Wilderness Visionaries: Robert Marshall, John Muir, Sigurd F. Olson, Calvin Rutstrum, Robert Service, Henry David Thoreau
By Jim Dale Vickery
The term land use planning is commonly used to describe urban or suburban planning on a local or regional scale. The original conservationists, men like Thoreau, Muir and Marshall, used it on a national scale. Wilderness Visionaries allows us the chance to share the experiences of these men, all accomplished authors who used the spoken word to promote the protection of natural resources. As each passed the torch to the next the amount of land preserved for its intrinsic value, for nature’s sake, and for the sake of future generations increased. Each visionary spoke his message in the language of his generation. As the world gradually became more mechanized, population bases became more centralized and the wild areas became “civilized”, each reminded us to listen for the call of the wild.
I approached this book with some knowledge of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, but the other visionaries' stories were unknown to me. I enjoyed very much Mr. Vickery’s voice, and the way he followed the evolution of wilderness preservation as it progressed from Henry David Thoreau’s time in the early 1800s through Sigurd F. Olson’s death in the late twentieth century.
Vickery chose to write about these particular men because of their influence on his life as a Minnesotan who loved nature, and their monumental impact on the conservation and preservation movements in the United States and in Canada. All six explored parts of the Minnesota wilderness at one time or another. Vickery began researching this book in the 70s. Over the next 15 years he canoed and hiked many of the routes these wilderness pioneers followed to better understand the forces that formed their visions.
While I admire all six visionaries, I will focus on Thoreau, Muir and Marshall because they most advanced land use planning in the U.S. Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. Wilderness preservation and land use planning weren’t concerns in Thoreau’s time because people lived closer to nature, and there was enough land for all. Private property wasn’t as restricted as it is now. For instance, when Thoreau built his little (10' x 15') house on Walden Pond he was actually squatting on the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson’s farm. The land was there and Thoreau made good use of it. Emerson and he became fast friends until death separated them.
Thoreau is the first to speak to audiences both of his time and succeeding generations of the wild areas, their importance to humans and their "intangible" value. He believed “In wildness is the preservation of the world” (2). His message of conservation and preservation was picked up by the other visionaries as the importance of land use planning became better understood. John Muir and Thoreau never met, but the younger man was as committed to preservation as Thoreau ever was.
John Muir emigrated to the U.S. from Scotland in 1849 to homestead a farm with his father. Muir was a child of the 19th century. When he came of age he roamed at will, taking jobs when necessary and exploring the wilderness whenever possible. The land was becoming more industrialized, and Muir was sick about it. His beloved sequoias were being harvested at an alarming rate. Too big to saw, they were dynamited, which created a tremendous amount of waste. “What happened in America’s East, the logging, plowing, mining and developing, now knocked on the door of the Pacific Coast, where some of the continent’s last forest sanctuaries soughed in eternal winds”(78).
As one of the founders and as the first president of the Sierra Club (until his death) Muir worked to preserve the sequoias by pushing to create the forest service. He especially worked to end grazing rights on public land. Muir believed that with “institutionalized stewardship” forests would be protected and preserved so they could be saved for future generations, and for their own sake. He was only partially rewarded when Congress passed the Forest Management Act of 1897. Instead of fully protecting forests, the act allowed “the nation to be furnished with a continuous supply of lumber” (91). John Muir would have been very pleased with the continued efforts of Robert (Bob) Marshall to preserve the wilderness of North America.
Bob Marshall only lived to the age of thirty-eight, but many say that by the time he died in 1939 he had done “as much, if not more than, any American to sound the alarm against inroads on our wilderness and to promote long-range scientific programs for its preservation” (129). Independently wealthy, Marshall was the primary financial supporter of the Wilderness Society, leaving it one quarter of his estate upon his death. As a founding member of its board of directors, and as the Director of Forestry of the Office of Indian Affairs (precursor to the Bureau of Indian Affairs), Marshall recognized that “As society becomes more and more mechanized, it will be more and more difficult for many people to stand the nervous strain, the high pressure, and the drabness of their lives” (142). Marshall worked tirelessly so that wilderness would be available for people to enjoy by “cutting all bonds of habit and drifting into the timeless continuity of the primeval” (143). By planning how the land was used, Marshall hoped to save it.
These visionaries were similar in many ways: they loved nature and the wilderness, they wrote prolifically and poetically to the audiences of their times about land use, and their words continue to inspire us to find ways to preserve nature for its own sake. These fathers of land conservation and preservation recognized the importance of keeping the wilderness experience in our daily lives. Their wisdom and vision lives on in their words, there for any of us who would listen, and act.
Vickery, Jim D. Wilderness Visionaries. Merrillville, IN: ICS Books, Inc., 1986.
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