President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964, four months after Howard Zahniser’s deat, with his widow Alice Zahniser and Maudie Murie looking on. Photo courtesy Abby Rowe, National Parks Service, Harpers Ferry Center.
Iconic figures loom large in environmental history: Henry David Thoreau, turning his back on civilization to live as one with nature; Bob Marshall, tramping for days through the wilderness; Edward Abbey, living large in the desert.
These charismatic heroes inspired subsequent generations and shaped our thinking about wilderness and environmental issues. They bore witness to the beauty and the importance of nature, and their writings have become canons of the environmental movement, dissected in literature classes, enshrined as slogans and memorialized on bumper stickers. Their impact remains significant.
But legions of people toiling at their desks in dusty nonprofits know that working for environmental protections is rarely as dramatic as lashing yourself to a treetop to better experience the fury of a storm. For those, and for anyone interested in wilderness preservation, the story of Howard Zahniser, eloquently told by Mark Harvey in Wilderness Forever: Howard Zahniser and the Path to the Wilderness Act (University of Washington Press, 2005), will inspire and elate. Zahniser, a quiet, persistent and unfailingly polite man, spent his entire career in the nation’s capital, first as a government bureaucrat and then as the executive secretary of the Wilderness Society. His legacy is perhaps the most significant piece of wilderness legislation in our time: the Wilderness Act of 1964.
The Wilderness Act secured for the American people “the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness” and established a 9.1-million-acre wilderness preservation system. It defined wilderness areas as places “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Zahniser relied on his political acumen, his public relations skills and his love of language to convince Congress and public land agency managers that wilderness was worthy of protection in perpetuity.
It would seem that bureaucratic maneuverings might make for an uninspired read, but in fact, just the opposite is true. Zahniser, born in 1906, was a thoughtful and well-educated man. Through extensive research and Zahniser’s meticulous journals, Harvey has framed the beginnings of the modern environmental movement against a background of the tumultuous events of the first half of the twentieth century.
Zahniser was named the executive secretary of the Wilderness Society in 1946, after a decade spent working first for the Department of Commerce, and then for the U.S. Biological Survey. Leaving the security of a government job for the unknown territory of a nonprofit organization, particularly when nonprofits were in their infancy, was a risky move for a man with a wife and four young children.
But during his government years, Zahniser wrote a monthly column for Nature, and his thoughts about the importance of the natural world were evolving. The unleashing of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II was a pivotal point for him. He was horrified at the destruction of human life, and also feared that the bomb’s development would overshadow the importance of the natural world, elevating the work of physicists and chemists at the expense of biologists and wildlife managers.
His appointment to the Wilderness Society was controversial, coming as it did when the founder of the society, Robert Sterling Yard, became too ill to continue leading the fledgling organization. Society supporters, including Benton Mackay and Aldo Leopold, recognized Zahniser’s talents as a writer and an editor, but saw his lack of wilderness background as an obstacle. They resolved this issue by hiring Zahniser as the executive secretary and Olaus Murie as the executive director. Murie, a prominent biologist, had no desire to leave his ranch in Moose, Wyoming, but he provided an inspirational public face, leaving Zahniser to dig into the day-to-day managerial work: fund-raising, membership recruitment, budgeting and lobbying.
Zahniser’s initial challenge, and his main interest, was editing the Wilderness Society’s quarterly magazine, Living Wilderness. Much to the dismay of some on the executive council, he abandoned the spare format of his predecessor and began to include more pictures and a wide range of essays. Zahniser’s detractors feared change would alienate long-time society members, but he argued that the organization’s interests were best served by expanding the definition and the accessibility of wilderness to a broader audience. During his tenure, he coaxed the publication into a first-class literary magazine celebrating wild nature, and from 1945 to 1948, the Wilderness Society increased its membership from 500 to more than 3,500.
Zahniser understood by the early 1950s that keeping wilderness places intact was essentially a political task. He knew that environmental protection was not a given, even as he felt more than ever the urgent sense that industrialization could take over and erase these unique places forever. The steady and sometimes frustrating battles to protect one pristine area after another led Zahniser to conclude that wilderness must be protected proactively, rather than reactively.
When the Wilderness Bill was introduced in 1956, it met opposition from all sides. The National Park Service, which at first seemed on board, argued that protecting wild areas was already part of its mission. The U.S. Forest Service claimed that wilderness protection ran counter to its multiple-use mandate. Some charged that the bill was elitist: if recreationists were given special consideration, logging, mining and other industries would demand equal consideration.
But Zahniser’s skillful lobbying and persistent political maneuvering saw the bill through to its final signing, although he did not live to witness it. Four months before President Johnson signed the bill into law on September 3, 1964, Zahniser died of a heart attack in his sleep.
Wilderness Forever reminds us that it’s not always the fist-shakers and the rabble-rousers who get things done. Sometimes, it’s the detail man who sees things through.