The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation

Chapter Three Toward a Wilderness Bill of Rights

58  chapter three Toward a Wilderness Bill of Rights The wilderness cannot be preserved against the pressures of population and “progress” unless the guarantees are explicit and severely enforced, unless wilderness values become a crusade. William O. Douglas, A Wilderness Bill of Rights1 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, William O. Douglas became a worldfamous traveler, writing accounts of “strange lands and friendly people” while commenting on social and political themes.2 By the late 1950s, he was traveling more at home, concentrating on wild areas and writing about conservation. In 1960, he published My Wilderness: The Pacific West, a book with profiles of eleven locales special to him that he had visited in recent years. From Alaska’s Brooks Range to Washington’s Glacier Peak to California’s Sierra Nevada, Douglas reported on his adventures, the natural history of each place, the threats to their ecology from economic activities like grazing and mining, and the beautiful delicacy of unspoiled nature. My Wilderness’ opening epigraph came from John Muir and declared: “In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and the wounds heal ere we are aware.” Five years later, A Wilderness Bill of Rights appeared. Rather than a celebration of natural beauty, this book chronicled a plethora of environmental problems and mismanagement by federal agencies. Justice Douglas ended the book with a call for a “wilderness bill of rights” that would promote an ethical relationship between people and nature through a massive reform of the legal structure. Instead of Muir, Douglas this time quoted President Lyndon B. Johnson in his epigraph: For over three centuries the beauty of America has sustained our spirit and enlarged our vision. We must act now to protect this heritage. In a fruitful new partnership with the states and cities the next decade should be a conservation milestone. We must make a massive effort to save the countryside and establish—as a green legacy for tomorrow—more large and small parks, more seashores and open spaces than have been created during any period in our history. … We will seek legal power to prevent pollution of our air and water before it happens. chapter three: Toward a Wilderness Bill of Rights  59 The differences between the two volumes and their epigraphs were emblematic of the changing nature of American conservation in the early 1960s and Douglas’s position within that transformation. From a preservationist’s hopeful celebration of the wild to a president’s focus on immediate threats and legal protections, these books—and the movement—evolved toward concerted and consistent calls for political action, responding to both continuing threats and a shifting American polity. More than any national figure, Douglas conveyed these changes to a public eager to work for nature.3 The first few years of the 1960s were a dizzying time for the emerging environmental movement and for Douglas. Both accelerated their efforts at building a strong national constituency who sought permanent legislative changes to protect nature. To a remarkable degree, they succeeded. The wilderness movement coordinated a national campaign to secure passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 after eight years of near-constant lobbying and negotiating. In the meantime, Rachel Carson shocked readers by publishing Silent Spring in 1962, an exposé warning the public of science run amok and poisons ubiquitous in the world. And civil rights advocates and student activists riveted the nation’s attention, calling for an end to discrimination and greater participation in civic life for all Americans. So, along with the many other reform discussions filling the air in the decade, environmental protection occupied a notable place—not least because Douglas took seriously his role as a public intellectual for conservation, his reputation furthered by his recent hikes for the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal and Olympic Beach. In his numerous speeches, articles, and books, he engaged and educated the public about ecology, threats to special places, and the importance of reforming political and administrative processes. Rather than adhering to any strict ideological approach to wilderness or other environmental concerns, Douglas embraced a flexible, pragmatic, and evolving perspective on environmental protection, a position that mirrored much environmental activism at this time.4 My Wilderness: Nature Celebration, Ecology Lessons, and Wilderness Politics When Douglas walked off the Olympic Beach in 1958, the secretary of agriculture could have stricken every last acre of designated wilderness or primitive areas within the national forest system with a...