Death Valley National Park: A History

3. Changing the Meaning of Desert

46 The 1960s were a heady time for the National Park Service. Mission 66 had finally given the agency the facilities to accommodate the tremendous growth in tourism that followed World War II. Because of a divergent set of forces, the National Park Service began to move in new management directions. Two significant changes— the gi Bill that trained so many specialists at the college level and two reports, the Leopold Report on the condition of wildlife in the park system and the National Academy of Sciences or Robbins Report—compelled a new vision of National Park Service management.1 In a way never before possible, the agency embraced science as a guiding administrative force, its people focusing with renewed vigor on resource management as a core mission. In the late 1960s, American culture began to change its perspectives on the question of the environment. Support for environmental protection had been building since the early twentieth century, but as late as 1968, environment, conservation, and ecology did not register on the Brooking Institution’s assessment of problems facing the new Nixon administration; the following year, the environment became the leading concern of the respondents in that survey. This transformation reflected the enormous change in US society wrought by postwar prosperity and its power to transform social expectations. Along with the demographic transformation caused by the “baby boom,” this prosperity created an enormous population with ideas and values that altered national society at every stage of life. The idea of a “quiet crisis” in the environment, in Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall’s phrase, and a strong pull away from material prosperity at all costs led to new questions concerning the environment. A much stronger emphasis on preservation, on resource protection from any kind of use, resulted. c h a p t e r 3 Changing the Meaning of Desert c h a n g i n g t h e m e a n i n g o f d e s e r t 47 This was very different from the conservation that marked the early twentieth century, for its focus was aesthetic as much as cultural. Despite the National Park Service’s long involvement with preservation, it was uncomfortable with some of the new movement’s goals.2 Designated wilderness became a measure of the National Park Service’s discomfort with the environmental revolution. When it came time to apply the Wilderness Act of 1964 to Death Valley, the idea of wilderness became a dominant concern, for its impact on the regional population and for the limitations it placed on nps discretion in management. Unlike any preceding environmental legislation, the Wilderness Act permitted the reservation of land for a single purpose . Wilderness designation required stringent management and limited administrative prerogative to the least-intrusive tool for the job, in most cases eliminating motorized travel and equipment. The National Park Service had not been enthusiastic about the passage of the Wilderness Act, because its regulations made park-level management more difficult and managers complained about the law’s inflexibility. At the same time, the wilderness concept was extremely popular with the public, albeit often in a symbolic fashion.3 Wilderness required a legislatively mandated review process that had the complicated effect of making wilderness of places that park planners had previously ignored. Because the statute required roadlessness as a prerequisite, only areas of more than five thousand acres that remained undeveloped qualified for federal wilderness assessment. Although of all federal land-management agencies the National Park Service’s mandate most closely resembled the goals of the Wilderness Act, the agency initially balked at ceding discretion of its backcountry. The agency soon discovered that designated wilderness offered advantages. Wilderness designation of lands beyond its boundaries could insulate national parks from the clutter that often surrounded them. Even more, adjacent wilderness provided a permanent viewshed for national park areas, protecting an important asset with little direct agency investment.4 This seemed particularly true at Death Valley, one reason the agency recognized wilderness designations there as an asset for monument managers. New mining claims in surrounding areas remained a real threat to its aims, and lands adjacent to Death Valley and other park areas posed an ongoing threat that had the potential to affect resource management. As every superintendent beginning with Theodore R. Goodwin had noted, the desert had the potential to change very rapidly. The number of inholdings, the possibility of new mining claims, and countless other potential intrusions...