The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation

Introduction A Public Intellectual for Conservation

 1 introduction A Public Intellectual for Conservation We should leave behind a land where those yet unborn will have an opportunity to hear the calls of loons and come to know that they are more glorious than any whir of motors. William O. Douglas, “America’s Vanishing Wilderness,” (1964)1 In the middle of summer 1964, thousands of Americans opened up the most recent copy of Ladies’ Home Journal to find “America’s Vanishing Wilderness.” Sandwiched between articles on choosing paint for home decoration and the continuing importance of homemakers, “America’s Vanishing Wilderness” tackled an issue of increasing public significance— preserving the country’s natural heritage. Written by a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, the article hardly seemed typical reading for the popular domestic magazine.2 In his feature, Justice William O. Douglas described dire threats to America’s natural world. Tragically, Douglas explained, the environment through which Lewis and Clark had traveled no longer existed. No longer could Americans enjoy free-flowing, clean rivers, because dams blocked them and sewage poured untreated into streams. Grasslands, once six feet high, now had been trampled underneath thousands of hooves, never to recover. Diverse eastern hardwood forests lay reduced by loggers and bulldozers. We have lost wild nature, Douglas explained, and with that loss an uncertain future beckoned. “A boy or girl should have the opportunity to grow up in the Daniel Boone, Thoreau or Muir tradition—learning about survival in the woods, ridding the mind of fear, filling the heart with affection for all the mysteries of the forests, acquiring reverence, wonder and awe for all the handiwork of the Creator,” Douglas implored. Wilderness built character, after all. With so much wilderness already gone and so much more currently threatened, Douglas wanted readers to be aroused to action. His relentless list of threats—to rivers, to sand dunes and seashores, to forests—represented the significance and breadth of the menace of modern society to wilderness values. Douglas wanted his readers to know that nature stood in jeopardy.3 His was not just a negative message; the justice did not simply leave readers with a ghastly list of polluted rivers, endangered parks, and hopelessly degraded ecosystems. Believing that “[u]gliness is not an 2  Environmental Justice inevitable cost of modernity,” Douglas suggested ways Americans could slow, halt, or even reverse these devastating trends. Instead of “fighting rear-guard actions,” those who loved unspoiled nature needed “an overall plan … [that] drives as deeply into law as can be driven guarantees that precise areas will be kept as wilderness exhibits, now and forever.” Douglas pushed even further to advocate for constitutional guarantees to preserve wilderness, knowing such assurances would last longer.4 It was a momentous time for the wilderness movement. Just a few short months after “America’s Vanishing Wilderness” appeared, Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act. As Douglas had desired, the law instantly protected 9.1 million acres from roads and automobiles and vastly constricted or prohibited economic activities there; moreover, the act instituted a review process that would allow new wilderness areas to be added to the National Wilderness Preservation System, a system that today contains over 106 million acres. Moreover, even though the Wilderness Act empowered Congress to reverse wild designations, the cumbersome process made it far more difficult for wildlands to be desecrated by clear-cuts, subdivisions, or automobiles. The legislation represented the culmination of advocacy begun in the interwar era and intensely fought for since 1956. The new law grew out of a national, coordinated effort from the grassroots. Douglas had stood in the thick of these national wilderness politics for a decade, and he brought readers there with him.5 America’s natural heritage belonged to the public, Douglas preached. “These remote valleys belong not to the lumber companies and the few loggers and road builders who will profit from their destruction,” Douglas wrote, “but to all the people.” The public’s land, though, was vulnerable, because in July 1964 a government bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., could open up an existing roadless areas to all manner of despoliation, including logging, grazing, and construction. And even after the Wilderness Act passed in September which prevented those activities on millions of acres, bureaucrats controlled many millions more that could be opened to intensive extraction. To check those bureaucrats’ power and to promote wilderness preservation, Douglas suggested a strategy: We need Committees of Correspondence to coordinate the efforts of diverse groups to...