Who:
Doug Scott
Former chapter leader, Conservation Director, John Muir Award winner
Where:
Seattle, WA
I pondered today about my talk at the Sierra Summit celebrating our wilderness heritage. John Muir issued the call for action. Justice Douglas echoed him in a 1965 Club book: "Today we look forward to a time when all the wilderness now existing will not be enough."
So many stories come tumbling from memory, affirming the unstoppable Sierra Club heritage in preserving America's wilderness:
-- The growing frustration Club volunteers expressed in the decades when wilderness was protected only by administrative decision. As one wrote in 1956, "Wilderness areas could be wiped out by the stroke of the Secretary of Agriculture's [or Interior's] pen."
-- The foresight Dave Brower, Howard Zahniser, and others showed as they led the campaign to persuade Congress to pass the 1964 Wilderness Act. Their legislative acumen and principled accommodations (for example, continuing established grazing) gave us the model we've followed for these four decades to apply that law to 106,500,000 acres.
-- Club grassroots brilliance in following this pattern, passing 120 subsequent laws protecting hundreds of areas in our National Wilderness Preservation System-Golden Trout (CA), Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock (NC/TN), French Pete (cut from an Oregon wilderness before the Wilderness Act, put back in 1978), Lusk Creek (IL), Mount Naomi (UT), and a single 13,000,000-acre expanse in the Brooks Range (AK), to name a few.
In celebrating our success and anticipating much more, I will remember what this proud Club history teaches us: The continuing need to build rural community support for wilderness; the lessons of legislative pragmatism-practicing "the art of the possible;" the commitment to sustain the effort, however long it takes.
