Address given on Saturday, April 28^th, 2001 at the 35th Annual West Virginia Highlands Conservancy Spring Review

How great to be here with you tonight, talking about wilderness and wildness in West Virginia. That’s what we’re supposed to do: talk about wilderness and wildness where we live. There’s not a prayer for perpetuity in a wilderness and wildness located only out there. We must bring wilderness and wildness home where we live. Wilderness and wildness right here in West Virginia: so this is a special honor for me: to be with you tonight for wilderness.

When Steve Hollenhorst was still teaching at West Virginia University, he invited me there to talk to one of his wilderness classes and to a faculty seminar. I first met Steve and your Dave Saville at the Santa Fe wilderness conference in 1994. I’m in touch with Steve often by e-mail, and Steve wishes he could be here. You can take Steve out of West Virginia, but you can’t take West Virginia out of Steve. Let me tell you what a charge it is for me to talk to the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy about wilderness and wildness in West Virginia. Because I know who you are. Because I know where you’ve been. Because I know what you have done for wilderness in West Virginia. And I have a feeling you will do a whole lot more real soon to designate even more wilderness in West Virginia.

Didn’t Dave Saville do a great job putting together the 35th Annual Spring Review newspaper "Celebrating West Virginia’s Wilderness?" If you haven’t devoured it cover to cover, I hope you will do so as soon as you get home. It was such a trip for me to read the 1975 Highlands Voice reprint about the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act passing. And then to turn that page and read the Highlands Voice reprint about the victory for the Cranberry Backcountry and Laurel Fork wilderness areas.

And the reprint of the editorial by Ron Hardway from the January 1975 Highlands Voice was really inspiring. You must read that. It’s like reading our organizational roots, the Highland Conservancy’s family tree. The editorial is about the creation of the Dolly Sods and Otter Creek wilderness areas. Ron Hardway says this: "The Conservancy has gained many things from this bitter wilderness fight besides two wilderness areas. We have come of age as an organization, leaving behind us the days of a handful of letter writers and an occasional group picnic or hike."

Isn’t that great stuff? What a great genealogy? Ron Hardway says it right there: the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy has a wilderness genealogy. "We have come of age as an organization. . ." he writes. Well, didn’t Aldo Leopold tell us 70 years ago that wilderness builds good citizens? How true. Wilderness builds good citizens groups, too. Advocating wilderness builds good citizens and good citizens groups. Advocating wilderness has helped democratize the American political process.

In her doctoral dissertation about the conservation rhetoric of David Brower, Professor Susan Senecah, a New York State wilderness advocate, makes the point that before the wilderness bill campaign in the second half of the 1950's, the Congressional process was not open to public citizens. We take today’s rather open Congressional committee process for granted now, but we should not. Not only should we not take it for granted, we should take credit for it. The 1950's was still the time of the proverbial smoke-filled room, with Congressional committee chairmen – yes, mostly men – brokering the deal and personally killing right in their committee any bill they didn’t like. That happened to two wilderness bills in the House committee in the 1950's.

Grassroots organizing by wilderness advocates began to change that. Grassroots organizing by the Wilderness Society and Sierra Club in the early 1950's began to open up the Congressional process to democracy. As the Wilderness Society and Sierra Club organized nationwide to defeat the dam proposal at Echo Park within Dinosaur National Monument, these wilderness advocates signaled a big change coming for Congress. Then, surprised by their own victory at defeating the Echo Park Dam, my father, Howard Zahniser, and David Brower turned this first national conservation coalition toward pursuing a wilderness bill.

Doug Scott at the Pew Wilderness Center calls the Echo Park fight the most important conservation campaign of the 20th century. He’s not the only one to say this. And Doug is not ignoring the National Environmental Policy Act or the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in saying that. This may surprise you now, but a great deal of the political muscle, the grassroots political muscle for the big win at Echo Park came from the Federation of National and State Garden Clubs and the national Women’s Clubs. That was 1955.

My father, Zahnie as he was known, had been patiently building partnerships with organizations like that since 1945. There was no environmental movement in the 1950's and 1960's. That came later. That’s why the conservationists’ Echo Park campaign was so important. It put wilderness in the organizational bloodstream of the American conservation movement. It injected wilderness into conservation’s genealogy. So you share this great wilderness genealogy with the rest of your colleagues – past, present, and future – this great cloud of witnesses in the American conservation movement.

That’s the birthright Ron Hardway was claiming in his 1975 editorial in the Highlands Voice. "The Conservancy has gained many things from this bitter wilderness fight besides two wilderness areas. We have come of age as an organization. . ." Yes, as Aldo Leopold said, wilderness builds good citizens. But more than that: wilderness builds good government. The West Virginia Highlands Conservancy was born before Earth Day. Your own institutional memory knows that the Wilderness Act’s citizen wilderness review process -- your process that won the Dolly Sods and Otter Creek wilderness areas -- that process trained many movers and shakers of the original Earth Day. What a legacy – and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy shares that legacy to your very roots.

I worked for the Wilderness Society in the early 1970's. I know firsthand that the Highlands Conservancy was out there doing the grassroots organizing for public hearings on wilderness designation then. One of my three main jobs – if you work for non-profits you know you always have more than one main job. One of my three main jobs at the Wilderness Society was to produce all the public hearing alerts for all the wilderness reviews going on then. The reviews had been mandated by the Wilderness Act’s passage in 1964. They were all supposed to be done by 1974.

I was working at the Wilderness Society with Ernie Dickerman, Harry Crandall, Doug Scott, Raye Page, and others to crank out these public hearing alerts that summarized the citizen proposals for these wilderness areas up for legislative review for designation. I remember so well the West Virginia Highland Conservancy’s name from those years. I remember so well Ken Hechler’s name from those years. Ken Hechler came last year to our annual Earth Daytona Festival at Shepherd College. What a role model Ken Hechler is. He’s a West Virginia state treasure. I hope you engage him in your wilderness work.

I have lived in West Virginia since 1977, but I know that many West Virginians do not consider the Eastern Panhandle, where I live, as part of West Virginia. To show you how ignorant I am about geology, when my wife and I moved to the Eastern Panhandle, I asked a real estate agent if subsurface rights came with the house. The agent explained that in the Eastern Panhandle, we don’t have coal, we have limestone. We have karst topography. When I reflected on that later, I felt a bit like Golda Meir. "Everybody thinks we Jews are so smart," Golda Meir once told a reporter, "but we settled the only part of the Middle East with no oil." My wife Christine Duewel and I settled in the part of West Virginia that has no coal. We don’t cut the tops off our mountains in the Eastern Panhandle. Instead, we smother our farms with spec houses. We could use a strong presence of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy in the Eastern Panhandle, but I don’t want to distract you from wilderness advocacy and fighting mountaintop removal and Corridor H.

I am also a member of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and we have been proud to host OVEC in Shepherdstown. Their work is so important, too. Maybe they will kick in with you on preserving wilderness -- only Congress can cut the top off a mountain that is designated wilderness.

Even in West Virginia, we have wilderness neighbors. Kirk Johnson of the Allegheny Defense Project in Clarion, Pennsylvania sent me a couple interesting paragraphs from the 1986 Allegheny National Forest plan. Kirk and his colleagues are organizing to get more Wilderness designated on the Allegheny National Forest. That forest’s 1986 plan says the Monogahela National Forest has the nearest designated federal wilderness to the Allegheny. You can read about the Allegheny Defense Project’s work in Kirk Johnson’s articles in the 35th Annual Spring Review newspaper "Celebrating West Virginia's Wilderness." Kirk also told me he wishes he could be here for this weekend.

My father was born in 1906 in Franklin, Pennsylvania but considered Tionesta, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny National Forest area, his home town. In fact, he is buried in the Riverside Cemetery at Tionesta, Pennsylvania, just downriver from two wilderness islands in the Allegheny River. The islands are part of the Allegheny National Forest. Kirk Johnson has proposed to the State of Pennsylvania that a roadside historical marker near Tionesta describe my father’s work on the 1964 Wilderness Act. The marker has been approved for siting this year, but the site is not certain yet. I wanted to share with you -- in the spirit of my father’s lively sense of humor -- that there is a certain irony in this historical marker for me and my siblings.

Our father was a real nut about reading historical markers. This was before the heyday of Interstate highways. We traveled on U.S. highways like Route 50 through West Virginia and Route 62 by Tionesta. My father insisted on stopping at nearly every historical marker and reading it aloud, or asking one of us to read it aloud. It drove us kids crazy. So I said to my siblings a couple weeks ago, "Isn’t this ironic? Even from beyond the grave, Dad is making us read another historical marker!" In fact, we are all very proud of the commemoration of our father’s work and the recognition this will give to wilderness preservation, but I couldn’t resist sharing that nice bit of irony with you.

My father’s father was named Archibald Howard McElrath Zahniser. There’s a name, huh? He was an essentially unsalaried evangelical Christian minister when my father was very young. In the year of my grandfather’s death in 1938, in the last quarter of that last year of his life, his journal reveals that he made more than 200 pastoral calls on individuals and families. By then my grandfather had given up pastoring to become a district elder in his denomination, with several congregations under his spiritual oversight. That work is what took the family to Tionesta, where they settled in and my father would graduate from high school. My grandfather was like a full-time lobbyist for souls. His oldest surviving child Howard Zahniser would become a lobbyist for preserving wilderness, but Zahnie’s lobbying style was a great deal like my grandfather’s pastoral calling.

In orthodox Christian theology, we have all fallen short of the mark. Churches are not museums for saints but hospitals for sinners. A pastoral call never takes no for an ultimate answer. It may table the motion but not take no for an answer. And because we are all in that same theological canoe, we should not personalize whatever disagreement separates us from the other person. We can only all be redeemed together – much as in the Bodhisattva vow of Buddhism – even if this takes an eternity. And so we live in hope.

Zahnie brought traits of this upbringing to his work for wilderness. He projected an end-times hope that we would all one day take this wonderful step together – the creation of a National Wilderness Preservation System. Zahnie did not attack the opponent as a person. His arch nemesis and opponent on the wilderness bill was the powerful Colorado Congressman Wayne M. Aspinall, chairman of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. But Zahnie and Aspinall became genuine friends. They were friends despite the fact that Aspinall repeatedly violated House rules to block the wilderness bill, which they both knew had the votes on the House floor. Zahnie and Aspinall became genuine friends despite the fact that Zahnie raised a lot of Cain in Aspinall’s home Congressional district.

Stewart Udall once said that Aspinall had all the characteristics, both good and bad, of a hedgehog and that Aspinall was the last of the Congressional committee chairmen to run his committee as though only his vote counted. Still, these adversaries respected each other. Zahnie’s college chum and lifelong associate Paul H. Oehser once wrote in Backpacker magazine that "Even [Zahnie’s] adversaries in the wilderness cause (I don’t think he had any enemies) grew to respect and love him. He was persuasive but never caustic or vindictive . . . And this was the backbone of his integrity and effectiveness."

The many references in Zahnie’s wilderness writings to enduring, to perpetuity, and to the eternity of the past and future testify to this hope that we are all a part of, but that is larger than each of us.

This idea of working for eternity is a powerful draw to wilderness preservation work, maybe especially for young people. At the Wilderness 2000 conference in Denver last year, there were three young people representing the Student Conservation Association. The three students served as a panel for a concurrent session about recruiting young people to the wilderness movement. By the time of their panel session we had all heard Doug Scott talk about the idea of a "Wilderness Forever Future," and we had all seen a narrated slideshow of spectacularly beautiful wilderness. At the students panel, one of the students, Rebecca Dean, said she had been captivated by the beauty of the wilderness in the slide show, and then, she said, "When [Doug Scott] said we are working for eternity, that really got to me."

But isn’t that what working for wilderness preservation in perpetuity promises, working for eternity?

Zahnie came to the Wilderness Society in 1945 after the death of Robert Sterling Yard, who had functioned as the Society’s entire staff and edited its then occasional magazine The Living Wilderness. Yard’s job would be split between the bedroll biologist Olaus J. Murie, who became director, working out of Moose, Wyoming, and Zahnie, who became executive secretary and magazine editor with half-time clerical help. That was the Wilderness Society in 1945!

There were few members then but a new realization. The Wilderness Society must build bridges with other public lands advocates and friends to broaden support for wilderness protection. The bridge-building paid of ten years later in the coalition that defeated the Echo Park dam proposal.

The job of building bridges of cooperation for wilderness will never be done. Aldo Leopold might have couched this outreach effort in ecological terms, calling it widening the boundaries of the community. As you go about your own Wilderness advocacy work, you are surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses. You may still be in the minority, but you are never alone.

I know you have a lot on your agenda, with the Blackwater Canyon, mountaintop removal, and other important issues. "How can we work on wilderness and all this other stuff?" you may ask. Well, I believe that work for wilderness – working for eternity in the now – will inspire people. I believe it will bring in more people. There are places on your forest that, except for mechanized travel, are already managed as wilderness. They need to be protected as wilderness.

There is a new and very powerful ally out there on the conservation horizon today. It is our faith communities. The West Virginia Council of Churches, for example, has a campaign underway to get West Virginia, a coal state, to come out for limitations to global warming. I know: a few years ago we would have chuckled about that. But faith communities have now awakened to the connection between ecology and social justice. Remember how the religious lobby saved the Endangered Species Act? They shamed Congress off sinking Noah’s Ark. That connection between the environment and social justice reaches all the way back to the Transcendentalists, to Margaret Sarah Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau in the mid-19th century. And faith communities are organized the same way politics is organized, locally. Faith communities are organized locally. Within the denomination of my faith community, the Presbyterian Church USA, we have a creation theology action arm called Presbyterians For Restoring Creation. And our denomination also has a Presbyterian Washington Office that lobbies for social and environmental justice as part of what we call our Stewardship of Public Life. These faith communities are great allies for you. Connect with them.

As Doug Scott points out, the fundamental law of Congress has not been repealed. And what is this fundamental law of Congress? It is that the overall Congress instinctively defers to local representatives and senators. "This makes our burden the same old one," Doug writes, "grassroots organizing," and then Doug adds "by which I do not mean organizing the saved, but saving new souls."

As Brian O’Donnell says, Virginia has just succeeded with a great wilderness campaign in political hard times, and Pennsylvania is gearing up. Let’s not let West Virginia be the missing link in what should be a regional drive for more wilderness designations.

John Hay suggests in his book The Immortal Wilderness that wilderness is not simply designated areas. Wilderness is the very texture of our true, natural lives, the whole interpenetrating system of things. Hay calls wilderness "the earth's immortal genius." Gary Snyder likens wilderness to the system of planetary intelligence. Wilderness is both the DNA of human culture and the organizing intelligence of planetary life. I don’t think we have properly recognized the Wilderness Act’s truly incredible significance as a major sociopolitical step toward something like a land ethic. I don’t think we have properly recognized the Wilderness Act’s significance as an extension of ethical regard to the whole of life. I think designated wilderness is like an ethical womb space for the gestation of a land ethic. I think designated wilderness is like the turning point in human being’s relation with our home planet. In deciding that there are some places we are going to leave alone to be themselves, we have created an ethical space in which we can re-find ourselves in our true and proper role, as my father described it, as members of the whole interdependent community of life on Earth that derives its life from the Sun.

Working for wilderness is a great challenge that demands passion and commitment and patience. Aldo Leopold's patient and astute ecological observations were driven by passion. Passion forged them into a philosophy. Read or re-read his books. Robert Marshall rallied a spirited grassroots band of wilderness defenders. Rejoin those ranks. Rachel Carson studied buckets of sea water, teaching herself to write all along, and eventually wrote Silent Spring, the book that questioned the effluents of our affluence and changed American life forever. Emulate Rachel Carson.

Ours is an errand into the West Virginia wilderness that none of us here tonight will see completed. Because we are working for eternity. Ally yourself with hope. Remember Ron Hardway writing in 1975 of your historic wilderness campaigns, "We have come of age as an organization.." Yes, we have a wilderness genealogy. We are working for eternity - and the Cranberry Backcountry campaign only took 12 years. We are working for eternity – and the Wilderness Act campaign took only nine years. This is like a relay race, isn't it? Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, Olaus Murie, and Howard Zahniser did not live to see the Congress pass and the president sign the Wilderness Act. In fact, my father once said that creating a National Wilderness Preservation System was not even as important in itself as the fact that so many of us would one day take that step together. That step is now a 37-year journey-and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy was in the thick of it by 1967. So I challenge us, wilderness is our roots. Wilderness is our genealogy. Who else but the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy can and will do it here in West Virginia? We have wilderness in the blood. Let’s go and re-imagine more designated wilderness on the land.

Ed Zahniser is the youngest child of Howard Zahniser, the chief architect of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Ed lives in Shepherdstown, WV, with his wife Christine Duewel and their son Eric Duewel-Zahniser. Another son, Justin Duewel-Zahniser attends West Virginia University. Ed has worked with the publications group of the National Park Service since 1977 in Harpers Ferry, WV. He edited Where Wilderness Preservation Began: Adirondack Writings of Howard Zahniser (North Country Books, 1992) and is the author of three books of poems, The Ultimate Double Play (1974), The Way to Heron Mountain (1984) and A Calendar of Worship (1994). He was the contributing editor of and a contributing author to the North American Book of Trees (1995) published by the trade division of Readers Digest Books. He is also the author and/or editor of several official National Park Handbooks.