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Alice Zahniser took this photo of her husband during a two-week canoe trip down the Allegheny River in June 1937. Courtesy of Friends of Allegheny Wilderness. PART 2 Transition to The Wilderness Society 44 | Part 2 In 1945, when Zahniser accepted the position of executive secretary of The Wilderness Society, the organization was just ten years old. Dedicated to protecting expansive stretches of roadless country, primarily in the national forests and in the backcountry of the national parks, the Society was born during the heyday of the New Deal. Some of the jobs created by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration —through the Civilian Conservation Corps, Public Works Administration, and other federal programs—involved building roads along the high crest of the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia, and New England . These roads often intruded into remote and primitive lands prized by local hiking clubs. The Wilderness Society was created out of the resulting clash and from the determination of hikers and wildlife observers to protect their most valued walking paths from cars and roadways. The new organization, as described in the bylaws, sought to “promote nation-wide cooperation in resisting the invasion of such wilderness by the sights, sounds, and other influences of civilization . . . which clash seriously with the primeval environment.” In 1946, Zahniser spoke at a public hearing held by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which was planning to build dams along the Allegheny River. As he had grown up in a house only a few blocks away from the river, the river and surrounding hills had been his boyhood playground. In 1937, one year after his marriage, with Alice pregnant with their first child, the couple had spent two and a half weeks on a canoe descending the Allegheny. Zahniser believed that the Allegheny River valley ought to be cherished for its scenery and primitive landscape and urged that it be kept intact as a “wilderness belt,” a term conceived by forester and landscape architect Benton MacKaye, one of The Wilderness Society’s founders and a member of its governing council. ON THE ALLEGHENY RIVER Testimony I have been told that all who come to Warren and go on up the Allegheny River to study the area around Kinzua go away with the impression: “It’s too bad to have to do anything with such a beautiful valley.” And that, I understand, includes engineers and many others whose reason for visiting the area is to see what CAN be done to this valley. I too say it is too bad to have to do anything with it, but if something must be done I wish to Transition to The Wilderness Society | 45 suggest some important values to have in mind when choosing between the alternatives. I speak as the executive secretary of The Wilderness Society, a nationwide , nonprofit, nonpolitical organization with headquarters in Washington , DC, and also as one who has known and enjoyed this valley since boyhood. We of The Wilderness Society believe—with the support of an increasing number of Americans throughout the country—that the more natural an area is the greater is its stability and long-time value to its inhabitants. Our prime concern as a society, our distinctive interest, is in preserving the remnants of the American wilderness free from all artificial developments, but we believe also that on all natural areas the artificial measures should be held to a minimum. In this fine, still highly natural valley of the upper Allegheny we would say, adopt only an absolutely necessary program of change and then hold the artificial measures in such a program to a minimum. Personally I would recommend that the proposed detailed navigation survey be made and that it include careful attention to the recreational values of this area. There are not many valleys like this upper Allegheny left in the United States. For those who know it, it has a great sentimental value. Some men are at times likely to call sentimental values impractical and to substitute for them what they call “practical” considerations. Yet men fight to preserve their sentimental values, fight and die for them, and to the nation their service in so doing is a highly practical thing. There is something practical too about recreation. The strains of our high-pitched civilization are such that the provisions for recreation in natural areas are becoming more and more a matter of social concern. As individuals we know already the tonic values of getting away...

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