The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [150]
Primitive America is vanishing with appalling rapidity. Scarcely a month passes in which some highway does not invade an area which since the beginning of time had known only natural modes of travel; or some last remaining virgin timber tract is not shattered by the construction of an irrigation project into an expanding and contracting mud flat; or some quiet glade hitherto disturbed only by birds and insects and wind in the trees, does not bark out the merits of “Crazy Water Crystals” and the mushiness of “Cocktails for Two.”58
Under the enterprising leadership of Marshall and Yard, The Wilderness Society deliberately limited its membership. Approximately 500 dedicated fighters seemed about right. Compromisers weren’t welcomed. “We want no straddlers,” Marshall said. “For in the past they have surrendered too much good wilderness and primeval forest which should never have been lost.”59 The headquarters for The Wilderness Society was Yard’s apartment at 1840 Mintwood Place in Washington, D.C. An advertisement-free magazine, the Living Wilderness, was issued; its main feature was an attempt to stop road construction in Idaho’s Selway-Salmon river region and Washington’s North Cascades and Olympic Mountains. By October 1935 Marshall was in southeast Utah fighting to maintain 1 million acres of roadless wilderness. A movement had begun.
Marshall was wise to cofound The Wilderness Society with seventy-four-year-old Robert “Bob” Sterling Yard. Born during the Civil War in Haverstraw, New York, Yard was an old-style gentleman, the kind of man who tipped his hat and never swore. He had graduated from Princeton University and become a leading journalist and editor in New York City. One of his closest friends had been Stephen Mather, a fine reporter who went on to become the founding director of the National Park Service. Yard quit his career as a journalist to become the vital advocate of protecting wild and scenic America. Unlike Marshall, he had a calming personality that never grated on anyone.
A ferocious worker, Yard started a letter-writing campaign on behalf of The Wilderness Society that was stunningly impressive. Membership drives, public photographs, and lyceums were all part of Yard’s programming agenda, based on the gospel of “wilderness salvation.” He became the first editor of the Living Wilderness, perhaps the most important circular promoting Alaska’s nature heritage in the Tongass and Chugach. “The spirit of the forest is American,” he wrote in 1936. “It moves indomitably against all obstructions.”60
With The Wilderness Society up and running, and Yard handling the daily logistics, Marshall advocated on behalf of Arctic Alaska. Capitalizing on his appointment as director of forestry for the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1937, and later as head of recreation management for the U.S. Forest Service, Marshall kept asking this question: Why not have Alaska’s North Slope designated a wilderness area? In a report he wrote for the U.S. government in 1937, building on The Wilderness Society’s mandate, Marshall called for “all of Alaska north of the Yukon River” (minus a small area around Nome) to be officially declared wilderness. There should be no roads or congestion, just wilderness with caribou herds roaming free and birdlife thriving as if industrialization had never happened. It would be a sublime place with brilliant patches of tundra and wildflowers. An Arctic refuge would be cathartic for city dwellers, a vast treeless landscape uncompromised by jackhammers, smog, or bulldozers. In the future, someone like Thoreau could wander on snowshoes to the northernmost Arctic, camping along the Hulahula or Kongakut river in June, and warding off mosquitoes