward a more closed political system. As part of the progressive strain of liberalism, conservation sought to regulate. The conservation movement’s heart lay in efficient management of resources and that meant reducing economically wasteful practices, developing natural resources for profit, and establishing government agencies to safeguard public resources. Gifford Pinchot, the nation’s chief forester and most noted conservationist, famously characterized conservation as working for “the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.” Such a perspective left room for critics who found much missing in such a materialist philosophy or who wished to define the greatest good or the greatest number in alternative ways. Whereas the U.S. Forest Service might manage forests or the Reclamation Service might tap rivers for irrigation, some conservation critics thought certain lands deserved less intensive management or development. For them, nature’s best use sometimes was simply to be enjoyed in a wild state or with recreation as the chief economic use.3 These differences collided famously in Hetch Hetchy Valley, a portion of Yosemite National Park. San Francisco wanted a source of public water that would supplant that of the city’s private water supplier and cast its eyes on the Tuolumne River running through Hetch Hetchy Valley. Led by famed naturalist John Muir, many citizens criticized the choice as anathema to the park’s higher purposes. Favoring the valley undammed on aesthetic grounds, Muir and his allies, often called preservationists, mobilized the public as best they could to stop the dam plans. Advocates also envisioned Hetch Hetchy Valley as a premier tourist ground and often suggested hotels, campgrounds...