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in Fort Knox. Without the possibility of escaping into the noiseless backcountry, the United States would become merely a tacky version of tourist-packed Europe. “There is no possible way to open roadless areas to cars and retain a wilderness,” Douglas asserted. “This is one diabolic consequence of the ‘multiple use’ concept as applied. The Forest Service recognizes, of course, that the application of the ‘multiple use’ principle means that some areas must be devoted exclusively or predominantly to a single purpose. The difficulty is that, in the Pacific West, ‘multiple use’ in practical operation means that every canyon is usually put to as many uses as possible—lumber operations, roads, campsites, shelters, toilets, fireplaces, parking lots and so on.”5

Repeatedly, throughout his life, Douglas rallied to the defense of pristine Pacific Northwest and Alaskan landscapes. During the 1930s it was the Olympics; in the 1940s, the Cascades; in the 1950s, the Brooks Range; and in the 1960s, the redwoods of California. As his biographer Bruce Allen Murphy noted in Wild Bill, Douglas helped launch the modern environmental movement in 1960 by dissenting to a denial of certiorari in a dispute over DDT being sprayed in Long Island.6 Douglas, never idle, continually thought of legal ways to help save America from ruin. Later in Douglas’s legal career, following the oil spill near Santa Barbara of January 28, 1969, he stoutly refused to let Union Oil get away with impunity for fouling the Southern California coastline from Goleta to Rincon, and all of the northern Channel Islands. Since his young adulthood, Douglas had fought to protect American wilderness and coastlines. Now, in 1969, more than 10,000 birds had died because of a faulty blowout preventer on Union Oil’s platform A in Santa Barbara, and a furious Douglas wanted justice.

This oil spill impelled Douglas to put some of his long-held judicial beliefs into writing. He was, after all, the leading light of the wilderness movement. Douglas famously held, in a Supreme Court case, that trees, oceans, and rivers had legal standing. (Look up his dissenting opinion: Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727, 1972.) As a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Douglas had somehow found time to read an obscure essay by Christopher D. Stone in the Southern California Law Review: “Should Trees Have Standing?”7 Stone, a former Supreme Court clerk, thought the article was a breakthrough argument on behalf of the environment. Douglas used Stone’s argument to go after Walt Disney. In 1969, when Disney received approval to build a huge $35 million ski and swim resort at Mineral King Valley in Sierra Nevada courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service, Douglas dissented. What infuriated Douglas was that the state of California was going to build a twenty-mile asphalt road through the heart of Sequoia National Park to reach Disney’s high-country resort.

Drawing on Aldo Leopold’s ennobling notion of a land ethic, Douglas firmly believed that a sequoia tree, a barrier island, or a sand beach should be allowed to be a litigant. He wrote that “inanimate objects” about to be “despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage” could fight for their constitutional rights. Excoriating the U.S. Forest Service for being a patsy of the timber industry, Douglas maintained that before these “priceless bits of Americana (such as a valley, an alpine meadow, a river, or a lake) are forever lost or are so transformed as to be reduced to the eventual rubble of our urban environment, the voice of the existing beneficiaries of these environmental wonders should be heard.” What mattered to Douglas was that flora and fauna had rights: “Perhaps they will not win. Perhaps the bulldozers of ‘progress’ will plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land. That is not the present question. The sole question is, who has standing to be heard?”8

War against anything associated with Mickey Mouse had become a sport for Douglas. With typical brio, he called the “Disneyfication