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This was what was really unique and new.
He integrated ecology, on the one hand,
which we think of as a sort of neutral science with ethics,
on the other, which we think of as being a humanities.
Leopold saw the link.
He put them together and that was his real originality.
♪♪♪♪
"A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the
integrity, stability, and beauty of the community.
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community
to include soils, waters, plants, and animals.
Or collectively, the land.
One of the predominating ideologies of our age is the
idea that nature is a vast mechanism,
just a machine that will endlessly turn out the goods,
the necessities for human life.
Leopold saw that was not true.
That nature could not be adequately conceptionalized as
a machine and that when human beings intervene with their
tools they needed to be very careful that the tools did not
do more harm in the long run then short term good.
The land ethic has got to be from inside.
It's got to be actually something
which would guide you in the
conduct of your own fifty by a hundred and fifty lot,
or whatever else.
And it would spread out from there to how you think National
Parks, National Monuments, Wilderness areas, BLM lands,
whatever else should be looked after.
"I sadly feel my attempts to write are too
frequently narrow and dry.
We can put on paper that such and such flowers are added to
the list; that these birds have arrived; and those are nesting.
But who can write the great things, the deep changes,
the wonderful nameless things which are the real object of
the wonderful nameless things which are the real object of
study of any kind?
" A Sand County Almanac brought Leopold's land ethic to the
world, but he did not live to see it published.
In April 1948 he died fighting a fire on a farm near the Shack.
He was sixty-one.
A Sand County Almanac has been in print since 1949 and it
will probably be in print forever.
It is one of the great works of conservation and philosophy.
It is truly that, but for the first time people began to
understand that what we were talking about even in the post
war years was something essential.
It was not tree hugging.
It was not posy picking,
as Teddy Roosevelt once called it.
It was preservation for the sake of not only nature,
but of survival of life on this planet.
The wilderness movement of the twentieth century
was about restraint.
It was about restraining the urban,
industrial juggernaut that from frontier days right on
through had run rough shod over the American west.
It said let's hold off for a moment.
It said let's hold the line on progress and development.
Let's redefine progress and development.
Perhaps into not so much conquering wilderness as the
old style had it, but conquering civilization.
Conquering its tendencies, perhaps, to be suicidal.
"Consider Levittown.
Delaware Valley, USA."
One of the world's largest single
unit housing developments.
Here, nearly five thousand new homes per year rise out of an
area that was only yesterday swamp and meadow and brush."
Levittown and the immense tracks of suburban development
that exploded on the urban landscape of America
following World War II
are part of this paradoxical relationship of wilderness
preservation to the city.
On the one hand wilderness advocates saw them as a kind of
cancer upon the American landscape that would ultimately
overwhelm everything around them in this endless
ticky-tacky replication of all these little houses.
On the other hand, Levittown was where the people lived and
the children were growing up who in the 1960's would be
among the most powerful advocates of wilderness
preservation, so that there is this
sense that people living in those
landscapes will want to escape them.
Will want to get out, get back to nature.
"This is the forest primeval.
Just as it was at the dawn of civilization.
And this is how the first man explored it.
In a birch bark canoe.
Pitting his skill and strength against the
raw forces of nature.
Survival of the fittest, that's the law here."
HONK HONK
For decades American's thought
they were visiting the wilderness when
they went to the National Parks and National Forests.
But the Forest Service was in the business of selling timber
and building roads.
The Park Service, meanwhile, built resorts complete with
Dude Ranches, plush hotels, and scheduled bear feedings.
The two agencies provided recreation for a vast growing
population and resources for a booming economy,
but protecting wilderness was hardly their first concern.
"You and your family can enjoy this wonderland at very modest
rates because a variety of tent accommodations are available.
A tent like this, with comfortable furnishing, lights,
bedding, costs only two dollars,
fifty cents daily per person.
And fine meals are available at reasonable rates.
But because tent accommodations are limited
reservations are necessary.
Phone Madison 52446. Operator on duty."
All of the facilities at our national
parks is not wilderness experience at all.
You might just as well have the Old Faithful spouting in
Central Park or in in Lafayette Park,
or at the Golden Gate Bridge, every fifteen or twenty minutes.
You could shorten up the interval even.
It's not a wilderness experience at all.
♪♪♪
True wilderness or not, people loved their parks and their
wild lands.
By 1950 Americans had formed over three-hundred
conservation organizations.
Wilderness preservation had become a national crusade.
In the 30's Bob Marshall had been the movement's patron
saint of activism.
In the 40's Aldo Leopold was its philosophical prophet.
In the 1950's the preservation of wild land
demanded political skill.
The movement's unlikely hero was a bureaucrat
named Howard Zahniser.
"Let us be done with the preservation program of
emergencies, threats, and defense campaigns.
What we need is an enduring system of areas where we can be
at peace and not forever feel that the wilderness
is a battle ground.
We are not fighting progress, we are making it."
Zahniser was a minister's son, a career civil servant.
But in 1946 he quit his secure government job to work at half
the pay for the Wilderness Society.
For Zahniser had a mission of his own.
He wanted to put a stop to any and all invasions of the
remaining wild areas.
His first test was a landmark struggle over a
place called Dinosaur.
In 1950 the government wanted to put a dam in a wild canyon
on the Utah/Colorado border in Dinosaur National Monument.
Conservation groups urged their members to raft down the remote
Green River to see for themselves what the reservoir
would destroy.
"Nature took almost a million centuries to uncover this
beauty, this land you own.
But a few men would like to cover it up again
while you watch.
They'd like to pour concrete in the canyons and flood every
single mile of surging river you are going to look at.
Sure, man has a need for water and power.
He also has a spiritual need for the
beauty of natural things."
The proposed dam was to be part of huge network of
hydroelectric plants along the Upper Colorado River Basin.
The project's benefits were immediately obvious,
water and power for a vast area.
The list of the dam's backers was a virtual index of
political power, the construction industry,
the governors, and congressmen of the Upper Basin states,
the Department of Defense, the Bureau of Reclamation,
and the White House.
In the early part of the twentieth century dam builders
where conservation heroes.
The Bureau of Reclamation, the Core of Engineers were
considered conservationist, doing conservation business.
In fifty years we saw these same agencies,
Bureau of Reclamation, Core of Engineers,
become conservation bad guys.
And the reason that happened was that American priorities
had changed.
In the early years the priorities of progressive
conservation were heavy on utilitarian purposes.
Trees were lumber.
Water was potential hydropower.
By the 1950's quality of life had entered into the picture.
People were concerned about solitude.
They were concerned about wilderness.
They were concerned about beauty and open space.
And suddenly these old conservation organizations now
became the threats to environmental quality.
Something about dams really agitates conservationists.
And I think it may be their very permanence.
You put a dam up and you're not going to take it down.
They seem so clean and so inoffensive,
but they really make environmentalists bristle.
I think because of their permanence and because
they do such damage.
The Dinosaur struggle was an uncannily exact repetition of
the first full scale national battle over wilderness.
In 1913 the government dammed Hetch Hetchy,
a wild valley in Yosemite National Park,
despite a fierce protest by wilderness advocates.
In the early 1950's conservationists feared that
what had happened at Hetch Hetchy was about
to happen again.
"This is the story of two Yosemites.
One is the Yosemite valley everybody knows.
The other Yosemite was only a little less
beautiful than this one,
Hetch Hetchy valley.
This once beautiful valley, part of a national park,
was flooded."
Howard Zahniser took this film "Two Yosemites" around,
he found in the basement of the House
office building a little cart and a perpetual projector.
So he would haul this little cart in with a projector on it.
People were so curious they let him in the congressman's office
and he would show his film.
And I guess the high point of it was that he made the
congresswoman from Idaho, Gracie Pfost,
cry as it's something that you wouldn't want to repeat,
the Hetch Hetchy disaster.
Howard Zahniser and David Brower recognized that Dinosaur would
serve as a litmus test for public lands as a whole.
The government already had plans to development resources
in six other National Parks, including Glacier and
the Grand Canyon.
The debate boiled down to a choice between
wilderness and progress.
Hydropower is the only source of energy that
is renewable completely.
It has no elements of smoke, heat, acid rain,
none of the dehabilitating effects of burning
coal or oil or the atomic.
Hydropower is the only clean source of energy.
So why wouldn't the public want every possible kilowatt
generated from this source of power.
I remember as we began that one of Aldo Leopold's sons, Luna,
told me well, "Dave stick to your bird watching.
The Bureau of Reclamation has all the experts."
It was good the we didn't stick to our bird watching.
That we did know how to call on other experts who were more
objective then the Bureau of Reclamation was which was
naturally in favor of its projects.
Brower and Zahniser challenged the Bureau of Reclamation's
geological studies.
Not only was the dam unnecessary it
wasn't even feasible.
The rock walls were too unstable to support
the giant structure.
The public immediately responded.
Mail to congress ran eighty to one in favor of the wild river.
Howard Zahniser personally persuaded one hundred
twenty congressmen to change their votes.
Support for the Dinosaur Project crumbled.
For the first time in history preservationists had won a
national battle against progress.
I think the reason why Dinosaur,
the dam at Dinosaur was blocked but the dam at Hetch Hetchy was
not blocked was that recreation and wild land was becoming more
and more important as we move into the 50's.
And also there was the sense that America
had progressed enough.
That our cities had grown to a considerable degree and now it
was the wild lands that were more at risk rather than
civilization itself that seemed to be at risk.
Even land that had been designated as
wilderness was at risk.
If one bureaucrat decided to preserve an area the next would
destroy it forever with the stroke of a pen.