1963-1990
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WORK IN PROGRESS
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This chapter and the next will be way shorter than those preceding them because an exciting related project will assume priority for a long time.
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As discussed in the preceding chapter, the successful fight to preserve the integrity of Dinosaur N.M. in the mid 1950s and the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 represented the culmination of the century of conservation efforts launched by George Perkins Marsh in 1864. This is not to say that the war was entirely won. It was not and will never be - in point of fact as I write today (January 2026), we are going backwards). The 1960s saw epic battles over a federal government effort to build two dams in the Grand Canyon and, even more contentiously, a Consolidated Edison proposal to turn Storm King Mountain in NYS's Hudson Valley into a hydroelectric facility.
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The development of environmental law principles and tactics, a critical environmental protection strategy ever since, arose out of the Storm King controversy as well as litigation initiated in the wake of Silent Spring to stop indiscriminate municipal use of DDT on NYS' Long Island. [It is no coincidence that the main triggers for the entire environmental law movement occurred within 50 miles of New York City. As an NYC resident, I can vouchsafe that there are a hell of a lot of lawyers there].
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Guided by David Brower, the Sierra Club in 1960 had launched its hugely influential exhibit format series of photo-focused coffee-table style books modeled after the aforementioned This is Dinosaur (1955). The books played a key role in the Grand Canyon fight as well as contributing to successful efforts to protect a number of parks, wilderness areas, shorelines and rivers. Along with the great Ansel Adams, who is discussed in the prior chapter, the photography of conservationists Philip Hyde and Eliot Porter were critical elements in the series' effectiveness and success.
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Hyde, who also contributed to Dinosaur, "didn't get a wilderness area named after him, as [Ansel] Adams did, but he should have. Through the 1960s, the Sierra Club and others used Hyde's photographs for the campaigns to save wilderness areas in the High Sierra, Wind River Range, Canyonlands, North Cascades, Big Sur, Kings Canyon, Sequoia, Denali, Tongass, Monument Valley, Navajo Tribal Park, and Oregon's Cascades." (SSR p. 398).
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The first exhibit format book to be published was Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall's This is the American Earth (1960). The book was the outgrowth of a 1955 CA exhibit organized by Adams, Newhall and Brower with photos by Adams, Hyde, Porter and others that was so well received that the Smithsonian and the US Information Agency ended up touring it domestically and internationally, respectively. Other books in the series in the Collection include Francois Leydet's Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon (1964), as well as The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon (1963) and "In Wildness is the Preservation of the World", both by Eliot Porter.
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The exhibit format books were not the only impactful Sierra Club publications of the early 1960s. As part of the push for Wilderness Act passage the Sierra Club instituted a biennial Wilderness Conference in 1949 (the last one being in 1975). A 1964 of essays from the first five of these by such luminaries as Wallace Stegner, Howard Zahniser and Starker Leopold and photos by Philip Hyde were consolidated a published in book form in 1964. Brower contributed, edited and provided a Foreword - the copy in the Collection, entitled Wildlands in our Civilization (1964), is inscribed by Brower. The club published an anthology entitled Tomorrow's Wilderness (1963) one year prior, edited by Leydet with contributions from Ansel Adams Fair Osborn, Paul Brooks, Stegner and Udall. Zahniser wrote the Foreword and Brower the Preface.
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The Sierra Club was indeed a prolific publisher under Brower's leadership. Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), which Ehrlich wrote at Brower's urging after hearing an Ehrlich presentation, was among the most controversial books published by club. The book was heavily criticized even at the time, including by Barry Commoner, for its apocalyptic predictions for the near future, most of which did not come to pass (at least not yet). That said, the book is described as "one of the most influential books of the 20th century" in a Smithsonian Magazine article which goes on to argue that while it "gave a huge jolt to the nascent environmental movement," it also "fueled an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world." (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-worldwide-fear-overpopulation-180967499/). ​
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Our friend Richard Pough, who had brought the Hawk Mountain hunt to Rosalie Edge's attention in the early 1930s, was a major force in the development of conservation easements and other important strategies to preserve the ecological integrity of private landholdings. Pough's efforts also began in the area around New York City, but his tactics became, and still are, an important tool in the environmentalist toolbox. Not satisfied with that, Pough turned to the establishment of organizations such as the Nature Conservancy to acquire and protect millions of acres of ecologically sensitive land that would otherwise be vulnerable to development.
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The 1960s counterculture sparked by opposition to the Vietnam War embraced environmental conservation. Rosalie Edge and Willard G. Van Name were pioneers of militant conservationism. Their mantle was assumed by Brower and the "New Life," including writers such as Edward Abbey and Gary Snyder.
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Edward Abbey in particular has influenced generations of conservationist readers with his iconoclastic and uncompromising worldview combined with a writing style that easily oscillated between lyrical, poetic, insistent and conclusory, usually at the same time. Abbey is very well represented in the Collection with some one-of-a-kind examples of his fiction and non-fiction work. His most enduring and impactful books were Desert Solitaire (1968), an account of his time as a park employee at Arches in Utah, and The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), which inspired hard-core eco-saboteurs such as Earth First!
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Desert Solitaire had a huge impact on me personally. I bought it randomly on one of the my first trips in the West. It opened my eyes to a new world - new realms geographically and philosophically. It redefined for me the art of the possible. The book contains an affecting account of a river trip Abbey took through Glen Canyon, before it was dammed to create Lake Powell.
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The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a fictional attempt to blow up the Glen Canyon dam, will win no points for political correctness, particularly as it relates to the protagonist, George Hayduke. (Abbey, incidentally, was known for his anti-immigration views). Hayduke's character was said to be inspired by grizzly advocate Doug Peacock (2013), who is separately represented in the Collection, as is his wife Andrea Peacock (2003). The eco-saboteur (ecotour) group Earth First!, which among other things pioneered tree sitting as a strategy to hinder old-growth forest logging, was inspired by The Monkey Wrench Gang and other conservationist works. Two of the founders of Earth First! are represented in the Collection, Dave Foreman (1991) and Howard Wolke (1991). Ed Abbey frequently addressed early Earth First! gatherings, and his Foreword for Wolke's book is nominally written by Hayduke. For an account of perhaps the most famous tree sit of all, see Julia Butterfly Hill's The Legacy of Luna (2000). Hill inspired one of the protagonists of Richard Power's masterpiece The Overstory (2018).
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Gary Snyder is sometimes referred to as "the Thoreau of the Beat Generation", as one of the founding beat poets, fusing environmentalism and Buddhist teachings in his work. He was the inspiration for the protagonist of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums (not in the Collection). Among the copies of his work in the Collection is a copy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island inscribed to Peter Matthiessen. Snyder is also called "the poet laureate of deep ecology", as Bill Devall and George Session's influential book Deep Ecology (1985) is dedicated to him and deep ecology pioneer Arne Naess. The book, which in a nutshell calls for a dramatically reduced human environmental footprint, quotes extensively from Snyder's work.
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The JFK administration was developing into strong conservation force when he was killed. His successor LBJ's environmental record was as strong as any president not named Roosevelt, highlighted by the first clean air and clean water acts, the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Act, The National Trails Act, and the protection of vast national parks, wildernesses, seashores and rivers. But his conservation record was overshadowed by his misadventures in SE Asia. The main architect of JFK and LBJ's conservation agendas was Stewart Udall, who served as Interior Secretary for both. Udall was the only secretary to rival Harold Ickes in his effectiveness and ambition.
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Udall has several works represented in the Collection, including the important The Quiet Crisis (1963), which was highly praised by, among others, Rachel Carson. But my favorite example of his presence in the Collection is James Trefethen's Crusade for Wildlife (1961), a Boone and Crockett book which is inscribed by Udall to Bob Hines. Hines is the only person ever to hold the formal title of National Wildlife Artist. He illustrated a number of disparate books in the Collection, including the third book in Rachel Carson's sea trilogy, The Edge of the Sea (1955).
Barry Commoner was a popular speaker on college campuses during the 1960s and 70s. A scientist whose work establishing the presence of radioactive materials in children's teeth helped lead to the Nuclear Test Ban treaty of 1963, Commoner was a force in all aspects of environmental action focused on the protection of human and ecosystem health. He ran for President in 1980 on the Citizen's Party line. Commoner was among the half-dozen most prominent conservationists of the latter half of the 20th century, in a league with Abbey, Brower, Carson, Pough, McKibben and Udall. He was way ahead of his time in his up-front consideration of the social justice ramifications of the many different types of environmental issues he addressed. He is represented in the Collection with a couple of his books, including an inscribed copy of his first, Science and Survival (1966).
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The environmental justice movement is focused on the long-prevalent practice of siting environmentally hazardous facilities amongst economically disadvantaged, frequently Black and brown, communities (or siting those communities around existing hazards). It took until the late 1970s into the early 1980s to rise to national prominence, driven by opposition to a proposed dump in East Houston and a toxic waste site in rural North Carolina. But the seeds of the movement were sown in the 1960s by the intersection of the civil rights movement and ecological integrity and by Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers (not in the Collection) focus on agricultural workers' pesticide exposure.
In the North Carolina case, Rev. Benjamin Chavis of the United Church of Christ was sent to participate in the protests, where he coined the phrase "environmental racism." In 1987 Chavis and the UCC issued a groundbreaking report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. Dr. Robert Bullard, who served as an expert in the East Houston case, issued the first book dedicated to the issue, Dumping in Dixie (1990). Traditional environmental groups and the government began to get on board to combat an issue whose resolution seems very far away.
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Ralph Nader (not my favorite figure given his role in denying Al Gore the presidency in 2000) was, in fairness, a major force in building the infrastructure for the grassroots environmentalism which began in the 1960s. ​
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Cuyahoga and Earth Day (Nelson, poster)
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LBJ and Lady Bird
Beautification
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Whole Earth Catalog
Pough (OSAC/OSI, Little, Whyte)​
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Edward O. Wilson
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Nash
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Watts
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Ecofeminism
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Love Canal and Cercla​
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McKibben and Climate Change
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​Zwinger
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Bakker
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Leen
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PM/GS
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Graham/Schaeffer
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gaia
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literary nature writers - zwinger, teale, Dillard, Cathy johnson
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Reisner (doig)
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McKibben (Revelle)
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David Brower. Wilderness Act. Modern Environmental Movement. Brower. SSR quote of historical Hal Rothman as to how Brower drove "the transformation of conservation into environmentalism in the United States." (SSR 103 end of section). Brower radicalized by the Dinosaur fight described in previous chapter. Grand Canyon, NYT ads etc. (Ads on SC website see SSR pg 773 note 47.
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Stewart Udall. Complicated legacy. Backed Wilderness Act, NPs, National Sea and Lakeshores, Scenic and Wild Rivers. Early supporter of RC's SS. Zealous conservationist who nevertheless initially supported the damming of the GC. "For preservationists, the arrival of Udall to head Interior (under JFK) was like the second coming of Harold Ickes." (SSR p. 187). "Kennedy immediately elevated Udall, looking on him as the lightening rod of the New Frontier's third-wave conservation. More than that he trusted the new secretary." (SSR pp 190-1). However, Brinkley takes him severely to task from ignoring the plight of disadvantaged communities suffering from environmental injustice. He also points out Udall's support for a number of dubious positions (i.e. support for the Long Beach nuclear-powered desalination plant and attempts to build aqueducts from the Columbia River in Oregon to the Southwest.). (SSR 229-30). "He took only modest steps in behalf of minorities, seeing his job as serving the mainstream, which was, to judge by his actions, the middle and upper-classes of white America." [Brinkley's short screed is unusual regarding an individual who otherwise presents very positively throughout the balance of the book. Certainly much of the criticism might have been leveled against nearly all of the conservationists at the time - although granted they were not Interior Secretary].
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In point of fact, the environmental justice movement did not become a national phenomenon until the 1980s, as discussed further below. In the Overview Chapter that begins this historical narrative, I write of the "undemocratic" and sometimes elitist nature of the EC movement. Udall had good company in his failure to address disparate impacts of environmental abuse.
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Udall wrote The Quiet Crisis (1963) which "burst with a blend of facts highlighting American conservation history and philosophical wisdom for a 'land ethic of tomorrow'.... The most vibrant part of the book was Udall's promotion of a wild and scenic river system." (SSR p. 355). Stegner had the idea for the book and contributed considerably - he was actually hired by Interior.
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Hartzog was close to Udall, who Intro'd his book. Floated Current River together in 1961 (Hartzog became head of NPS in 1964). Current and Jack Fork Rivers became first federally protected river system. See also Leonard Hall (1958). "One of Udall's smartest moves had been hiring George Hartzog...." [Also check Stegner's blurb for Hartzog's book quoted in SSR]
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Udall in turn was close to Lady Bird Johnson, whose Beautification Project was an important and generally effective campaign not just to pick up litter and plant flowers, but involving "clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste disposal and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me [Lady Bird]...beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future." (Quote from an article on the NPS website www.nps.gov/articles/lady-bird-johnson-beautification- cultural-landscapes.htm#Note3). To some degree, the Beautification Project resembled Horace McFarland and the American Civic Association's programs in the first decades of the 20th century.
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Environmental Justice - MLK 1959 tied antiwar, nukes, civil rights and environmental (SSR p. 153). Later Memphis sanitation workers, Cesar Chavez (SSR) 445-8
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Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers SSR p. 247-8
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On the same day that Silent Spring was published, the NYT reported that power company Consolidated Edison planned to build a massive hydroelectric plant on Storm King Mountain on the West Bank of the Hudson River less than 100 miles north of NYC. "The battle over Storm King became the fiercest environmental confrontation of the 1960s." (SSR p. 285). The seventeen year battle between Con Ed and the opposition coalition organized by Carl Carmer, Scenic Hudson, "is credited with launching the modern grassroots environmental movement" per the organization's website.
The Storm King battle, along with the Yaphank Lake DDT litigation discussed immediately below, launched environmental litigation as a powerful and important strategy in the arsenal of environmentalists. In 1970, the lead attorneys opposing the power plant formed the Natural Resources Defense Council to act as nationally organized, professionalized group of lawyers and scientists. John H. Adams was the NRDC's first staff member and led the organization until 2006. One of the NRDC's first wins was an effort by the IRS during the Nixon administration to deny the organization's tax-exempt status while litigating. The NRDC won in 1971, opening the door for US citizens to sue polluters directly for damages.
[Also Robert Boyle - Sports Illustrated articles - SSR 287-9]
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The Sierra Club "exhibit format" books, large photo-forward coffee-table books.
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The Wilderness Act requirement that Congress, not the president, could designate wilderness areas, the conservation movement saw a significant increase in local and regional grassroots efforts to advocate for various areas.
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WOD's two My Wilderness books helped the Wild and Scenic Rivers bill "gain traction on Capitol Hill." (SSR p. 399).
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An editorial in the 9/20/1963 NYT summarizing conservation accomplishments of 1964, including the creation of Fire Island National Seashore, the passage of the Wilderness Act, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, and the Ozark national scenic riverways bill (but not yet protecting Indiana Dunes lakeshore) notes that a "special word of tribute should go to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. Among his modern predecessors only the redoubtable Harold L. Ickes equaled him in zeal and effectiveness in the cause of conservation. Secretary Udall's work in this field bestows great distinction upon the Johnson Administration."