The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [138]
Throughout his months in alpine Montana Marshall corresponded with his family and friends about the Northern Rocky Mountain Forest Experiment Station. Nobody before or since has written about western Montana’s green-gold somnolence with as much grace as Marshall, who described everything from jackrabbits to larch needles. And his personality as a naturalist was gaining tangible professional benefits. Between 1925 and 1928 he wrote several articles on forestry, lumberjack culture, and wilderness preservation. Using the Forest Service’s national newsletter (the Service Bulletin) as his pulpit, Marshall sided with the case against roads that the young forester Aldo Leopold was making for Gila National Forest in New Mexico. Leopold and Marshall both wanted primitive areas of national forests to be declared roadless, free of all construction—vast tracts of public lands saved from the press of modern humanity.
Sometimes the death of one conservationist seemed to coincide with the birth of another. On September 21, 1928, Charles Sheldon died in Nova Scotia, Canada, leaving behind his voluminous unpublished Alaskan journals (known in the Boone and Crockett Club to be immensely rich in detail about the Denali wilderness). Sheldon had received modest public acclaim—he was called the father of Mount McKinley National Park. And he had a legion of friends, having served on the board of directors of the National Parks Association, the National Recreation Committee, and the National Geographic Society, and as chairman of the Commission on the Conservation of the Jackson Hole Elk. Indeed, his list of affiliations was so long that he probably lost track of them himself. Nobody, it seemed, had done more than Sheldon to save interior Alaska. The snowcapped mountains of the Alaska Range were his life story. There was a lyrical intensity to everything Sheldon did on behalf of Dall sheep and caribou. As when Muir died in 1914, Sheldon’s death left a void in the conservation movement, particularly in Alaska—a void that Bob Marshall would soon fill.
Meanwhile, in the fall of 1928, Marshall enrolled in Johns Hopkins University’s PhD program in plant physiology. His goal was nothing less than permanently altering the course of U.S. forest policy. Already, his landmark article in the U.S. Forest Service Bulletin—“Wilderness as a Minority Right”—was being acclaimed by nature enthusiasts of all stripes as a major intellectual breakthrough, a long-overdue articulation of the right to open space, miles upon miles in extent. Much of his time in Baltimore was spent in greenhouse laboratories conducting experiments with evergreen and conifer seeds. Companies such as Weyerhaeuser Lumber had destroyed great forestlands, and Marshall vowed to reverse this trend. Rising at five o’clock in the morning, Marshall would toil away until eleven at night, determined to learn the secrets of soil composition. Defining himself first and foremost as a conservationist, he believed scientists should engage in political advocacy: that is, more stringent federal regulation of “big timber.” He published articles in the Nation (“Forest Devastation Must Stop”) and in the Journal of Forestry (“A Proposed Remedy for Our Forestry Illness”).17 The League for Industrial Democracy issued a thirty-six-page pamphlet written by Marshall, promoting the undeniable virtues of public forests over private ones. Minimal impact became his creed.
Bored by his academic career but refusing to feel boxed in, the twenty-eight-year-old Marshall organized a scientific trip to the unmapped Brooks Range—named after Alfred Hulse Brooks, who served