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CHAPTER 5 Wilderness as Regional Plan: Benton MacKaye Benton MacKaye was a visionary. His innovative synthesis of conservation and regional planning made him one of the most important and imaginative environmental thinkers of the early twentieth century. He was also a perceptive social critic whose environmental thought was informed by concerns about labor and community stability. Not only did MacKaye help to craft the modern wilderness idea, but the Appalachian Trail, which he first proposed in 1921, remains an important model for recreational preservation. Few people have had as great an influence on the landscape of preserved open space in America. Yet MacKaye has been one of the most danced around characters in the American preservationist tradition, a figure who resists categorization precisely because his commitment to wilderness grew amid an intellectual polyculture of forestry, labor activism, democratic socialism, and regional planning. These are commitments that scholars are not used to seeing allied. MacKaye is also frustrating to assess because so many of his ideas either failed to materialize or did so in divergent ways. To some extent, these mixed results can be chalked up to the Achilles’ heel of planning: strong visions usually require centralized power for their realization. To MacKaye’s credit, he scrupulously avoided the use of such power in the planning process. Whenever possible, he incorporated democratic and decentralized models of implementation, hoping to foster a structured pluralism. The Appalachian Trail (AT) provides a case in point. Its completion in less than two decades was a remarkable example of what can be achieved when a vision is diffused among a group of loosely organized workers. But the transformation of MacKaye’s vision into a completed trail came at the expense of certain 142 prominent aspects of his broader regional plan, and his disillusionment with those developments fed directly into the formation of the Wilderness Society. As this chapter will show, wilderness was an idea that MacKaye came to while defending his AT vision against the perils of partial completion. There are other reasons why environmental historians have neglected MacKaye’s thought, some of them quite understandable. His writing was dense and, as his career progressed, increasingly abstract. He possessed neither the literary ability of Aldo Leopold nor the charisma of Bob Marshall . He often worked in isolation, and he never saw his ideas achieve the vogue of those of his colleague, Lewis Mumford. He lacked his friend’s skill for self-promotion and the ego that drove Mumford to be so prolific. MacKaye’s environmental thought also was imbued with a technological optimism that appears odd in retrospect. He, like many of his contemporaries, invested considerable hope in technologies such as hydroelectricity and the automobile to solve problems of urban concentration , congestion, and the culture’s drift from nature.1 He also had a deep faith in national planning, and in the power of planners and other technical experts to achieve the public good. These commitments lost their political luster in the postwar era, as Americans grew suspicious of government planning and as the very technologies and planning agencies MacKaye had believed in emerged as the bane of the environmental movement. Finally, his environmental thought had a social substrate that suspended it between conservation politics and the politics of social reform.2 For all of these reasons, MacKaye has not fit easily within the pantheon of preservationist heroes. Fortunately for MacKaye, environmental historians have turned a critical eye in recent years on the criteria that have defined that pantheon. This process has cleared ground for the emergence of figures such as MacKaye, who mixed social and environmental agendas. Indeed, one cannot fully understand the origins and content of Benton MacKaye’s wilderness thinking without grasping the planning context and social critique in which it was embedded. One goal of this chapter, then, is to describe his unique brand of social conservation and to see how it evolved over time. That said, MacKaye’s career also suggests that there were serious obstacles to integrating environmental and social reform. Those obstacles did more than litter his intellectual path to the wilderness idea. They defined it. 143 Wilderness as a Regional Plan: Benton MacKaye The Making of a Social Conservationist The roots of Benton MacKaye’s wilderness advocacy reach back, ironically , to a career and body of thought that had little to do with preservation . He was born in 1879, the son of well-known actor and playwright Steele MacKaye. Although they lived mostly in New York City, the...

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