the wilderness writings of howard zahniser

8/18/2019 The Wilderness Writings of Howard Zahniser

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William Cronon, Editor


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are reprinted editions of key worksthat explore human relationships with natural environments in all their varietyand complexity. Drawn from many disciplines, they examine how natural systemsa ect human communities, how people a ect the environments of which they are apart, and how di erent cultural conceptions of nature powerfully shape our senseof the world around us. These are books about the environment that continue too er profound insights about the human place in nature.

The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805–1910, by D. W. Meinig

Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aestheticsof the In nite, by Marjorie Hope Nicolson

Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, by Herbert Guthrie-Smith

A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement, by Mark Harvey

Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modi ed by Human Action,by George Perkins Marsh; edited by David Lowenthal

Conservation in the Progressive Era: Classic Texts, edited by David Stradling

DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism: Classic Texts, edited by Thomas R. Dunlap

Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film, by Gregg MitmanThe Environmental Moment, 1968–1972, edited by David Stradling

The Wilderness Writings of Howard Zahniser , edited by Mark Harvey

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics is a subseries within Weyerhaeuser Envi-ronmental Books, under the general editorship of William Cronon. A completelisting of the series appears at the end of this book.


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WILDERNESSWRITINGS

HOWARDZAHNISER

Edited byMARK HARVEY

Foreword by

Seattle and London


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PART 3 87A Statement on Wilderness Preservation 89How Much Wilderness Can We A ord to Lose? 95New York’s Forest Preserve and our American

Program for Wilderness Preservation 102

PART 4 111Our Wilderness Threats 112Protecting Our Wild Places at the End of the Road 118Letter to A. T. Steele 122Washington Monument in Echo Park 125

The Need for Wilderness Areas 127The Three Sisters Primitive Area: Testimony 138

PART 5 145The Wilderness Bill and Foresters 147Letter to the Editor, Washington Post and Times-Herald 154Lake Solitude Sermon 157An Exchange of Letters with C. Edward Graves 159Wilderness Forever 162

PART 6 171A Circle That Took Him In! 173Wildlands: A Part of Man’s Environment 180Guardians Not Gardeners 189The People and Wilderness 192

PART 7 197

Obituary, Washington Post 199Compromising the Wilderness, New York Times 199The Constant Advocate, by David Brower 200Letter from Harvey Broome 204

Excerpts from the Wilderness Act of 1964 209Selected Bibliography 213Permissions 217Index 219


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FOREWORD

A Great and Humble Man

It could hardly be more tting that this long-planned anthology, The Wil-derness Writings of Howard C. Zahniser , should be published just in timeto commemorate the ftieth anniversary of one of the greatest legisla-tive achievements in the history of American conservation. In 1964, aftereight di cult years of tireless lobbying by those who had advocated on itsbehalf, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law “An Act to Establish aNational Wilderness Preservation System for the Permanent Good of theWhole People.” This Wilderness Act, as it has come to be known, placed9.1 million acres of the wildest lands in the United States under permanentprotection so that future generations could forever experience them freefrom the mechanical intrusions of humanity. In the half century since,the National Wilderness Preservation System has grown to encompassmore than 100 million acres, and is among the proudest expressions of theAmerican love for nature and nation that has been a de ning feature of

the United States almost since its birth.More poignantly, this book also commemorates the ftieth anniversaryof the death of Howard Zahniser on May 5, 1964, just four months beforethe Wilderness Act became law. No one was more responsible for the pas-sage of the act than Zahniser. As executive secretary of The WildernessSociety for nearly twenty years, he persuaded nervous members of its Gov-erning Council that they could lobby for such a bill without endangeringthe organization’s tax-exempt status. He drafted the original language forthe legislation in 1956, and no hand was more important than his in the


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sixty drafts that followed as the bill worked its way through Congress.As editor of the Society’s quarterly magazine, the Living Wilderness, Zahn-iser recruited some of the best writers of the day to articulate the reasonswhy wilderness deserved legal protection, and penned not a few essays ofhis own toward that same end. When members of Congress wanted todeliver speeches on behalf of wilderness protection, he provided them withcompelling facts and eloquent words in equal measure. Famously stalk-ing Capitol Hill in a special suit coat whose many added pockets carriedthe brie ng documents he wanted near at hand to persuade recalcitrantpoliticians, he was a consummate lobbyist, a Washington insider whobrought quiet and tireless passion to the mission that became his lifework.

Although Zahniser did not live to see his great bill signed into law, the endwas clearly in sight at the time of his death.

We published Mark Harvey’s biography of this remarkable man in theWeyerhaeuser Environmental Books series in 2005. Wilderness Forever:Howard Zahniser and the Path to the Wilderness Act did a superb job of trac-ing the journey its subject made from his boyhood in Pennsylvania, to hisearly career as a federal bureaucrat, to his growing skills as an editor, to hisexecutive position at The Wilderness Society starting in 1945. What moststruck me after reading the book is that although Zahniser played such apivotal role in one of the great environmental success stories of the twenti-eth century, he remains virtually unknown among those who celebrate andenjoy the wild landscapes he did so much to protect. This is partly becausehe worked so much behind the scenes, as Washington insiders are oftenwont to do, but also because he had no particular need to place himselfin the spotlight unless doing so helped the cause of wilderness. Everyonewho knew him remarked on his self-e acing willingness to let others takecredit for achievements that were at least as much his as theirs. Although

he was a superb editor and writer, the essays he produced were more oftenthan not created to meet the needs of a particular moment and publishedin relatively ephemeral venues—magazines, newsletters, conference vol-umes, and the like—where they soon became hard to nd, even for thosewho knew and admired his special qualities as a writer and human being.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Zahniser’s untimely death at age fty-eight was that he never got to write the book that might have introducedhis literary gifts and his ideas about wilderness to a wider and more perma-nent circle of readers. One gets the sense from Mark Harvey’s telling that


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as the campaign for the Wilderness Act neared its climax in the spring of1964, Zahniser (who long su ered from heart problems) realized he mightnot live to see the end. In late April, he testi ed at the nineteenth set ofcongressional hearings about the legislation and reported to a friend after-ward that he was gasping for breath and soaked with sweat by the time he

nished. “The prospect for a post-wilderness bill controversy period ofbook writing doesn’t seem too good,” he lamented. “My best boast nowis that I am better than I ever will be.” A week later, he was dead from amassive heart attack.

Mark Harvey completed Wilderness Forever possessing an unsurpassedfamiliarity with the myriad pieces of prose that Zahniser scattered so far

and wide. After the biography had been shipped o to the stores, he andhis editors at the University of Washington Press realized that we had theperfect opportunity to follow it up with the book that Zahniser himselfhad never been able to complete. It could include what Mark judged to bethe best and most important of Zahniser’s essays so that his excellence as awriter might nally receive the recognition it deserves, along with an intro-duction and headnotes to help readers understand the contexts for whichthese pieces were written. The result is the volume you now hold in yourhands—the book that nally enables us to read an author that few of usreally know despite everything we heard about his historical signi cance.

Before this book, even those who recognized the name of HowardZahniser probably couldn’t think of anything he ever wrote, save perhapsfor the single most famous sentence in the 1964 Act: “A wilderness, incontrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate thelandscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its com-munity of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor whodoes not remain.” It has been noted before that this is probably the only

instance in the legal history of the United States where the word “untram-meled”—which means unshackled or unrestrained—occurs in a federalstatute. Its appearance in this crucial sentence testi es to the literary graceof the writer who chose it, just as Zahniser’s invocation of the “communityof life” suggests the moral vision of the devoutly religious man who sawwilderness as a repository for sacred values he held dear.

Harvey Broome, one of the founders of The Wilderness Society, madean entry in his journal in 1956 commenting on a piece of Zahniser’s writingand connecting it to the leadership that his friend was bringing to bear on


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PREFACE

My interest in Howard Zahniser originated in the early 1980s when I wasa graduate student in history at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.While working on research involving the controversy over the proposedEcho Park dam, I often found myself in the wonderfully rich sciencelibrary at the University of Wyoming, which held the back issues of theLiving Wilderness magazine that Zahniser edited for nearly two decades. Iquickly found myself drawn to the magazine for its arresting black-and-white images, lyrical prose, and the occasional piece by Zahniser himself.In perusing the Living Wilderness, and in reading a number of Zahniser’sletters that I unearthed in manuscript collections at the American HeritageCenter, I was struck by the high quality of his prose and intrigued by theman himself. His essays and letters were carefully crafted, always thought-ful, respectful of di erent points of view, yet still insistent that Americansshould treasure wild lands, recognize their beauty and ecological values,and commit to preserving them. Zahniser struck me as con dent withoutbeing cocksure, bold without being overbearing, and certain of his views,yet still humble.

More than two decades after leaving Laramie I published his biogra-phy, Wilderness Forever: Howard Zahniser and the Path to the Wilderness Act .Researching and writing that book gave me a deep and (to employ one of hisown favorite words) “rich” understanding of his upbringing, background,and career, as well as of his character and personality. Naturally I learnedmuch too about his crucial role in drafting, testifying, and shepherdingthrough the legislative process the bill that became the Wilderness Actof 1964. The most crucial phrase in that legislation, I learned, came fromZahniser’s own hand, that “a wilderness, in contrast with those areas where


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man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as anarea where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Along with the Wilderness Act, which is readily available in any num-ber of published works and websites, at least some of Zahniser’s otherwork can be found in books or in the publications of various conservationorganizations, including the Living Wilderness. Yet because Zahniser wrotemany essays and speeches for a variety of audiences and in specialized pub-lications, tracking most of them down would be a challenge. During theeight-year campaign on behalf of the wilderness bill beginning in 1956,Zahniser testi ed before nineteen congressional hearings and presented

statements to federal o cials from the U.S. Forest Service and ArmyCorps of Engineers. Virtually all of these writings, however, are deeplyburied in the printed copies of public hearings and reside in the govern-ment documents section of the library.

Because much of his written and spoken work is not easily found, itwas clear to me after writing his biography that the next step was to bringtogether in a single volume Zahniser’s best writings and speeches alongwith a few select letters. My goal with this anthology has been to reassem-ble the great body of Zahniser’s important written and spoken work andbring it to the attention of the present generation of wilderness enthusiasts,agency o cials, nature writers, environmental historians, and students ofwilderness history in the United States.

I am certain that each of the documents in this anthology speak asmuch to us today as they did when Zahniser rst wrote them, and that wehave just as great a need to read and think about the case he advanced forwilderness now as did people in the middle twentieth century. Taken as awhole, they make clear his own view that wilderness has much to o er to

humans, including physically challenging adventure, spiritual inspiration,and gaining perspective on life. He insisted, too, that wilderness preserva-tion demonstrated stewardship of humans toward the natural world andwould remind people of the community of life on the planet.

I have organized the anthology chronologically and in seven sections.Part I provides samples of his earliest published writings, mainly fromNature Magazine , in which he began a monthly column in 1935. His rst yearof that column focused on seasonal changes in the natural world, mainlyin terms of animal behavior, and re ected his association with scientists at


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the Bureau of Biological Survey as well as his own delight with the naturalworld. This section also includes three of his radio broadcasts from the late1930s, when he touted the federal government’s programs in wildlife man-agement and wildlife refuges. Part II showcases his initial work editing andwriting in the Living Wilderness, for which he took major editorial responsi-bility in 1945. This section reveals his fondness for certain wilderness areas,including Cloud Peak and the New York Forest Preserve, and also containshis earliest essays articulating the value of wild lands. One essay in this sec-tion was written by Zahniser’s close friend, Paul Schaefer, who introducedhim to the Adirondacks in the 1940s, and who many years later recalledtheir hike to Hanging Spear Falls in 1946. Part III includes several pieces in

which Zahniser expanded the case for wilderness and warned that unlessstrong steps were taken, much of the American wilderness would soon belost. The documents in Part IV outline various threats to wilderness fromroads, commodity industries, and dams. Parts V and VI include essays,speeches, and a few letters revealing Zahniser’s crucial role in crafting thewilderness bill and in pressing federal agencies and members of Congressto support it. The e ort to gain congressional passage of the wilderness billpreoccupied him during the last eight years of his life. There seems littledoubt that the stress and strain of lobbying for the legislation contributedto his early death from heart failure in May 1964, just four months beforePresident Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law. Finally,part VII includes obituaries and personal testimonies of Zahniser’s life andwork. An excerpt from the Wilderness Act concludes the volume.

Preparing the essays, speeches, and letters for publication entailedonly a few minor editorial changes. Because Zahniser wrote and spoke forso many di erent audiences, he often employed the same phrase or pas-sage in several di erent pieces. I have eliminated this repetition with the

occasional use of ellipses. I also imposed uniformity in capitalization andpunctuation throughout. My introduction to each essay, speech, and letterfurnishes the setting in which it was crafted.

Moorhead, Minnesota

April 2014


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Warm thanks go to Charles Harris, editor of Natural History Magazine ,for permission to reprint several of Zahniser’s columns and an article fromNature Magazine . The Wilderness Society granted permission to reprintnumerous essays and photographs originally published in the Living Wil-derness, the quarterly that Zahniser edited. Thanks also to American Forests for permission to reprint a piece rst published in 1957.

Bill Cronon has been an enthusiastic supporter of this project for along time. I am particularly grateful to Bill for keeping the faith that thisanthology would one day appear during some very challenging years inthe publishing industry. Marianne Keddington Lang has contributed tothis book in more ways than I can say. She took a rather unruly digital le

of material scanned from the originals and smoothly converted it into areadable Word document with which I could easily work. Marianne thenkept me on task collecting photographs, tracking down permissions, andmeeting deadlines. I did not meet every one of them, but I am grateful forher rm hand on the tiller throughout the process. It was a pleasure towork with Lita Tarver, whose vibrant enthusiasm for the book I deeplyappreciate and whose skill greatly enhanced the text.

As they did when I undertook the writing of Howard Zahniser’s biogra-phy a decade ago, members of the Zahniser family have strongly supportedme in preparing this book. To Mathias, Karen, Esther, Edward, and theirwonderful mother, Alice, my heartfelt thanks. Ed cheerfully answeredevery one of my questions and served as spokesperson for the family, grant-ing me permission to republish several of the articles and photographs.

Putting the nal touches on this project reminds me of the importantrole of my parents, William and Dorothy Harvey, in my own wildernessupbringing. Each of them cherished their times hiking, canoeing, andcamping in Glacier Bay, Grand Teton, and Glacier National Parks, near

the arms of Yellowstone Lake, and in the High Uintas Wilderness Area innortheast Utah and the Jedediah Smith Wilderness Area on the west sideof the Teton Range. They took me with them on some of those treks andhelped me discover at a young age what a treasure the American wildernessis. Although they are no longer with us, I like to think that they would bepleased with this book and with the lands and values that it celebrates.

My own immediate family has been of tremendous help as well. It isimpossible to thank Gretchen for all that she does for me every day and forsharing the fruits of her own scholarship and teaching. Together with our


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grown sons, William and James, we have built our own wilderness tradi-tions and prize our wilderness outings. Those outings serve as a reminderto me that wilderness is not merely a place of natural beauty and wonderbut also a landscape of shared memories of families and friends. HowardZahniser, of course, knew that too, as many of the essays and speeches thatfollow reveal.


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Howard Zahniser in the Adirondacks about1960. Courtesy of the Zahniser family.


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INTRODUCTION

Evangelist for the Wilderness

Howard Zahniser was an o ce man who spent the bulk of his workinghours at the headquarters of The Wilderness Society in Washington,DC. For almost twenty years, from 1945 until 1964, he sat at a desk andpoured over an immense body of printed material involving wilderness inthe national forests, parks, and other public lands. He read Forest Servicewilderness maps and reams of correspondence from fellow conservation-ists, scrutinized the essays of authors who contributed to the Living Wilder-ness, the Society’s quarterly journal, and scanned memoranda from federalo cials, members of Congress, and their sta . His life and work centeredon words, on writing and editing and publishing, all of it directed towardprotecting the nation’s wild lands. To be sure, his desk work t him well.He loved language, puns, wordplay, books and libraries, and the companyof almost anyone who appeared at his desk. A gentle, bespectacled man,Zahniser was the consummate working professional. Most days he enjoyedhis work immensely, especially when it gave him the opportunity to col-

laborate with writers, artists, poets, and others who contributed to the Living Wilderness, which he edited for almost two decades.But Zahniser also worked under tremendous strain, especially during

the last eight years of his life when he led a national movement to securepassage of a bill to establish a national wilderness system. That e ortembroiled him in political and economic complexities and pressures,entailed numerous appearances at public hearings, and compelled himto hold countless meetings with agency o cials, members of Congressand their sta , and fellow conservationists. He often became weary of the


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whole business and yearned to be in the wilderness. In addition to spend-ing time in his family’s getaway cabin in the Adirondacks, he took himselfinto a wilderness area at least once every year to the annual meetings ofthe governing council of The Wilderness Society. There, he rediscoveredhow being in the wild brought restoration, healing, and refreshment ofbody and soul. His friend and fellow wilderness lobbyist Sigurd Olsonhad articulated those e ects eloquently in an essay in 1938. Recalling hisexperiences guiding people by canoe into the boundary waters area ofMinnesota and Ontario, Olson concluded:

They have long days with nothing to clutter their minds but the simple

problems of wilderness living, and at last they have time to think. Thencomes the transformation and, of a sudden, they are back to earth.Things move slowly, majestically in the wilds and the coming of the fullmoon in itself becomes of major importance. Countless natural phenom-ena begin to show themselves [and] with this, some of the old primitivephilosophy works itself into their thinking, and in their new calm theyforget to worry. Their own a airs seem trivial. . . .

Whenever it comes, men are conscious of a unity with the primalforces of creation and all life that swiftly annihilates the feeling of futil-

ity, frustration, and unreality.

Zahniser appreciated Olson’s description every time he got away fromWashington and into the wilderness. In the summer of 1956, with his wifeAlice and their children in the Cloud Peak Primitive Area in Wyoming’sBig Horn Range, he awoke early. “As I looked through the open aps of mytepee tent that morning, alone,” he wrote:

I wakened to a world of wilderness so bright, so lovely, so peaceful thatits exquisite quiet was itself so exciting that I could hardly keep fromdisturbing it myself. The air was still. The lake was smooth. The roar ofwaterfalls from the surrounding high and immense cli s of mountainrock was a background of sound so constant that at rst it must haveseemed itself an aspect of the quietness. As I lay there, inspired to wor-ship, the words from some Psalm came to my mind: “Great peace havethey which love thy law.”


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Howard Zahniser’s wilderness writings may be less known than thoseof Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and AldoLeopold, but his articles, essays, and speeches left a signi cant mark onAmerican wilderness thought. As executive secretary of The WildernessSociety, editor of the Living Wilderness, and book columnist for NatureMagazine , Zahniser contributed a distinctive voice to the growing publicinterest in wildlands in the United States. In his role as editor and chiefadministrator of The Wilderness Society, he defended the nation’s fragilewilderness areas before o cials of the US Forest Service and National ParkService, agencies skeptical of and often opposed to wilderness protection.He defended wilderness against lawmakers intent on authorizing dams,

highways, and other developments that could intrude into wild places.From his front row seat in the arena of wilderness protection after WorldWar II, he saw that the case had to be made to the broadest audience possi-ble through riveting prose, photographs, poetry, lms, and art. He directedhis writing and speaking to that end.

Zahniser’s written and spoken work reveals his love of the Englishlanguage. A scholar of Thoreau and president of the Thoreau Society, heread widely among poets and in works of literature, history, and naturewriting. His love of reading and writing had been nurtured by his parentsat an early age.

Born in Franklin, Pennsylvania, on February 25, 1906, Zahniser grew upin small towns in the northwestern part of the state. He spent his formativeyears in Tionesta in a home three blocks from the great Allegheny River,where he found rich opportunities for exploration and play. He shed andplayed baseball on an island at the con uence of Tionesta Creek and theAllegheny, and the woods and hills surrounding Tionesta o ered hide-aways and trails for exploration and adventure. The Allegheny River had

long been used to transport logs and oil, yet it remained a waterway ofstriking natural beauty and a haven for birds and many wildlife species.The river and its valley became Zahniser’s primary nature school, instill-ing in him a lifelong love of rivers and their natural and human histories.From teacher Evelyn Spencer, who conducted a Junior Audubon Societyprogram for Howard and his fellow fth graders, he learned to recognizelocal bird species by sight and sound.

Howard’s father, Archibald, was a Free Methodist minister and, later,district elder. His mother, Bertha, was a devoted Christian who helped


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instill in young Howard and his brother and sisters a love of books andstories. He much enjoyed family reading sessions at home, and he especiallyrelished books about travel, exploration, and the work of Christian mis-sionaries among native peoples overseas. His upbringing in a home infusedwith the precepts of Free Methodism (four of his uncles were ministers ofthe church) made him ever mindful of obligations and responsibilities towork for social justice, to build communities, and to take care of nature.He attended Greenville College in rural Illinois, a small private schoola liated with the Free Methodist church, graduating in 1928 with majorsin history and English.

In 1930, Zahniser took a civil service position as an editorial clerk in

Washington, DC, and began to make his way into the federal bureaucracyby the strength of his pen. In the division of publications in the Depart-ment of Commerce, he learned how to write press releases, speeches, radiobroadcasts, and other promotional material and how to edit and proof-read. He also kept alert for opportunities that were more attuned to hisinterests in literature and nature studies. His friend and former Greenvilleclassmate Paul Oehser, an editor at the Smithsonian National Museum,helped him nd such a position in 1931 at the Bureau of Biological Survey, adivision of the Department of Agriculture that undertook wildlife studiesto serve farmers and ranchers, state sh and game departments, hunters,and scientists. In 1939, the Survey was folded into the newly created Fishand Wildlife Service, where Zahniser remained until 1942. Throughoutthose years, he issued a steady stream of news releases, reporting on thegovernment’s activities in wildlife research and especially its role in man-aging wildlife refuges. He wrote speeches for the Survey’s directors, andcomposed radio broadcasts, which he delivered on the nationally broadcastFarm and Home Hour .

In 1942, Zahniser left the Fish and Wildlife Service to take a positionin the Bureau of Plant Industry. The new position gave him a substantialupgrade within the federal pay scale, enabling him to support his elderlywidowed mother who had remained in the family home in Tionesta. In hispublic relations work at the bureau, in the midst of World War II, Zahn-iser publicized the Victory Gardens campaign to encourage Americans togrow their own food and contribute to the war e ort, seeking to reach alarge public audience and a range of people interested in agriculture andgardening.


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By the mid-1940s, Zahniser had worked for fteen years as an editor,writer, and publicist of conservation and agricultural programs and poli-cies. Secure in his civil service position and with a respectable salary, hewas satis ed and comfortable. He and his wife Alice had a son, Mathias,and two daughters, Esther and Karen (a second son, Edward, was born in1945), and a home in a Washington, DC, suburb. Then, in 1944, Zahniserheard about a position with a small nonpro t known as The WildernessSociety, an organization established to promote the preservation of thenation’s wildlands. He had joined the organization as a charter memberin 1935. The Wilderness Society was led by Robert Sterling Yard, whoseeditorship of its agship magazine, the Living Wilderness, had been vital to

the organization. By 1944, Yard’s health was in serious decline, leaving theSociety’s governing council anxious and in search of a successor, someonewho was an experienced editor, writer, and publicist and who preferablylived close to Washington, DC. Following a luncheon with several mem-bers of the Society’s executive committee at the Cosmos Club in Wash-ington, DC, Zahniser was o ered the job. While he was intrigued by theposition, which combined nature writing, editing, and publishing, he nev-ertheless felt some trepidation, for it would mean a substantial reductionin salary and it did not include a retirement plan. Leaving the civil servicesystem to join a small nonpro t organization seemed a daunting prospect.

Still, after much re ection and consultation with friends and fam-ily, Zahniser decided that he had been preparing for the position at TheWilderness Society all of his life. His editing experience tted him forthe position, and he sensed that he could draw from his upbringing in aminister’s family in the Allegheny River Valley to lead an organizationdedicated to protecting America’s wild places. Now, he would have anopportunity to preach and proselytize for wilderness. In the spring of 1945,

with full support from Alice, Zahniser accepted the position of execu-tive secretary of The Wilderness Society and editor of the Living Wilder-ness. Editing the magazine could itself have constituted a full-time job.In addition, Zahniser conducted Society business, built its membership,arranged the annual meetings of its governing council, communicatedand met with members of Congress, federal agencies, and conservation-ists in Washington and elsewhere, and generally served as spokespersonfor wilderness preservation.

Zahniser’s partner at The Wilderness Society was Olaus J. Murie, a


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well-respected wildlife biologist and, like Zahniser, a longtime employeeof the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Biological Survey. Murie’s workincluded research on caribou in Alaska and elk in Jackson Hole. Hired atthe same time as Zahniser in 1945, Murie was the Society’s executive direc-tor, responsible for overseeing the organization’s major initiatives and plan-ning its strategy. He lived at a small ranch in Moose, Wyoming, with hiswife Mardy and half brother Adolph, who had worked closely with Olausin studying coyotes, wolves, and predator prey relationships.

Zahniser soon became highly respected within The Wilderness Societyfor his attention to detail, his e ciency, and his competence. Even as hefelt the pressing demands of his administrative tasks, he was eager to write

and speak for the wilderness cause. Along with his own contributions tothe Living Wilderness, he published essays in National Parks Magazine andAmerican Forests , and he wrote a monthly column for Nature Magazine. Healso testi ed at public hearings and spoke at the Sierra Club’s biennial wil-derness conferences and at other forums. His prose was powerful, evokinga sense of community between human beings and the natural world andeloquently identifying the values of wildlands. Language became Zahn-iser’s most powerful tool, as he used words such as “eternity,” “perpetuity,”and “untrammeled” to de ne the essence of wilderness. The generosity ofhis prose enabled him to atter his opponents with a genuine and heartfeltrecognition of their interests while inviting them to accept his. His abilityto listen to and consider others’ points of view proved crucial to his successas a lobbyist and advocate.

Zahniser had a special talent for listening to others, no doubt owing tohis upbringing by a minister who had made pastoral calls and had tendedto people’s emotional and spiritual needs. He knew how to listen and toaddress the concerns of skeptics, such as loggers, miners, and ranchers.

Though he often disagreed with their perspective, he did not hold personalgrudges and constantly sought to nd the middle ground. He rejected thenotion that wilderness preservation and commodity production on pub-lic lands were incompatible. He accepted the expansionist energies of theAmerican economy during the post-World War II years and acknowledgedthat timber, minerals, and hydroelectric power were vital to serve people’sneeds. Yet he insisted that wilderness served more basic needs as well. In awealthy society like the United States, commodity production and wilder-ness could coexist.


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Inclusive in asserting the case for wilderness protection, Zahniserpushed back at the charge that wilderness areas would primarily serve thewealthy and the elite. Wilderness areas, he told members of Congress, werecomparable to the National Gallery of Art. They “are maintained,” he tes-ti ed, “so every American, now and in the future, can have the privilegeof choosing to visit a wilderness area, if he wishes to do so. If he does notwish to visit the area, nevertheless, as the privilege of an American citizen,he has it there, and the very fact that it is there means a great deal to manypeople who do not visit it.” For him, the preservation of wilderness servedthe public interest.

Zahniser’s sense about the value of wilderness also rested on his rec-

ognition that wild nature was present in everyone’s lives—the birds andsmall mammals in backyards, by the roadways, and in nearby meadowsand forests. Wildness is found in many places, he argued, and one neednot travel to remote and distant locales to nd it. For him, the wildness ofthe everyday world should be embraced and celebrated, something he didin his columns in Nature Magazine .

Although he cherished the wildness near at hand, Zahniser’s e orts atThe Wilderness Society focused on the daunting challenge of safeguard-ing the fragile and weakly protected primitive areas in the national forestsand the roadless areas in the vast backcountry of the national parks. Insetting forth the case for preserving these areas, he drew on the domi-nant ideas of wilderness thought articulated by Thoreau, John Muir, BobMarshall, Aldo Leopold, Sigurd Olson, and Benton MacKaye. Wildernessholds scienti c, educational, and historical values, he said, and an excur-sion into it o ers people a fresh perspective on the world. He eloquentlydistilled and articulated these values in his writings and speeches, appeal-ing to Americans in the postwar years who were increasingly mobile and

were visiting parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. Because he was not anecologist like Aldo Leopold, an amateur geologist or botanist like JohnMuir, or a mammalogist like Olaus Murie, he did not try to replicate theirscienti cally based support for wilderness. Instead, he based his case oncultural and ethical grounds, mindful of postwar Americans’ growingappetite for scenery and solitude.

Outdoor recreation exploded in the post-World War II years, sparkedby the end of gasoline and rubber rationing and by the pent-up desires ofthe millions of Americans who had put o vacations during the war. Now,


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Americans were driving in their cars to state and federal parks, forests, andbeaches to swim, hike, sh, and wonder at the scenic vistas. For some, aview of Old Faithful or the Grand Canyon provided a taste of wildernesswithout requiring substantial e ort. For others who were willing to leavetheir vehicles behind, wilderness in Forest Service primitive areas and inthe backcountry of national parks beckoned, and they made their way intothese areas on foot or by horseback. The postwar surge in recreation madeplain to Zahniser that wilderness areas must be a part of the nation’s out-door opportunities.

Along with contemporaries such as Murie, Olson, and Leopold, hesensed that growing numbers of Americans su ered from stresses and

tensions in their places of work and urban settings and that many livedapart from the natural world. An outing into the wilderness, he asserted,provides inspiration, relaxation, refreshment, and a new perspective. Thevalues of wilderness, he said, “are human values. Its preservation is a pur-pose that arises out of man’s own sense of his fundamental needs.”

Moreover, he argued, there is an ethical dimension of wilderness pres-ervation that transcends personal and societal needs. Being in the wilder-ness, he believed, awakens a sense of other forms of life and encourages anunderstanding of how all life derives its existence from the sun. Wilder-ness thereby reminds humans of their obligations to the earth and otherliving things. “We now know,” he wrote in a 1953 essay, “that our conser-vation to be truly successful must arise, not from a too sel sh concern forour own day, but rather from a sense of ourselves as a responsible part of acontinuing community of life.” He insisted: “We live only as members ofa great community.” These statements re ect his innermost convictionsabout the social bonds in society as well as the moral obligations of humansto be stewards of nature.

For Zahniser, wilderness preservation was the ultimate act of stew-ardship, of environmental responsibility. That point deserves attention,particularly in light of the Great Wilderness Debate. Sparked by WilliamCronon’s provocative essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness” in 1995, andby the writings of other nature writers and philosophers, scholars havevigorously debated the meaning of wilderness in American society andculture and around the globe. One of Cronon’s major points was thatthe laserlike focus of environmentalists on saving wilderness distractedthem from taking care of landscapes closer to home. In a sense, he argued,


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wilderness had become synonymous with nature and thereby diminishedpeople’s appreciation of the full range of natural and human landscapes.Ramachandra Guha and a number of other scholars have pointed out theproblems that wilderness preservation has caused for indigenous people,whose subsistence strategies rely on harvesting animals and plants fromlands targeted for preservation by wilderness advocates. In the UnitedStates, Native peoples, accustomed to hunting and shing in areas of theRocky Mountains, were displaced when Congress created Yellowstoneand Glacier National Parks. These critiques have sparked tremendous soulsearching about the merits of wilderness preservation and advocacy. Byimplication, they have also tended to diminish the e orts of earlier genera-

tions of wilderness advocates like Zahniser’s.It may be instructive to speculate on what Howard Zahniser might have

thought about the Great Wilderness Debate. Above all, he and his con-temporaries in The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and other orga-nizations understood that wild lands would inevitably disappear from theAmerican landscape, the victims of an economy built on consumerism andgrowth, so they directed their energies toward setting aside and preservingwilderness by law. The wilderness ideology of Zahniser and his generationcan be critiqued, but it bears remembering that they believed wildernesswould vanish completely unless measures were taken to protect it.

It is di cult to escape the notion that Zahniser’s crusade on behalf ofAmerican wilderness was deeply rooted in his religious convictions. Heshared with many other American environmental leaders a grounding inevangelical Protestant thought. This deep strain in America’s religioustradition drew on John Calvin, as historian Mark Stoll has pointed out,and emphasized restraint, responsibility, and stewardship. Calvin’s ideas,as they descended through the generations, also contributed to the ideol-

ogy of free-market capitalism, which sought to exploit nature.Although Zahniser did not wear his religious beliefs on his sleeve orassert that his faith compelled him to press for wilderness preservation,there is no doubt that his insistence on the responsibilities of humans toother forms of life and to future generations was grounded in his Protes-tant upbringing. He regularly said that humans were called upon to rec-ognize and care for the life around them. For Zahniser, it was especiallyimportant to nurture the lives in wild places, not by “management” butthrough observation, study, and celebration of nature’s own processes.


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His sense of obligation, restraint, and humility toward the natural worldwere all rooted in his religious convictions. In a major speech, “Wilder-ness Forever,” delivered at the Sierra Club’s seventh biennial wildernessconference in San Francisco in 1961, he said:

It is a bold thing for a human being who lives on the earth but a few scoreyears at the most to presume upon the eternal and covet perpetuity forany of his undertakings. Yet we who concern ourselves with wildernesspreservation are compelled to assume this boldness . . . to project into theeternity of the future some of that precious unspoiled ecological inheri-tance that has come to us out of the eternity of the past.

He concluded his address by saying: “We are not ghting progress. We aremaking it. We are not dealing with a vanishing wilderness. We are workingfor a wilderness forever.”

the wilderness writings of howard zahniser

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