Wilderness Preservation: It Began in the East!
By Ed Zahniser, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
It is great to see new energy going into protecting wilderness in West Virginia. Organizing to protect wilderness in the eastern United States is a tradition that reaches back to the 19th century. This tradition also shows that the wilderness preservation movement and the Wilderness Act were not 1950s upstarts, not newcomers to the American conservation movement. On the contrary, the wilderness preservation movement harks back to just after the Civil War and the quickening of Americans’ concern to protect their federal public lands in their natural state.
The great wilderness champion Robert “Bob” Marshall was the driving force behind organizing The Wilderness Society in 1935. It is a little known fact, however, that Bob Marshall was a second-generation wilderness activist. His father, Louis Marshall, the great champion of civil liberties, was a voting member of the 1894 New York State Constitutional Convention that wrote the “forever wild” clause into the state’s constitution to protect wildlands in the Adirondacks and Catskills. And it was Louis Marshall who led the floor fight at the 1915 Constitutional convention that successfully defended the “forever wild” clause. In a speech to New Yorkers in the 1950s, my father Howard Zahniser referred to New York State’s resulting Forest Preserve lands as “where wilderness preservation began.”
The insertion of the “forever wild” clause into New York’s constitution in 1894 actually put the cap on efforts begun in the 1870s to protect Adirondack and Catskill forested wildlands from private commercial exploitation and despoliation. What immediately sparked New Yorkers’ concern to protect their forests was the fact that in 1871 they found themselves net importers of wood fiber for first time in their history. It was a rude awakening. Also, the publication of George Perkins Marsh’s book Man and Nature in 1864 had alerted people to the grave dangers to watersheds posed by indiscriminate logging of forested lands.
It is crucial to remember what was going on in the national conservation scene from the 1870s to the 1890s. That was in fact when John Muir, Robert Underwood Johnson, and others were trying to get the Forest Reserves established on federal public lands. This they succeeded in doing in 1891. Notice the similarity in wording: forest reserve and forest preserve. New Yorkers accomplished in their own backyard in 1894 what the nation had done on federal public lands in 1891.
The difference, however—and the significance for the Wilderness Act of 1964—is that New Yorkers made their “forever wild” designation stick. It is still in force today. On the forests of the federal public lands, however, the original Forest Reserves were redesignated as National Forests open to exploitation for fiber, forage, and minerals. The Wilderness Act is an overlay to federal lands that can be seen as restoring a level of protection once provided for in the original Forest Reserves. Indeed, my father wrote in a 1946 journal that the “forever wild” clause might be a model for protecting wilderness on the federal public lands. Today, New York State’s wilderness system and the National Wilderness Preservation System share the same definition of wilderness.
As West Virginians work to protect the wilderness areas of the federal public lands in our state, then, we do so in a tradition harking back to the mid-19th century. But wilderness preservation also serves a very modern and even futuristic purpose. As Dave Foreman of the Wildlands Project has asserted, wilderness protection is the best strategy for protecting the core natural areas that are crucial to creating connected wildlands that can ensure survival of keystone predators. This strategy has also been affirmed by Bill Meadows, president of The Wilderness Society, whose program of a Network of Wildlands shares the principles of conservation biology underlying the Wildlands Project, on whose board Bill Meadows serves.
It seems so utterly suitable to me that West Virginians protect substantial areas of wilderness on the common legacy of federal public lands within our border. Our state motto is that “Mountaineers are always free.” Ultimately, this means we are free to be who we are. The Wilderness Act serves to protect “the freedom of the wilderness” that Bob Marshall wrote about in the 1930s. In explicitly protecting “natural conditions” and “wilderness character,” the Wilderness Act intends that the wilderness should be free to be itself in perpetuity.
What could be more truly conservative than to preserve in perpetuity the “natural conditions” that Aldo Leopold credited as the basis of our civilization? And yet opponents of wilderness call wilderness preservation an elitist posture. I prefer the counter view of anthropologist Richard Nelson. Nelson calls conservation the true patriotism, the true defense of the land. We should be very proud of our work. Again, I am delighted to see new energy going into protecting wilderness and wildness in West Virginia.