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declare permanent wilderness areas.
Zahniser knew there was no time to waste.
The economic growth of the United States was abusing
nature at an incredible pace.
The US Forest Service, for example,
had completely abandoned all the instincts that began to
inform it in the 1930's for preservation.
It's foresters were looked upon and encouraged to act as if
they were salesmen selling timber.
I'm a forester and I've logged a lot of land.
I'd always thought that we were doing the right thing.
But then more and more as you looked at what we what you were
doing as you looked at the kind of land that was being logged
there was a question in my mind as to whether what we were
doing made ecological sense.
We were unable to quantify the so called multiple use benefits.
The only thing we could quantify was the board feet.
I think that as foresters we misread the situation.
And those who are interested in resource extraction
misread the situation.
Howard Zahniser made the wilderness bill
his personal crusade.
For eight years he lobbied virtually every
member of Congress.
Saw the bill through sixty-six rewrites and spoke at all
eighteen Congressional hearings in every part of the country.
Even his friends called him a bureaucratic pitbull.
I think my father approached the passing of the Wilderness
Act with missionary zeal.
It was in his family.
His father and his uncles were missionary oriented
evangelistic pastors of churches.
His aunt had been a missionary.
And although it's probably not a conscious missionary approach
it was natural to him.
It was an urgent task.
My image of my father as a lobbyist is really embodied in
the coats he wore.
He found a Taylor in George Town who made these coats.
My father's coats had these incredible inside pockets that
hold reams and reams of Congressional reprints and
leaflets and Wilderness Society membership materials.
And so he was just a walking file cabinet of
the wilderness issue.
In April 1964, after eight years of constant work
Howard Zahniser collapsed and died.
He was fifty-eight.
Just four months later the Wilderness Act was signed into
law by President Johnson.
For the first time there was a different kind
of American progress.
Nine million acres had been preserved forever as the
National Wilderness System.
In twenty-five years the system would
contain ninety-four million
acres, four percent of the country.
Without the Wilderness Act the wilderness areas on the public
lands would all be vulnerable constantly.
There would be no permanent protection for them,
and any time some director in the Bureau of Reclamation wants
to propose a dam on a National Park or a National Monument it
might possibly be built.
So It's a constant struggle and I'd like to point out that we
on our side can never win.
All we can do is get a stay of execution for a very special
place on the Earth because there are always going to be
people coming on who've got other ideas about what to do
for the place beside save it.
They would exploit it.
That was fair enough until we got down to such a little bit,
such a vestige of wildness on the Earth.
Now I think wildness gets precedence.
They've got to make the case.
Wildness is innocent until proven guilty and they're going
to have a tough time proving it guilty.
They're selfish people.
They would like to preserve vast stretches of rivers and
vast ranges of mountains for the few.
Just those that can take time off and back pack into the
wilderness areas and enjoy the pristine world like Davie
Crocket and others did, you know, Daniel Boone.
But we're not living in Daniel Boone days any longer.
We're living with two-hundred million,
two-hundred and twenty million not fifty million.
And we have to develop our resources sensibly and properly.
I think Americans are never going to be done with this
debate about how much land should be set aside as
wilderness, how wilderness should be used,
how it should be managed.
Because it does flow from our past.
It does flow from trying to protect some static vision of
what our past should be.
And it also, in some ways, represents our conflicted sense
of our future.
Of how far our progress should proceed.
What parts of the landscape ought not to be
part of that progress.
I don't see that set of questions disappearing.
They're going to be on our political agenda
for a long long time.
♪♪♪
In the beginning, a stump was our symbol of progress.
Marshall, Zahniser, and Leopold argued for a
redefinition of progress.
In effect, they wanted America to change it's mind.
For Bob Marshall and Howard Zahniser the crucial task was
saving vast tracks of wild land.
For Aldo Leopold, what was needed was a new way of
understanding the world.
Of seeing the wildness in small things.
"On a still night when the camp fire is low and the pleiades
have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a
wolf to howl.
And think hard of everything you have seen and
tried to understand.
Then you may hear it.
A vast pulsing harmony.
It's score inscribed in a thousand hills.
It's notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals.
It's rhythms spanning the seconds and centuries, " Aldo Leopold.
♪♪♪