• The Wilderness Act turns 35!
  
  
• Wilderness Act — A 35-Year Legacy of Respecting the Land
  
  
• Stewart M. Brandborg: Wilderness Champion — By Michael Frome
  
  
• Cumberland Island: Park Service Deal Wounds Wilderness — By Bill Harlan
  

The Wilderness Act turns 35!

For all of us who love wild nature, September 3, 1964 stands out as the most remarkable day in our nation’s conservation history. On that day when President Lyndon B. Johnson put pen to paper and signed the Wilderness Act our National Wilderness Preservation System was born. The Act marked the first time that Americans’ put into law the notion that Wilderness deserved to be protected for its own sake, that in some places human demands would forever be subserviant to the unpredicatable and sometimes inconvenient whims of wild nature. Today, nearly 105 million acres of public land, an area slightly larger than the State of California, has been set aside to remain forever wild.

On a beautiful late-summer night on the eve of the 35th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Wilderness Watch and 14 other conservation groups hosted a grand party to celebrate the signing of the Wilderness Act. Over 250 people celebrated the theme of “saving what we have and building for the future.” The evening kicked off with noted author Rick Bass’s compelling discussion and reading about our need for Wilderness and his Herculean efforts to secure its protection for parts of the remote Yaak valley in Northwestern Montana where he lives.

Inspirational words were offered by Stewart Brandborg, former director of the Wilderness Society and WW board member, who described the history of the Act’s passage and the ongoing need for inclusive, bold, grassroots participation in the movement. Jennifer Ferenstein of the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors warned against some of the paper tigers that agencies and opponents of Wilderness set up to stymie our efforts to designate and protect Wilderness. Former Forest Supervisor Tom Kovalicky railed against the “almost, although not quite, complete departure from the care and feeding of the wilderness and wild characteristics mentioned in and objectives of the Wilderness Act of 1964” by present day managers, and he called for “a Wilderness stewardship jury - now.” Perhaps the night’s greatest applause was reserved for recognizing Brandborg, Clifton Merritt and Bill Worf, all of whom have been fighting the good fight for Wilderness since before the law passed! Long-time Wilderness supporter Walkin’ Jim Stoltz completed the celebration with his catchy tunes and soul-grabbing wilderness photos.

Our Missoula celebration even attracted the attention of Senator Russ Feingold (D - WI), who later used the anniversary to announce his convening of a Senate Wilderness caucus. So far, five U.S. Senators have joined Feingold’s efforts to raise the importance of a number of Wilderness issues in Congress.

It’s true that not everyone is crazy about Wilderness, but if you were one of the 250 or more people crammed into the Old Milwaukee train station in Missoula, Montana on the eve of the 35th Anniversay of the Wilderness Act, you’d have a hard time believing the law is anything but overwhelmingly popular. Here’s to its 35th!

Reprinted with permission by Star Tribune, Minneapolis, MN.

Thirty-five years after its passage, the Wilderness Act remains rather a radical idea — that wild lands should remain wild for their own sake and not necessarily for ours, that considerable acreage should be set aside not as parks and playgrounds but for the central purpose of remaining forever, in the language of the law, “untrammeled by man.”

As a people, we Americans set great store by a heritage in which wilderness plays a leading role. And we love our natural landscapes; most of us spend some portion of our time in the scattered fragments that remain.

But we love to trammel, too. We enjoy camping from our cars and starting a day in the woods with a hot scrub in the showerhouse. We like taking the kids to the interpretive center, eating lunch at the lodge, spending an afternoon biking through the woods on a paved path. When we visit a Yellowstone or a Yosemite and find ourselves in a traffic jam that rivals our morning commute, we are as likely as not to wonder why the road couldn’t be a bit wider.

The advocates of the Wilderness Act— including Sen. Hubert Humphrey, an initial sponsor— asked instead why there couldn’t be some sections of America without any roads at all, or any buildings, cars, motorboats and tour buses. They proposed to survey roadless federal lands for portions that might be kept available to, but unimpaired by, human visitation.

Not even the National Park Service thought this a very good idea, at the outset, and the measure went through 66 rewrites over a seven-year span before becoming law on this day in 1964.

A little over 9 million acres of land was designated as wilderness by the act, and the total has grown to something over 100 million. If that seems like a huge triumph, consider that more than half that acreage is in Alaska (one-quarter in a single unit, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). Only 4 percent of federal wilderness is east of the Mississippi River. And only 2 percent of the land mass in the lower 48 states is permanently shielded from trammeling.

Additions to the system have been few and far between in recent years, and the reasons have more to do with politics than the availability of untrammeled territory. The Wilderness Society, a 60-year old leader among advocates for wild land, makes a plausible case for enlarging the system by another 200 million acres, half of it in Alaska.

There are many good reasons for doing so, some centered on direct benefits to humankind. Wilderness offers matchless opportunities for recreation and solitude, for respite from the buzzing world. It preserves biodiversity by sheltering species and ensuring genetic variation. It serves as a laboratory for science and a classroom for education. It exports clean water to the cities.

But the most important reason, less tangible than any of those, is rooted in the right of the land itself to be in some measure unconquered, in the value of wilderness for its own sake, in the soul of a people that respects such places even if no human use is ever made of them.

— By Michael Frome

In my years covering the environmental scene in Washington, D.C., from the late 1950s until the early 1980s, I knocked on many doors in Congress, government bureaus and diverse interests around town. I went frequently to the environmental organizations, large and small, militant and mild, and met and knew, to one degree or another, all of the environmental leaders of that period.

My best source, and my best mentor, was Stewart Brandborg, executive director of the Wilderness Society. He answered many, many questions, and was patient, with good humor, in contrast with some others who I found absorbed with self-importance, snobbery and jealousy of their peers. I have never, to this day, fathomed mean-spirit among people presumably working toward common goals. With Brandborg, however, I observed that both his door and heart were open. He allowed a lot of time for a lot of people, of all different kinds, whether from the New York Times or a local citizen group from Idaho or Iowa.

I liked the way he would not quit and eschewed compromise. In the mid-sixties, when I became interested in citizen efforts to save the Little Tennessee River from being obliterated by the Tellico Dam, I went to see the conservation director of the National Wildlife Federation. “Oh, sure,” he said. “We wrote a letter.” And that was the whole campaign. With Brandborg it was all-out action, whether the cause had a chance or not — and, after all, who can foretell the ultimate consequence to hearty determined effort?

For Brandborg the Wilderness Act of 1964 opened the way to a new level of citizen involvement and activism, a grassroots conservation movement in which local people could be heard on behalf of wilderness areas they know best. He seized a provision of the act stipulating that, prior to action by Congress, public hearings must be held with advance notice on each proposed new wilderness unit in the vicinity of the lands in question. In the Spring-Summer issue of The Living Wilderness 1964 (No. 86), which actually appeared in the fall following passage and signing of the Wilderness Act, Brandborg wrote:

“In bringing these wild land areas into the Wilderness System the basic need will be public support. This can develop only with studies of each area by conservation groups at local and state levels in cooperation with the agencies responsible for administering the areas. Field reconnaissance coverage will be necessary for the definition of boundary proposals and development of protection programs that meet the wilderness preservation needs of each area. Following the completion of the recommendations from these studies an educational job must be done, both within the local communities and states, and on a broad national scale.”

Consequently the late 1960s and early 70s were exciting times, a marvelous moment in conservation history. The early training programs of the Wilderness Society, which Brandborg initiated, were great exercises, popular and productive with the grassroots groups. Harry Crandell, who worked for the Wilderness Society from 1970 to 1975, wrote about this period:

“The Society was in the forefront and led major wilderness and public land issues. We all worked together as a team, each helping the other. Successful conclusion of issues would have been highly unlikely absent citizen involvement and telephone “trees” manned by volunteers and “alerts” prepared by staff.”

Brandborg was meant for this work. He was born and raised on the Idaho-Montana wilderness frontier. His father, Guy M.(or G.M.) Brandborg, was a two-fisted populist, who joined the Forest Service in 1914 at the age of 21, committing himself through forty years in the Forest Service and retirement thereafter to leaving the earth and its resources in better condition than he found them. For twenty years as supervisor of the Bitterroot National Forest, he wrote a record of stewardship. After he retired, the Forest Service hierarchy became the victim of its love affair with clearcutting and made G.M. Brandborg’s old forest the first and worst example. He fought it tooth-and-toenail, with encouragement from old friends on the inside, until he died in 1977.

In the meantime, the younger Brandborg was graduated from the University of Montana and earned a master’s degree in wildlife science at the University of Idaho while conducting pioneering studies of mountain goats, principally in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Following his interests, he came to Washington in 1954 to work in the conservation department of the National Wildlife Federation. Two years later he was elected to the Wilderness Society Council (the board of directors) and in 1960 joined the Wilderness Society staff.

Howard Zahniser was his boss, teacher and best friend. “Zahnie” was the exemplar of patience, principle and courage, who had drafted the original Wilderness Bill in 1956 and kept pursuing the cause through eighteen congressional hearings over a period of eight years. He was the hero but passed on before the victory. An editorial by Edward J. Meeman in the Memphis Press-Scimitar of August 22, 1964 paid him tribute with the last paragraph as follows:

“Like Moses, Howard Zahniser, executive director of the Wilderness Society, who died fighting for the cause, was not here to enter the promised land of wilderness preserved. We wish he could have seen how we answered his plea that we project the wild “that has come to us from the eternity of the past into the eternity of the future.”

Brandborg was by all odds the logical successor, facing a new challenge to make the National Wilderness Preservation System a reality under terms of the law. He recognized the time and place for compromise, but felt also that paper victories create illusions rather than progress. I recall that a friend of mine, Roger Allin. Superintendent of Olympic National Park in Washington State, in the early 1970s was assigned by his superiors to prepare a wilderness proposal for his park. The regional director advised him to omit two politically controversial portions. “Then,” said the director, “we should have no difficulty in getting it through Congress.” Allin refused. “I was more concerned,” he said later, “with saving the wilderness than in getting a law passed saying that I had done so.” Or to quote S. Herbert Evison, who served for many years in the National Park Service: “We who have tried to improve conditions have been too ready to compromise. Experience shows it is better to make demands than deals.”

In Brandborg’s case, the test came in consideration before Congress of the official proposal for designation of the San Rafael Wilderness in California, the first national forest area to be reviewed after passage of the 1964 act. The Forest Service proposed a wilderness of 143,000 acres, but the California Citizens Committee for the San Rafael Wilderness felt it must hold its ground for an additional 2,200 acres. The contested area covered an unusual meadow life zone, highlighted by potreros, or grassy balds, dotted with rocky outcrops, a beautiful, unworldly scene. Inscribed among the rocks were prehistoric aboriginal cave art, considered among the best yet discovered in North America. After a hard fight in Congress, the Forest Service had its way, but it was worth the fight, for Brandborg showed the local activists that he and the Wilderness Society would stick with them on principle.

I recall also Brandborg’s role at the first public hearing on wilderness in the national parks, dealing with Great Smoky Mountains National Park and conducted at Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in 1966. The agency offered a dreadful plan, of road construction and massive campgrounds designed to intrude upon instead of protecting wilderness. Harvey Broome, president of the Wilderness Society, and his friend and hiking partner, Ernest Dickerman, both of whom lived in nearby Knoxville, mobilized the local citizens and coordinated with Brandborg to make a national issue of the Smoky Mountains wilderness.

Brandborg set the tone for the hearing at Gatlinburg when he said: “Conservationists the world over are looking to our National Park Service for exemplary leadership in safeguarding the beauty and character of natural landscape. It would be most unfortunate if the Park Service were unable to fulfill this role in the Smokies.” Others followed. “No road on earth is important enough to destroy the values inherent in these mountains,” warned one of many scientists who testified. “Saving the wilderness may be one of the few worthwhile accomplishments of this generation,” said a young mother. Witness after witness identified with love of land, idealism, the qualitative experience that must be the essence of our national parks.

The fight to protect the Smokies from their protectors continued until 1971, when the Park Service issued a new report, withdrawing its proposal for a new transmountain highway and conceding that the Smokies comprise “a natural treasure of plant and animal life living in an ecological balance that once destroyed can never be restored.”

Dickerman was impressive and effective during the Smokies fight and Brandborg hired him to conduct local leadership training programs for the Wilderness Society. He was typical of personnel on the staff. They didn’t work for the money, they worked for the cause. Or, as Dickerman wrote to me years later:

“It is the volunteers back home, the grassroots, who fundamentally get the job done. Sure, we need the national organizations and their staffs to carry the message to Congress and the agencies, no question; the direct human contact is essential. I am glad that you and I were most active directly in an earlier time when for the most part the spirit was pure and the cause felt personally!”

And when Brandborg left the Wilderness Society Dickerman left too. For Brandborg, the parting in January 1976 was unhappy and acrimonious, for he actually was discharged by the governing council that he had long served. His dismissal was explained later as a very small part of a very long article on the history of the Wilderness Society published in Wilderness (formerly Living Wilderness) for winter 1984. The author brushed off Brandborg’s role in the fight for wilderness, asserting that his work was marked by “operating at too fevered an emotional pitch,” and that he gave too much attention to Alaska and not enough to the western field staff of the Society.

Dave Foreman, who had begun his environmental career on that western field staff, was appalled and furious. In January 1986 he dashed off a hot letter to the author, Stephen Fox. Yes, conceded Foreman, there was dissatisfaction among the staff because of Brandborg’s commitment to Alaska, but that commitment clearly made the oil pipeline to the North Slope much safer and led to “the tremendous effort to safeguard over 100 million acres of parks, refuges and wild rivers in Alaska.” Foreman summarized his feeling:

“Stewart Brandborg is a great man in American conservation, full of vision, courage and a solid environmental ethic.”

That is the way I see him too, though I know Brandborg in a very personal way through long years of friendship and plead guilty to bias. Like all the rest of us, he has his weaknesses. Verbal overkill is one of them — that is, where one word will do he is likely to use two, or three. Sigurd Olson, the author, was a friend and strong supporter, but once struck back at the long and wordy letters he received: “Brandy, if you can’t say it in one page, don’t say it!”

But for commitment and courage in the crunch and unflagging energy to mobilize the troops, Brandborg stands at the head of the class. Leaving the Wilderness Society was not the end but a new beginning. He went to work organizing Conservationists for Carter, a national network that may well have made the difference in Jimmy Carter’s victory over Gerald Ford. Then he served in the government as special assistant to the director of the National Park Service, showing parks people how to relate to citizen activists.

Ultimately, after Ronald Reagan was elected president and James G. Watt took over the Department of the Interior, Brandborg returned home— home to the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, where he grew up and attended school, and where he met and courted his wife of fifty years. He and Anna Vee live with two dogs and a parrot in a handsome log home on a hill with vistas of mountain wilderness in all directions, where their five grown children and families are in and out and friends come to call from all over. The house where they live is definitely a happy home.

Part of the happiness derives from Brandborg’s continued activism and involvement. The phone is always busy with affairs of the Friends of the Bitterroot, Wilderness Watch and even, these days, the Wilderness Society. Stewart Brandborg may be in his mid-70s, but he is still going strong, looking toward the future rather than living in the past. I must say, however, that he has accounted for some choice hours in conservation history—and given me personal memories to cherish.

— By Bill Harlan

In a hushed land deal with former landowners, the National Park Service (NPS) recently dealt another blow to the battered Cumberland Island Wilderness.

The Park Service granted eternal driving rights to residents on Cumberland Island, a barrier island and National Seashore and Wilderness along the Georgia coast. The deal carves out a 103-acre enclave in the Wilderness for developments and gives residents special rights to drive all open roads and trails in the Wilderness for as long as they have an interest in the island.

“Cumberland Island Wilderness has been seriously wounded by this deal,” says Bill Worf, president of Wilderness Watch. After visiting the island in April, Worf observed that Cumberland was one of the most carefully watched wildernesses in the country right now:
“All eyes are on Cumberland. The decisions being made there in the coming months will affect wildernesses across the country.”
Park Superintendent Denis Davis claims the deal was integral to the 1100-acre land purchase from the Carnegies that added that tract to the Cumberland Island Wilderness. But Hal Wright, a Georgia lawyer who heads Defenders of Wild Cumberland, sees it differently. “This is one of the most blatant violations of Wilderness I’ve witnessed,” says Wright, who has been challenging the Park’s Wilderness abuses since 1996. The original legislation for the Wilderness granted limited-term driving rights with a definitive phase-out period to the residents of the island.

Cumberland Island Wilderness — an 8,880 acre web of marsh, maritime forest, and seashore — boasts some of the richest biodiversity on the Atlantic coast. Endangered sea turtles crawl out of the ocean under the cloak of midnight, dragging their ancient bodies across the beach. During the day, osprey circle the saltwater marshes, white-tailed deer forage on beards of Spanish moss, and alligators sun themselves in the sloughs. Part of the Atlantic flyway, the island provides critical resting and nesting ground for migratory birds and shelters several endangered species of wildlife. In 1982 part of Cumberland Island was designated Wilderness and in 1984 it was designated by the United Nations as one of only 350 international Biosphere Reserves in the world.

The Park Service bought most of Cumberland Island from Carnegie heirs and other wealthy families in 1972. The purchases allowed the residents to remain on the land, but with restrictions to protect the Wilderness from additional abuses. The NPS has chosen not to enforce the retained rights agreements or Wilderness regulations. The Cumberland Island Wilderness was designated in 1982. As a result, these wealthy families and their guests drive jeeps and four-wheelers through the Wilderness, and the feral livestock they helped introduce devour sea turtle eggs and trample sensitive island ecosystems.

“The Park Service has allowed Cumberland’s Wilderness to become a private playground for the rich and famous,” continues Wright.
It was Wright’s lawsuit in 1996 that prompted the Park Service to draft a Wilderness management plan for Cumberland. Now, both the wilderness management plan —scheduled to be released for public comment this fall — and the three-year planning process have been undermined by the Park’s eternal driving rights and permanent residency giveaway. To make matters worse, the Park Service has not yet notified the public about the deal.

“What good is a Wilderness plan without a real Wilderness?” asks Melissa Walker, Georgia chapter chair of Wilderness Watch.

Wilderness Watch Policy Coordinator’s Note:

The agreement brokered by the NPS and landowners violates the Wilderness Act, is an insult to legal public involvement requirements, threatens native biodiversity and sets a precedent for similiar negotiations in Wildernesses across the country. At printing time, the Park Service at Cumberland Island had refused to provide information about the retained rights agreements that allow driving in the Wilderness unless Wilderness Watch pays a significant fee.