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By Root 2979 0

From the Great Depression to Watergate, Douglas composed vivid prose sketches about the American valleys and mountain ranges that had stolen his heart. The Olympics, Wallowas, and Brooks Range consumed his imagination even when the Court was in session. A glint in his eye indicated to his colleagues that he was thinking about fly-fishing in the Middle Fork of the Salmon or on the Quillayute River. Douglas, who had climbed in the high Himalayas, encouraged groups like the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society—he was an active member of both nonprofit societies—to bring class-action suits against despoilers of the American landscape. When Douglas received the John Muir Award from the Sierra Club in June 1975, he noted that his “view” of “policy in environmental matters” came from the “powerful influences” of Buddhism, Gifford Pinchot, Clarence Darrow, and John Muir. “I thought so well of Muir and his works that in 1961 I wrote a book about him,” Douglas boasted, “Muir of the Mountains.”1

In a series of books, articles, and letters, Douglas proudly argued that tramping around the unspoiled wilderness, as Muir had done, was part of a noble American tradition that dated back to the transcendentalists of Concord. What could be more American than rediscovering the natural world to offset urban angst? Wasn’t it essential to leave some areas unmapped, so that wanderers could get lost in the wild? Shouldn’t young Americans be encouraged to answer the “call to adventure” represented by white-water rivers, unbounded tundra, and dense forest reserves? Citizens needed retreats in the natural world from the degradation of city life. “The distant mountains make one want to go on and on and on,” Douglas wrote after exploring the Brooks Range of Alaska in 1956, “over the next ridge and over the one beyond.”2

Always an iron-willed individualist, Douglas was concerned that the freedom associated with exploring the wilderness, hitchhiking, backpacking, camping, and mountain climbing was being constricted by anti-vagrancy laws. (The novelist Kurt Vonnegut later supported this belief, saying that the Constitution protected our right to “fart around.”) During the Great Depression, Douglas had been a hobo, traveling the rails from Yakima to Chicago, west to east, living out of a rucksack. Disappearing down the open road and shedding the shackles of the nine-to-five workday was—to Douglas’s mind—an American right just as surely as free speech or equal education. Douglas worried that national parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite were being corporatized. Visitors in the mid-twentieth century encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic, gift shops, asphalt parking lots, uniformed rangers, and firework displays—and at Yosemite, the Hetch Hetchy valley had been destroyed by the construction of a reservoir. As Thoreau had complained in Walden, many stouthearted Americans, seeking regeneration in wild places, were fleeing the “desperate city” only to arrive at the “desperate country.”3 What demon, Douglas asked, had possessed the National Park Service to turn natural wonders like Old Faithful into sites for gewgaw shops? What fools would hollow out a redwood tree in Mariposa Grove so automobiles could drive through it? “When roads supplant trails,” Douglas wrote, “the precious unique values of God’s wilderness disappear.”4

Although he admired Pinchot, Douglas dissented, as he matured, from the whole concept of “multiple use” of natural resources. He saw Americans’ mania for constructing roads in national parks and forests as “evidence of our decline as a people.” Habitats for wildlife, he argued, should be left alone. All the national forests, as far as he was concerned, should be redesignated as wildernesses. Douglas, agitated, predicted that the world of 2200 would be choking on concrete, smog, industrial blight, and the withered wastelands left by clear-cut forests and oil spills. If Americans were wise, he believed, they would understand the importance of preserving roadless wilderness for its own sake: wilderness was more valuable than all the gold bars