Who Was John Muir? (Adapted
from Sierra Club.org)
John Muir was born in Scotland in 1838, In 1849, Muir's family
emigrated to the United States, starting a farm near Portage, Wisconsin
called Fountain Lake Farm. It has been designated a National Historic
Landmark.
At age 22, Muir enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, paying
his own way for several years. In 1864, Muir left school to go to Canada
to avoid the military draft, spending the spring, summer, and fall
wandering the woods and swamps around Lake Huron collecting plants.
His travels then took him on a 1,000 mile walk from Indiana to Florida,
and finally to California where he lived in Yosemite Valley for two years.
Muir was America's most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist. As a wilderness explorer, he is
renowned for his exciting adventures in California's Sierra Nevada, among Alaska's glaciers, and world wide
travels in search of nature's beauty. As a writer, he taught the people of his time and ours the importance of
experiencing and protecting our natural heritage. His writings contributed greatly to the creation of Yosemite,
Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest, and Grand Canyon National Parks.
His words and deeds helped inspire President Theodore Roosevelt's innovative conservation programs,
including establishing the first National Monuments by Presidential Proclamation, and Yosemite National Park
by congressional action. In 1892, John Muir and other supporters formed the Sierra Club "to make the
mountains glad." John Muir was the Club's first president, an office he held until his death in 1914. Muir's
Sierra Club has gone on to help establish a series of new National Parks and a National Wilderness Preservation
System.
Muir's last battle to save the part of Yosemite National Park, Hetch Hetchy Valley, from being flooded by a
dam and reservoir failed. But that lost battle ultimately resulted in a widespread conviction that our national
parks should be held inviolate. Many proposals to dam our national parks since that time have been stopped
because of the efforts of citizens inspired by John Muir, and today there are legitimate proposals to restore
Hetch Hetchy. John Muir remains today an inspiration for environmental activists everywhere.
Can We Afford the Wilderness?
The Battle still rages at the heart of the conservationist movement
by Ken Chowder
"The present flourishing triumphant growth of the wealthy wicked, the Phelans.... and their hirelings, will not
thrive forever.... we may lose this particular fight, but truth and right must prevail at last." - John Muir
"He [John Muir] is a poetical gentleman. I am sure he would sacrifice his own family for the sake of beauty. He
considers human life very cheap." - James D. Phelan
They were both good men. John Muir, a self-described "poetico-trampo-geologist-bot," was the first great
American advocate for wilderness, the first president of the Sierra Club, a nationally popular writer and
naturalist. James D. Phelan, the reform mayor of San Francisco, was the fiery opponent of monopolies, a
champion of the public good. They were good men - and they were vitriolic enemies.
In fact, the dispute between Muir and Phelan still rages today, in only slightly altered form. There are still two
conflicting answers to the question What is wilderness for?
The particular argument between Muir and Phelan concerned a remote mountain valley more than 150 miles
from San Francisco with the odd name of Hetch Hetchy. San Francisco, a city on the end of a dry peninsula,
was in chronic need of fresh water; in 1901 Mayor Phelan proposed damming the valley to create a reservoir for
San Francisco. At the time, only a few hundred people had ever seen Hetch Hetchy but it was, not so
coincidentally, in Yosemite National Park.
John Muir had spent many years in Yosemite, climbing its mountains, exploring its most remote corners, and
Hetch Hetchy was one of his favorite places on Earth. It is "one of Nature's rarest and most precious mountain
temples," he wrote. "Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water- tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for
no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man."
Muir and the Sierra Club raised enough of a protest to have Phelan's proposal turned down. Undaunted, Phelan
tried again in 1903, again in 1905, again in 1907. To his way of thinking, a dam in Hetch Hetchy would provide
drinking water and electricity, and, crucially, free San Francisco from the monopoly of the spring Valley Water
Company. The idea that preserving scenery was more important than saving his city from economic injustice
infuriated Phelan. "John Muir loves the Sierras and roams at large, and is hypersensitive on the subject of the
invasion of his territory," Phelan wrote. "The 400,000 people of San Francisco are suffering from bad water and
ask Mr. Muir to cease his quibbling."
Subduing the wild
Actually it was far from quibbling. The debate over Hetch Hetchy concerned the very definition of
conservation. At the time conservation was still very new. For the first European settlers the wild continent had
been a wolfish, godless enemy to be subdued; the mark of Satan, the Puritans thought, was on all things wild.
As naturalist Aldo Leopold put it, "A stump was our symbol of progress." But as wilderness slowly became
both less dangerous and less infinitely vast, it began to seem more valuable, more attractive.
By 1901 the new conservation movement was already a house divided. The "utilitarian" school of conservation
believed in "wise use" of the land: husbanding the resources of wilderness to provide the greatest benefit to the
greatest number of people. The "preservationist" school believed that wilderness should be left exactly as is,
untouched, like a cathedral of god. Which should have priority, the needs of man or those of wilderness itself?
The debate began early and persists to this day.
The first national debate over the use of wilderness in U.S. history, the Hetch Hetchy struggle lasted 12 years.
To most people the conflict seemed one between two Gods: water and light for San Francisco versus saving the
beauty of the wild mountain valley. But both sides saw it as simple right vs. Wrong, and the invective flowed.
Muir wrote of "James Phelan, Satan and company." He described the dam's proponents as "mischief-makers and
robbers," as "temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism." Dam supporter William Kent wrote of
Muir that he was "a man entirely without social sense. With him, it is me and god and the rock where god put it,
and that is the end of the story." San Francisco's city engineer called the preservationists "short-haired women
and long-haired men"; the pro-dam San Francisco Chronicle called them "hoggish and mushy esthetes." Muir
said of his critics: "They all show forth the proud sort of confidence that comes of a good sound irrefragable
ignorance."
The 1906 earthquake, causing a fire that destroyed much of San Francisco, seemed to underline the city's need
for water; and in 1908 a city referendum resulted in a -1 margin in favor of a dam. But in the nation at large
Muir and the Sierra Club, using articles, pamphlets and broadsides, successfully whipped up public opinion in
favor of preserving the valley. Letters began to pour into Congress by the thousand; most major newspapers
published editorials condemning the dam. "The people are now aroused. Tidings from far and near show that
almost every good man and woman is with us," Muir wrote in 1913. "Therefore be of good cheer, watch, and
pray and fight!"
On December 6, 1913, after 12 years of fighting, the Hetch Hetchy question came to a final vote. The U.S.
Senate passed the bill authorizing the dam with a 43-25 vote. The New York Times wrote, "The American
people have been whipped in the Hetch Hetchy fight."
"I'll be relieved when it's settled, for it's killing me," Muir has written. In fact, he did become sick not long after
the bill's passage, and died of pneumonia in December 1914.
But John Muir had his revenge. The Hetch Hetchy defeat did wonders for his cause. The grassroots nature of
the anti-dam protest widened preservationist support tremendously; a vague general approval of wilderness
hardened into a movement capable of sustained political action. "The conscience of the whole country," as Muir
put it, was "aroused from sleep."
The case of the sinister dam
The Hetch Hetchy decision was the beginning, not the end. Curiously, many of the great wilderness struggles
since Hetch Hetchy have had the same general outline: the argument is often about a dam proposed for a site in
a national park or protected area. "In the view of the conservationists, there is something special about dams,"
wrote author John McPhee, "Something ... metaphysically sinister." David Brower, longtime head of the Sierra
Club put it succinctly: "I hate all dams, large and small. If you are against a dam, you are for a river."
The struggles continue
The Wilderness Act of 1964 did not, of course, close the book on struggles between utilitarians and
preservationists. During the 1960s dams were proposed for two sites in the Grand Canyon itself. The Central
Arizona Project had the support of the President, but in a result that would have been almost unimaginable in
1913, environmentalists, led by David Brower, defeated the dams and preserved the canyon. Today, the broad
concept of wilderness has achieved a certain sanctity; wilderness, in its dotage, has become hallowed. "For it
can be a means," Wallace Stegner wrote, "of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the
geography of hope."
Still, there are at any given time numerous firestorms over wilderness raging in this country. Some of the hottest
of the moment: the Bush Administration, despite the huge Exxon Valdez oil spill, still hopes to open the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil development; the U.S. Forest Service is under fire for logging 450
million board feet of timber annually from Alaska's Tongass National Forest; and environmentalists in the
Pacific Northwest are pushing hard to save old-growth National Forests and protect the imperiled spotted owl.
The battle sites change, but the basic problem remains the same: "the very old problem," as Roderick Nash
wrote in Wilderness and the American Mind, "of whether parks, reserves and wildernesses are for man ... or for
nature." In conservation, as in everything else, some things never change. But what has changed, in the 77 years
since the Hetch Hetchy decision, is the face of the land itself. So much less wild land remains that the reasons
for developing it need to be that much stronger before they begin to make sense. In short, we need wilderness
more because there is less of it.
As the next century gallops closer, a second change in the ongoing Man vs. Nature argument grows increasingly
clear: One of the species that has become endangered by the rush of progress is humankind itself. The
accidental but terrifying byproducts of modernity such as nuclear waste and acid rain have made preservation,
in the end, perhaps the most utilitarian stance of all. So the old duality of Nature and civilization is, in some
sense, no longer a duality; the two have become an environmental version of the Odd Couple -- their fortunes
curiously but inextricably linked, from now on.
Edward Abbey, Conservative Anarchist
From the American Spectator By Bill Croke
Edward Paul Abbey was born on January 29, 1927, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of a farmer and logger.
After a 1944 hitchhiking trip west at 17, he served in the U.S. Army late in World War II and afterwards, then
enrolled at the University of New Mexico in 1948 on the G.I. Bill, eventually earning a Master's Degree in
philosophy. During this time Abbey started to write as he began concurrently to explore the backcountry of the
Southwest in his spare time, specifically the Four Corners area (where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New
Mexico meet), otherwise known as the Colorado Plateau because it's drained by that great river.
It was among the last of Western regions to be surveyed and mapped. In 1869, John Wesley Powell was its
primary explorer when he led a party in dories down the rapids-ravaged canyons of the Green and Colorado
Rivers from Green River, Wyoming, all the way through the Grand Canyon. It's an unforgiving region of
deserts and mountains, much of it federal land, and home to a half dozen national parks. Here Abbey found the
subject that was the focus of his four decades as a writer.
Money was tight, though, and Abbey also worked odd jobs through the 1950s and '60s. His most noteworthy
employment was as a seasonal ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) near Moab,
Utah, in 1959. This experience (along with others) culminated in the 1968 publication of Desert Solitaire, the
book that made his reputation. After that, Cactus Ed became the Thoreau of the West.
Here he is in Glen Canyon before the eponymous dam was built (1963) that created Lake Powell: The sandstone
walls rise higher than ever before, rounding off on top as half-domes and capitols, golden and glowing in the
sunlight, a deep radiant red in the shade.
And this from the same trip: Beyond the side canyon the walls rise again, slick and monolithic, in color a blend
of pink, buff, yellow, orange, overlaid in part with a glaze of "desert varnish" (iron oxide) or streaked in certain
places with vertical draperies of black organic stains, the residue from plant life beyond the rim and from the
hanging gardens that flourish in the deep grottoes high on the walls. Some of those alcoves are like great
amphitheatres, large as the Hollywood Bowl, big enough for God's own symphony orchestra.
In an essay entitled "Eco-Defense," he writes: "Eco-defense is risky but sporting; unauthorized but fun; illegal
but ethically imperative…Spike those trees; you won't hurt them; they'll be grateful for the protection; and you
may save the forest. Loggers hate nails."
Abbey's most controversial role was only obliquely related to his work. In 1975 he published his novel The
Monkey Wrench Gang. The plot involves four anarchic enviros who conspire to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. In
a case of life imitates art, the book inspired the establishment of a notorious radical green group in 1980 known
as Earth First!, with Abbey as a charter member. Earth First! "membership" was and remains (to the extent that
it even exists today) anonymous and shadowy, as it's known for acts of "monkey wrenching" of earthmoving
and logging equipment, spiking trees, stealing survey stakes, cutting wire fences, and so on. "Earth First!" has
spawned ancillary groups such as the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which before its downfall at the hands of
the FBI in 2006 burned down a Colorado ski lodge, and destroyed a number of vehicles at an SUV dealership in
Eugene, Oregon, among other acts of domestic terrorism.
Cactus Ed was a prickly sort; a conservative anarchist, if you will, who on one hand could support eco-terrorism
(a favorite motto was: "Keep America Beautiful -- Burn a Billboard!"), and on the other supported the National
Rifle Association (NRA), and restrictions on immigration. When he died of natural causes, some of his Earth
First! compatriots famously and illegally absconded with his body, and buried it in a secret place in remote
desert outside of Tucson. And there he lies to this day, pushing up cactus.
Excerpts from the Wikipedia Entry on Edward Abbey
Desert Solitaire is regarded as one of the finest nature
narratives in American literature, and has been compared to
Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and Thoreau's
Walden. In it, Abbey vividly describes the physical
landscapes of Southern Utah and delights in his isolation as
a back country park ranger, recounting adventures in the
nearby canyon country and mountains. He also attacks what
he terms the "industrial tourism" and resulting development
in the national parks ("national parking lots"), rails against
the Glen Canyon Dam and comments on various other
subjects.
Abbey stated that he deliberately wrote to provoke people to
anger, hoping to "wake them up", but that he also tried to
make his writing entertaining and
engaging for the reader. Abbey felt
that it was the duty of all authors to
"speak the truth--especially
unpopular truth. Especially truth
that offends the powerful, the rich,
the well-established, the traditional,
the mythic". His abrasiveness, opposition to anthropocentrism, and outspoken writings
made him the object of much controversy. Agrarian author Wendell Berry claimed that
Abbey was regularly criticized by mainstream environmental groups because Abbey
often advocated controversial positions that were very different from those which
environmentalists were commonly expected to hold.
Sometimes called the "desert anarchist," Abbey was known to anger
people o f all political stripes, including environmentalists. In his
essays the narrator describes throwing beer cans out of his car,
claiming the highway had already littered the landscape. Abbey even
had an FBI file opened on him in 1947, after he posted a letter while
in college urging people to rid themselves of their draft cards. He
differed from the stereotype of environmentalist as politically correct
leftist by disclaiming the counterculture and the "trendy campus
people", saying he didn't want them as his primary fans, and by
supporting some conservative causes such as immigration reduction
and the National Rifle Association.
Regarding the accusation of "eco-terrorism", Abbey responded that
the tactics he supported were trying to defend against the terrorism he
felt was committed by government and industry against living beings
and the environment.
Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), American conservationist and public official, was chiefly responsible for
introducing scientific forestry to the United States.
Gifford Pinchot was born in Simsbury, Conn., on Aug. 11, 1865, the scion of an old Huguenot family of
moderate wealth and high public spirit. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University and
studied forestry in Europe on his own. Gifford Pinchot's family had made a great fortune from lumbering and
land speculation. His father, James, regretted the damage his family's work had done to the land. He made
conservation a family affair and suggested that Gifford should become a forester. Unlike some others in the
forestry movement, Pinchot's wealth allowed him to singly pursue this goal without worry of income. After
successfully instituting the first systematic forest program in the United States on the Vanderbilt estate in North
Carolina, he served in 1896 on the National Forest Commission. Two years later he became head of the
Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture.
Pinchot's influence increased enormously during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. He was influential in
Roosevelt's decision to transfer millions of acres of forest lands to the reserves. He devised a system for
controlled use of waterpower sites, and, above all others, he shared responsibility with Roosevelt for the notable
advances in forestry and conservation between 1901 and 1909.
Unlike some ultraconservationists, Pinchot distinguished between the utilization and the exploitation of natural
resources. Controlled use was the key to his philosophy. To this end he opened forests to selective cutting and
leased the grasslands within them for grazing. He also converted some of the country's greatest lumber interests
to the selective-cutting principle of "perpetuation of forests through use."
A driving, zealous man, Pinchot made many enemies and was attacked fiercely by western interests and antiintellectuals in Congress. Yet he won the steadfast devotion of his subordinates. After Roosevelt left office,
Pinchot fumed over the apparent slowdown in conservation under President William Howard Taft. Finally he
charged Taft's secretary of the interior, Richard A. Ballinger, with a "giveaway" of valuable lands in Alaska.
The charge was an exaggeration, and Taft subsequently dismissed Pinchot from the government. The publicity
given the incident, however, made Taft more sensitive to conservation during the remainder of his
administration.
Methods
Pinchot used the rhetoric of the market economy to disarm critics of efforts to expand the role of government:
scientific management of forests was profitable. While most of his battles were with timber companies that he
thought had too narrow a time horizon, he also battled the forest preservationists like John Muir, who were
deeply opposed to commercializing nature.
Pinchot was generally opposed to preservation for the sake of wilderness or scenery, a fact perhaps best
illustrated by the important support he offered to the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National
Park.
Pinchot rose to national prominence under the patronage of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905, his
department also gained control of the national forest reserves, thereby dramatically increasing the authority of
the Forest Service. Pinchot developed a plan by which the forests could be developed by private interests, under
set terms, in exchange for a fee. Pinchot embarked on many publicity campaigns to direct national discussions
of natural resource management issues.
Pinchot’s policies encountered some opposition. Preservationists were opposed to massive timber cutting while
Congress was increasingly hostile to conservation of the forests, bowing to local commercial pressures for
quicker exploitation. In 1907, Congress forbade the creation of more forest reserves in the Western states.
Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and
journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global
warming. He is a founder of the grassroots climate
campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189
countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him 'the planet's best
green journalist' and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was
'probably the country's most important environmentalist.'
His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by
Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is
regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate
change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. His next
book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is
an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on
the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching
the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home.
In March 2007 McKibben published Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. It
addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more localscale enterprise.
In late summer 2006, Bill helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming that
some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning
in January 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would
cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming
demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. Step It Up 2007 has been described as the
largest day of protest about climate change in the nation's history. A guide to help people initiate environmental
activism in their community coming out of the Step It Up 2007 experience entitled Fight Global Warming
Now was published in October 2007 and a second day of action on climate change was held the following
November 3.
Book Review of The End of Nature: According to Bill McKibben, true nature, which was independent of
human influence, has been replaced by an artificial nature in whose processes human beings play a part.
This concept may not seem frightening but McKibben points out that the changes we have made, and are
continuing to make, in the chemistry of our atmosphere are not the kind of environmental changes we have
experienced in the past. We cannot escape them by fleeing to the woods. We have progressed beyond removing
parts of the earth from the domain of true nature -- through farming, mining, construction -- to actually altering
the global processes that define our environment.
The human hand acting on the earth is not a guiding hand but a clumsy hand. Most of our influence on climate,
for example, has been inadvertent. The new natural world we have made -- complete with changing
temperatures, sea levels, and atmospheric chemistry -- will be less predictable and perhaps more violent than the
natural world of the past. He presents problems on a human level, measuring the biosphere in units of the
distance to his mailbox, and lists possible consequences of environmental degradation ranging from floods and
famine down to worsening asthma and hay fever.
More insightful still is his discussion of what is preventing the human race from halting this destructive trend.
Just as human beings have the mental capability to take control of the Earth to the extent that we have, the
ability to reason should also enable us to change our habits and outlooks as well as our technology. International
cooperation, careful evaluation of the idea of infinite technological progress, and questioning the efficiency of
free market solutions are all necessary for the change that will have to come about. But the solutions will have
to go even deeper.
McKibben shows how tightly bound up the destruction of the planet is in our lives. Our cars, our houses,
plastics, and pesticides are as much a part of the world we know as are the trees, waters, and hills that we live
among. McKibben sets forth plainly that the human race will need to decide between our material world -houses, cars, clothes -- and the natural world. "One world or the other will have to change." McKibben
envisions a "humbler world" where our material excesses will seem absurd. In this world, he thinks, human
beings could take a less dominant relation to nature, and nature might once again establish itself as independent,
constant.
While this vision is fascinating and comforting, McKibben himself does not seem to think it is likely. He
recognizes that human beings value themselves and their interests primarily and that these values will likely win
out. A "managed world" in which human beings control the climate, genetics, and ecology is the most probable
solution short of ecological catastrophe. This result is not appealing to McKibben who values nature for its own
sake.
Book Review of Deep Economy; The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the biggest challenge in a generation to the
prevailing view of our economy. For the first time in human history, he observes, "more" is no longer
synonymous with "better”. McKibben's animating idea is that we need to move beyond "growth" as the
paramount economic ideal and pursue prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions
producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own
culture and entertainment. He shows this concept blossoming around the world with striking results, from the
burgeoning economies of India and China to the more mature societies of Europe and New England. For those
who worry about environmental threats, he offers a route out of the worst of those problems; for those who
wonder if there isn't something more to life than buying, he provides the insight to think about one's life as an
individual and as a member of a larger community. McKibben offers a realistic, if challenging, scenario for a
hopeful future. As he so eloquently shows, the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the
more we will recapture our own.
Aldo Leopold
Born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887, Aldo Leopold spent his boyhood years
exploring and hunting in the nearby woods, swamps, and fields. On their many
long hikes, his father taught Aldo and his brother and sister how to "see" many of
nature's mysteries.
Leopold went east for high school, to Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where
his love of the outdoors took a heavy toll on his grades. "My dear Mama," he
wrote home in 1904, "You probably know from my report that I have flunked
Geometry..." Leopold survived high school and began college at Yale, with the
idea of obtaining a graduate degree from the University's new School of Forestry.
With degrees in hand, Leopold joined the Forest Service in 1909, advancing
swiftly as a ranger and supervisor in New Mexico. By 1919, his thinking had
evolved from a narrow focus on forestry and game management to an increasingly
firm conviction that America was losing too much wilderness.
In 1924, in the process of transferring to the Forest Products Laboratory in
Madison,
Wisconsin, Leopold convinced the Forest Service to protect as wilderness 500,000 acres of New Mexico's Gila
National Forest. It was the National Forest System's first officially designated wilderness area.
Unhappy at the laboratory, Leopold left in 1928 to earn a living as a consulting forester. Soon thereafter, his
reputation as an expert on game management paid off. In 1933 the University of Wisconsin offered him a
professorship to teach in the nation's first graduate program in that subject.
Two years later, with the rapid loss of wilderness in America weighing heavily on his mind, Leopold joined
seven other leading conservationists to form The Wilderness Society. Also in 1935, Leopold purchased a rundown farm on the Wisconsin River. The entire family — wife Estella and five children — rebuilt the only
standing structure, a chicken coop, into a small cabin the family slept in. The cabin came to be known as "The
Shack." For years thereafter, the Leopolds spent their weekends at the Shack, planting thousands upon
thousands of trees as they worked to restore the land's health.
Weekends of planting, hiking, and observing nature further sharpened Leopold's thinking about the relationship
of people to the land and their moral obligation to take better care of it. Those weekends also provided the
material he needed to write his most famous book, A Sand County Almanac. Published in 1949, the Almanac
captured the wonders of nature Leopold saw all around him at the Shack.
It also laid out a startlingly innovative idea, called the "land ethic." This was to be a new way of thinking and
acting toward the land, one that would teach us to live with greater reverence for its ability to support all
manner of life. Sadly, Leopold did not live to see his book published. He died in 1948 helping fight a wildfire
near the Shack.
“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the
earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges;
you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete
with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as
the co-operations. You can regulate them—cautiously—but not abolish them.” Leopold, Aldo: Round River, Oxford
University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 145-146.
John Wesley Powell was born in New York on 24 March 1834. His parents eventually moved to
Ohio and experienced trouble because of their antislavery beliefs. Because of this trouble, Powell left school
and began studying with "Big George" Crookham, a local naturalist. Crookham taught Powell about biology,
geology, and archaeology with his vast collection of plants, animals, rocks, and artifacts.
In 1846, Powell's family moved to rural Wisconsin to start a
farm. Their farm was located close to several forests, meadows,
and streams where a young Powell would play. His first
encounter with Native Americans happened when members of
the Winnebago Tribe camped near their farm and explained
how the Powell's land used to be part of their hunting grounds.
This encounter fascinated Powell and began his lifelong study
and appreciation of Native Americans and the study of
ethnology. After attending college in Illinois, Powell served in
the Civil War. He lost his right arm in the line of duty.
In 1869, John Wesley Powell led his first exploration down the
Colorado River through what would later be known as the
Grand Canyon. This was a very tough journey through
uncharted territory and unpredictable rivers. They were sent out
to map and survey the river and the canyon. Several of their
boats capsized and were torn apart by the wild rapids in the
canyon. This trip provided the first glimpses of this area and
was a valuable asset for the USGS.
Powell's second trip through the Grand Canyon occurred in
1871. This trip was much more successful due to Powell's experience and knowledge of certain river sections.
His crew included several scientists and even a photographer with literally a ton of equipment. This expedition
brought back not only excellent specimens and photographs, but a new understanding of geologic principles and
better explanations of erosion, sedimentation, and uplift that would forever change modern geology.
In 1888, following a series of dry years, Congress, on Powell's recommendation, authorized the Survey to
undertake a study of the arid regions of the United States with special emphasis to be placed on investigations
of stream capacities and potential sites for dams, reservoirs, ditches, and other irrigation facilities.
While Powell is most widely known as the first explorer of the
Colorado River, he also made significant contributions as an
administrator and as an advocate for conservation and careful planning
in the use of western lands. He argued that because of their arid nature,
western public lands should be classified as to their potential use for
irrigation, pasturage, timber, and mineral or coal extraction. Powell
also maintained that the traditional 160-acre farm as provided for in the
Homestead Act was much too small for grazing purposes in the West.
Instead, grazing farms there should be expanded to no less than 2,560
acres in order profitably to support herds.