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>> It's an enormous pleasure to

introduce tonight's guest, but I

do want to say some thank you's

and do some housekeeping.

I'd like to thank, in

particular, the organizations

that have partnered with the

Nelson Institute to make this

lecture possible, and that

includes the Wisconsin Academy

of Sciences, Arts and Letters,

Gathering Waters Conservancy,

1,000 Friends of Wisconsin,

the UW-Madison Department

of Urban and Regional Planning,

of course, and Wisconsin Public

Television.

We're really delighted and

enormously proud to work with

these organizations.

Thank you very, very much

for your support.

[applause]

Just to emphasize some of the

things that were just said,

we take enormous pride

at reaching broadly to solve

problems with communities

that the universities

can engage across party lines,

across interests.

The Nelson Institute is

dedicated to the kind of work

that the Jordahl Lecture Series

and Bud Jordahl represented,

as does tonight's speaker.

Two bits of housekeeping,

one we have a large number

of lectures coming up

all Fall and in the Spring.

These things are available

up front, our various lecture

series.

I want to point to one

in particular.

That's our keynote

for the Earth Day event

on April 7,

is going to be Jane Goodall.

Go out and tell your friends.

It should be good.

That's a big one.

[applause]

But do take a look.

There's a lot of great speakers

from on and off campus coming,

through Nelson and it's brothers

and sisters across the campus.

Now it's my pleasure to

introduce tonight's speaker.

Some of us discovered the

environment and the state parks

by fishing, hunting, camping.

Some of us discovered it

by sitting in front of

the television.

Some of us did a little of both.

I fall into the third group.

It was only when I was in

a graduate ecology class

that I learned that Walt Disney

had run those poor lemmings

off that cliff

in "White Wilderness."

The power with which

documentary film

can fix and shape in our minds,

great and weird,

as well as powerful ideas,

is undeniable.

For every "Wild Kingdom,"

there was always

the "National Geographic."

Which, of course, transformed my

life experience fundamentally,

and put me right here now.

It is with the same power

that I think we can welcome

and celebrate

the work of Dayton Duncan.

He's an award winning writer

and documentary filmmaker.

He's the author of dozens

of books, and is a writer and

producer for a number of

documentaries directed by

renowned filmmaker Ken Burns,

as I think we all know.

Those include, and I'll list

them, just because you may not

have heard, Lewis & Clark:

The Journey

of the Corps of Discovery,

The National Park:

America's Best Idea.

That, I strongly recommend.

And The Dust Bowl, which

will air on Wisconsin Public

Television in November,

I believe.

In fact, Mr. Duncan has

collaborated with Ken Burns on

most of his award-winning series

for television,

The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz,

and many others.

Dayton Duncan has also served

as the Chief of Staff

to the New Hampshire governor,

Hugh Gallen.

He was Deputy National Press

Secretary for the Walter Mondale

presidential campaign,

National Press Secretary

for the Michael Dukakis

presidential campaign.

President Clinton appointed

Dayton Chair of the American

Heritage Rivers

Advisory Committee.

And Interior Secretary,

Secretary Bruce Babbitt,

that was my first vote

that I ever cast,

was for Bruce Babbitt,

appointed him Director for the

National Park Foundation.

He currently serves on the board

of the Student Conservation

Association and the Conservation

Lands Foundation.

He's a native of Iowa.

Dayton graduated from the

University of Pennsylvania,

and was a fellow at Harvard's

Shorenstein Center for Press,

Politics and Public Policy.

He holds honorary doctorates

from Franklin Pierce College,

Keene State College,

Drake University.

He lives in New Hampshire,

and came a long way.

So please, please, give a very

warm welcome for Dayton Duncan.

Thank you.

[applause]

>> Thank you.

Thank you very much.

[applause continues]

I have to get my cheaters on.

Thank you very much

for that kind introduction.

It's a great honor to be chosen

to give the inaugural lecture.

This is a lecture,

I just want you to know...

[laughter]

for the Jordahl Public

Lands Lecture

for the Nelson Institute.

It's an act of faith on your

part to call it the first

annual, because depending on how

it goes tonight, you know.

We'll see.

I hope there'll be many more.

It's good to see.

I have some old friends out in

the audience who asked very

specifically that they not be

mentioned by name, either out of

modesty or shame that they once

were associated with me.

Back before the Democrats

begged me to get out of politics

so that they would have half a

chance to get the presidency

back.

When we did our film on the

West, the great Kiowa poet,

Scott Momaday, talked about, for

the Kiowa people, when they

wanted to describe the ages long

past, they would call it, "in

the days when dogs could talk."

Among my family and friends,

the way we express the days long

past is, "back when Dayton had

hair."

These are folks from the days

long past.

I've spent much of my adult life

in pursuit of magazine stories

and books and documentary films,

and sometimes just out on the

the open road, trying to

understand Americans'

relationship to the land that

sustains us.

I've retraced the Louis & Clark

trail four times, and followed

the route of the first

transcontinental automobile trip

of 1903 a century later.

I've visited all 132 counties in

the United States with fewer

than two people per square mile,

the census bureau's former

definition of the frontier.

My job required me, one time, to

visit all 58 of the national

parks in our country.

I've do all that, and more, not

just because I'm a sucker for

road trips, but because I

believe that the history of our

country as a nation and who we

are as a people is bound up with

that relationship between us and

the land.

I'm not here tonight to

elaborate on that belief, or

even to defend it, but I'll

state it as a given.

For a little help in supporting

that belief, I want to begin

with a part of a poem by Robert

Frost, from my adopted state of

New Hampshire.

A poem he read at the

inauguration of John F.

Kennedy, becoming the first poet

ever invited to speak at such an

important national event.

The title of the poem is

"The Gift Outright."

The land was ours before

we were the land's.

She was our land more than

a hundred years

Before we were her people.

She was ours

In Massachusetts, in Virginia,

But we were England's, still

colonials,

Possessing what we still were

unpossessed by,

Possessed by what we now no

more possessed.

Something we were withholding

made us weak

Until we found out that it was

ourselves

We were withholding from our

land of living,

And forthwith found salvation

in surrender.

We found ourselves as a nation

Frost says,

when instead of withholding

ourselves from the land, we

became part of it.

Such as we were,

he wrote,

we gave ourselves outright

To the land vaguely realizing

westward.

We found ourselves and our

salvation in our surrender to

the land.

Now the story of our public

lands is part of the story of

that transformation, part of who

we are.

The story of our public lands is

obviously a story of very real

places.

Awe inspiring scenery, as well

as vast and intimidating

landscapes, fertile lands as

well as harsh deserts.

But it is also the story of an

idea, a very American idea.

After the Declaration of

Independence, the idea that

founded our nation.

It is, I think, America's best

idea.

I'm going to begin my story with

the author of that founding

idea.

In 1767, nine years before

drafting the Declaration of

Independence, Thomas Jefferson

came across what he described

as, "the most sublime of

nature's works," Virginia's

natural bridge, a limestone arch

215 feet high spanning a gorge

carved by a tributary of the

James River.

"The rapture of the spectator is

really indescribable," Jefferson

wrote, before attempting,

nonetheless, to describe it.

At the top he said, "you

involuntarily fall on your hands

and feet, creep up to the

parapet and peep over it.

Looking down from this height

about a minute gave me a violent

headache.

But from the bottom," he said,

"it is impossible for the

emotions arising from the

sublime to be felt beyond what

they are here.

So beautiful an arch, so

elevated, so light, and

springing as it were, up to

heaven."

Now 1767, there were no public

lands at the time.

Everything belonged to the king.

So Jefferson paid King George 20

shillings for the natural bridge

and 157 surrounding acres.

"I view it in some degree as a

public trust," he wrote a friend

later, "and would on no

consideration permit the bridge

to be injured, defaced or masked

from public view."

A public trust, he called it,

but it was still private

property, his, not a public

land.

A quarter of a century later

Jefferson was president of the

new nation, which at the time

stretched from the Atlantic

seaboard to the Mississippi

River, when he made the greatest

land deal in world history.

It brought us Iowa, after all.

[laughter]

For three cents an acre he

bought the Louisiana Territory,

8,200 square miles, doubling the

size of the United States.

And while not quite extending

our boundary to the Pacific,

putting us on the trajectory to

becoming a continental nation,

instead of the Brazil of North

America.

Not everyone approved of the

bargain, as good as it was.

"We are to give money, of which

we had too little," a Boston

newspaper complained, "for land

of which we already have

too much."

But Jefferson had a plan for

all that surplus land.

He envisioned an orderly

settlement, an empire of

liberty, stretching westward.

The land surveyed into grids and

parcels, offered at auction by

the General Land Office to

yeoman farmers, with each new

patent signed by the president

himself.

An orderly settlement is what he

envisioned.

Well, it didn't work out that

way.

Orderly settlement, it turns out

was not part of the American

character.

Land hunger, land fever,

described it better.

By 1832 the quickened pace of

claims had created a backlog of

10,500 patents awaiting

President Andrew Jackson's

signature to become legal.

It was such an obstacle to

settlement, that congress

figured a way to solve it.

They passed a law authorizing a

clerk to forge the president's

name.

If your grandparents have a

deed, a patent, signed by the

president of the United States

after Andrew Jackson, it wasn't

the president that signed it.

It was some...

It was before there were

robo-signings, they started

this.

They wanted to do that so that

the disposal of the public land

would not slow down.

The federal government, which

relied in part by the sale of

the domain for revenue, could

continue doing, "a land-office

business."

That's where this phrase comes

from.

The very phrase tell you a lot

about our attitude toward the

public domain.

We intended to get rid of it at

the pace of a land-office

business.

But that same year, of 1832, the

artist George Catlin, traveling

on the vast Great Plains in

search of what he called "the

grace and beauty of nature," had

come across a teeming herd of

buffalo and was suddenly struck

with the premonition that they,

and the Indians who depended

upon them, would someday be gone

forever.

Then he had an epiphany.

Much of nature, he realized was

destined "to fall before the

deadly ax and desolating hands

of cultivating man."

And yet the further mankind

became separated from what he

called "pristine wildness," "the

more pleasure does the mind of

enlightened man feel in

recurring to those scenes."

He went on, What a splendid

contemplation when one imagines

them, by some great protecting

policy of government preserved

in a magnificent park,

a nations park.

Containing man and beast in all

the wild and freshness of their

nature's beauty.

I would ask no other monument

to my memory, nor any other

enrollment of my name amongst

the famous dead, he said, than

the reputation of having been

the founder of such an

institution.

Catlin published his thoughts

in a letter to a New York City

newspaper the next year, but his

idea for a nation's park

attracted little attention.

Quite the contrary, the main

business of congress remained

the same, figuring out ways of

disposing of public lands so it

could be put to private use.

By 1841, so many settlers were

pouring onto lands not yet even

surveyed, that congress passed

the Preemption Act, which

permitted squatters to purchase

up to 160 acres of public land

for as little as a $1.25

an acre before it was surveyed

and offered at auction if they

could show a certain number of

months of residence and a

certain number of improvements

to their claim.

The French journalist, Alexis de

Tocqueville, who traveled the

United States around that time,

summarized the prevailing

American attitude toward their

land, I think, the best.

In Europe, he wrote, people

talk a great deal about the

wilds of America, but the

Americans themselves

never think about them.

They are insensible to the

wonders of inanimate nature.

They may be said not to

perceived the mighty forest

that surround them, until the

fall beneath the hatchet.

Their eyes are fixed upon

another sight, the march across

these wilds, draining swamps,

turning the course of the

rivers, peopling solitudes, and

subduing nature.

They will habitually prefer the

useful to the beautiful, he

said, and they will require

that the beautiful should be

useful.

Under the banner of Manifest

Destiny, in less then a decade

from then, we fought a war with

Mexico, added California and the

Southwest, negotiated with Great

Britain to give us the Pacific

Northwest, and accepted Texas

into the union.

Well, we make some mistakes

every once in awhile, right?

[laughter]

There you go.

If we could go back in time, the

things we could do.

Rick Perry's dream would have

come true.

But now there was a lot more

space to fill, and more space to

be made "useful."

When the Civil War slowed down

the rate of settlement, congress

nonetheless tried to stimulate

it, by upping the ante.

The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862

promised vast tracts of the

public domain to the companies

building the first

transcontinental railroad from

Omaha to Sacramento.

That same year, the Homestead

Act offered individuals their

own 160 acres for free if they

improved the land and filed for

their deed.

Into this environment, while the

nation was still fighting to see

if it would even survive, and

for reasons history does not

provide clear documentation to

explain, in 1864 Senator John

Conness of California proposed

something totally unprecedented

in human history.

Setting aside, not a landscape

garden or a city park, but a

large tract of natural scenery

for the enjoyment of everyone.

More than 60 square miles of

federal land encompassing the

Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa

Grove of giant Sequoias, were to

be transferred to the care of

the state of California "for

public use, resort and

recreation," and made

"unalienable forever."

That is, reserved from private

ownership for all time.

In other words, he was asking

congress to do the exact

opposite of what it had been

doing for all of it's existence.

To save a piece of public land

for the public, instead of

trying everything possible to

sell it, or even give it away,

so it could become private

property.

Conness obviously understood

this when he introduced his bill

on the senate floor.

"I will state to the senate," he

said, "that this bill proposes

to make a grant of certain

premises located in the Sierra

Nevada Mountains in the state of

California, that are for all

public purposes worthless, but

which constitute perhaps, some

of the greatest wonders of the

world."

For all public purposes

worthless is what he was just

saying about Yosemite and the

Maripose Grove.

How many people have been there?

Pretty worthless, right?

But that was the first point he

made, before tossing in a little

nationalism that Yosemite and

the big trees where also

world-class wonders, something

more spectacular than the Old

World, Europe, could claim.

Then, in case they had forgotten

that initial point, he

reiterated.

"It is a matter involving no

appropriation whatever," he

promised.

"The property is of no value to

the government."

In other words, to those other

congressmen and senators,

something of a freebie.

Congress wouldn't be spending

any money and wouldn't be

depriving it's citizens of

"valuable," "useful" land,

that is, good farmland or

merchantable timber or precious

minerals, by prohibiting private

ownership.

It helped, no doubt, that this

was a place tucked into a remote

recess of the Sierra Nevada.

It helped that Carleton Watkins'

stunning photographs of the

valley, and those huge, ancient

trees, hung in the

Sergeant-at-Arms's office near

the senate chamber.

It certainly helped that at

least one prominent business

interest, a steam-ship company

eager to take tourists to

California to see these wonders,

wanted the law to pass.

It probably helped that many of

the senators knew that some of

California's mammoth trees had

already been cut down,

illiciting the scorn of those

who already rubbed the

commercial degradation of

Niagara Falls in the nation's

face.

Now, at least one of the

celebrated big tree groves would

be preserved, to show off to any

disdainful European, de

Tocqueville might come to mind,

who doubted America's superior

natural wonders or it's capacity

to properly care for them.

It's impossible to look down

your nose when your head is

craned upwards looking at the

top of a live Sequoia tree.

Virtually no real debate arose

over Conness' bill.

The senate passed it and moved

on to other issues.

A month later, the house did the

same thing.

On June 30, 1864, whether he

realized it fully or not,

President Abraham Lincoln took

an historic step.

He signed a law to preserve

forever a beautiful valley and a

grove of trees that neither he

nor the members of congress had

ever seen, thousands of miles

away in California.

The seed of the national park

idea had been planted.

Our attitude toward public lands

had just now begun to evolve.

Now a year later, 1865, a small

group gathered in Yosemite

Valley to hear one of the state

commissioners read a report he

had written about the future of

this new park that had been

entrusted to the state of

California.

His name was Frederick Law

Olmsted, better known as one of

the designers of New York City's

Central Park.

He was living temporarily in

California where he was

overseeing a big mining estate

not far from Yosemite.

Like Senator Conness, Olmsted

was acutely aware of American's

predisposition to commerce.

After describing the new park's

natural beauty, he began his

report by noting what he called

the "obviously pecuniary

advantage" of such scenery.

Switzerland, he noted, prospered

economically from the thousands

of tourists visiting the Alps.

Their money supported inns and

restaurants, provided farmers

with "their best and almost only

market" for surplus products.

It fostered to developments of

railroads and carriage roads,

steamboat lines and telegraphs,

that all contributed substantial

revenue to the nation of

Switzerland.

So too, Olmsted predicted, would

the scenic attraction of

Yosemite and the big trees

become a financial boon to

California, and ultimately, the

United States.

Scenery as magnificent as

Yosemite's, carefully protected,

would be good for business.

And business is the business of

America.

But Olmsted also offered a new

argument for the park.

Economics and international

bragging rights paled as

rational for preserving

Yosemite, he said, compared to

something much more fundamental,

the purposes of democracy and

the enduring promise of America.

Throughout history, he argued,

the world's aristocracies and

richest families had always set

aside the most magnificent

places for their own exclusive

benefit.

Here's what he said.

The enjoyment of the choicest

natural scenes in the country

and the means of recreation

connected with them is thus a

monopoly of a very few, very

rich, people.

The great mass of society,

including those to whom it

would be of the greatest

benefit is excluded from it.

But the United States, he said,

was founded on a different

notion than protecting the

special privileges of birth or

wealth.

He said, It is the main duty of

government, if it is not the

sole duty of government, to

provide means of protection for

all it's citizen in the pursuit

of happiness against the

obstacles otherwise

insurmountable which the

selfishness of individuals, or

combinations of individuals, is

libel to interpose to that

pursuit.

The establishment by government

of great public grounds for the

free enjoyment of the people

under certain circumstances is

thus justified and enforced

as a political duty.

A political duty, he said.

A government of the people has

the duty to protect it's

citizens' rights, including the

pursuit of happiness, against

the narrow and often powerful

interests that would otherwise

monopolize it for themselves.

Like Lincoln in his Gettysburg

Address, though not nearly as

briefly or poetically, Olmsted,

I think, had deliberately

referred to the nation's most

sacred document, the pursuit of

happiness.

He then linked it to an idea

that summoned it's essence

forward, expanding it in a way

that Jefferson himself would

have understood and approved of.

It was the Declaration of

Independence applied to the

land.

Next, Olmsted got down to his

specific plans for Yosemite.

California needed to invest in

better roads to the Valley and

Mariposa Grove, cutting the time

and expense of travel in half,

so that the grant did not, by

virtue of its inaccessibility

become what he called "a rich

man's park."

He estimated the roadwork

would cost about $25,000 and

suggested the state spend an

addition $12,000 for better

trails, surveys, advertising and

construction of five

strategically placed cabins as

free resting places for

visitors.

But none of this would be

worthwhile, he warned, without

remembering another duty, the

duty to future generations and

the duty to the scenery itself.

Regulations needed to be enacted

and enforced, he said, to

protect "the dignity of the

scenery" against the demands of

what he called, "the

convenience, bad taste,

playfulness, carelessness or

wonton destruction of present

visitors."

In a place as timeless as

Yosemite, Olmsted declared, "the

rights of posterity" outweighed

the immediate desires of the

present.

So he is reading this aloud, for

those of you who have been to

Yosemite, in a meadow along the

beautiful Merced River, with the

waterfalls flowing over those

magnificent cliffs, and

gathering there and flowing past

them.

There was about 30 people

listening to it.

That was the largest tourist

group to date in Yosemite Valley

at that point, which had been

first visited by white people in

1851.

The first tourists were 1855.

Ten years later, a group of

30 was an awful big group.

There, standing before what

constituted a crowd in Yosemite

Valley in 1865, when fewer than

100 tourists normally visited

each year, Olmsted cast his

vision far over the horizon.

He invited his listeners to do

the same.

He said, before many years, if

proper facilities are offered,

these hundreds will become

thousands, and in a century the

whole number of visitors will

be counted by millions.

An injury to the scenery so

slight that it may be unheeded

by any visitor now, he said,

will be one multiplied by those

millions.

Therefore, laws to prevent an

unjust use by individuals of

that which is not individual,

but public, property, must be

made and rigidly enforced.

This duty of preservation, he

said, is first, because the

millions who are hereafter to

benefit have the largest

interest in it, and the largest

interest should be first and

most strenuously guarded.

Yosemite, he proclaimed, was "a

trust from the whole nation."

An expression of, what he

said, "the will of the nation is

embodied in the act of congress

that this scenery shall never be

private property, but that like

certain defensive points upon

our coasts, it shall be held

solely for public purposes."

This was a stunningly prescient

document.

All the more remarkable because

it was written so early in

America's, and therefore the

world's, first venture into

setting aside large tracts of

public land.

Without any precedent or any

guidance Olmsted had just

presented a closely reasoned yet

farsighted argument about the

future of Yosemite and of all

future parks.

Filled with democratic theory as

well as practical

recommendations, lofty ideals

and the nuts and bolts of

management.

A manifesto combining the

Declaration of Independence and

the Constitution, on behalf of

public parks, binding them to

the principles that had founded

the nation now embarking on yet

another experiment in democracy.

Nothing like it had been written

before.

And I must tell you, nothing

better has been written since.

It would be natural therefore,

to think of Olmsted's report as

the blueprint that guided the

development of the new park at

Yosemite and all national parks

and public lands that would

follow.

That would be natural and nice,

but it would not be close to the

truth.

History, some of you who are

history students here know,

follows it's own winding paths.

No one at Olmsted's reading had

disagreed with his proposal.

But once he was safely out of

California and back at Central

Park in New York City, a small

group of his fellow

commissioners secretly convened

and decided his recommendations

were too expensive and too

controversial to bring before

the legislature.

With the governor's concurrence

the report was quietly shelved.

Nearly a century would elapse

before an Olmsted biographer,

going through the papers of the

Olmsted Brothers' firm in

Brookline, Massachusetts in

1952, unearthed a copy of that

report and published it.

In the mean time, the history of

Yosemite, the national park

idea, and our relationship with

the public lands, would need to

proceed the way so much of

American history has, not from a

blueprint, however brilliant,

but by experimentation, by

improvisation, trial and error.

Not by a straight path, but a

winding road with several turns.

I'm just going to walk you past

a few of those turns.

In 1872, eight years later,

congress was asked to set aside

another remarkable part of the

land, the headwaters of the

Yellowstone, where rivers steam

and mud boil, amidst the

greatest collection of geysers

in the world.

The rational for keeping it

inalienable for all time was

exactly the same as with

Yosemite.

It wasn't good farmland, no

valuable timber of minerals, and

so on.

Once again, a major business

interest, in this case the

Northern Pacific Railroad,

seeing the possibility of

increased profits from a

spectacular tourist attraction,

was working behind the scenes in

congress.

In the house and senate to quell

any lingering resistance to

removing public land from

development, supporters made

specific reference to the

precedent that had already been

set in Yosemite, except for one

difference.

Yellowstone was in Wyoming

Territory.

There was no state to take over

management of it.

Therefore this proposed park

would have to be a federal

responsibility.

And so, though modeled in every

respect on the Yosemite grant

eight years earlier, Yellowstone

became the world's first

national park.

It was a distinction arising

more out of happenstance than

intention, but in time it would

prove to be of the utmost

significance, a turning point in

the evolution of the park idea.

Meanwhile, a fellow from here in

Wisconsin was wandering around

the Sierra Nevada, about to add

another reason why we need

public lands.

Not economic opportunity, not

national pride, not political

duty, but spiritual necessity.

If you haven't guessed, his name

was John Muir.

He was an immigrant from

Scotland, a University of

Wisconsin dropout, a Civil War

draft evader, an inventive

genius who could have become a

titan of industry in the Gilded

Age.

A man who had walked from

Indiana to Florida, and later

walked from San Francisco to

Yosemite, all the while

searching for a direction and a

purpose for his life.

Luckily for our nation, he found

it in the mountains he called

"the range of light,"

and in the valley he considered

"the grandest of all the special

temples of nature I was ever

permitted to enter, the sanctum

sanctorum of the Sierra,"

Yosemite Valley.

Talk about finding salvation by

surrendering to the land.

Muir found himself by losing

himself in nature.

Here's how he described it.

We are now in the mountains.

They are within us, kindling

enthusiasm, making every nerve

quiver, filling every pore and

cell of us.

Our flesh and bone tabernacle

seems transparent as glass to

the beauty about us.

As if truly an inseparable

part of it, thrilling with the

air and trees, streams and

rocks, in the waves of the sun.

A part of all nature, neither

old nor young, sick nor well,

but immortal.

I must drift about these

love-monument mountains, he

said, glad to be a servant of

servants in so holy a

wilderness.

Now that was more than a

restless young man finally

finding a new direction in life.

This was a profoundly religious

experience.

A moment of ecstasy and a

revelation on the most

fundamental level.

He wasn't choosing a future to

follow, it was calling him to

it.

Muir understood it immediately

in those terms.

"How glorious a conversion," he

recorded in his journal that

same day, "so complete and

wholesome."

Muir called it his

"unconditional surrender" to

nature.

"In these mountains," he wrote,

"everything is perfectly clean

and pure and full of divine

lessons, until the hand of God

becomes visible."

That hand pointed in one

direction.

The realization that all of

creation is intertwined and on

an equal standing.

Mankind is not above nature, but

one part of a great joyously

interconnected web of being,

where rivers chant an exulting

chorus and what he said "the

very stones seemed talkative,

sympathetic, brotherly."

That realization, in turn,

pointed him to his destiny.

I will follow my instincts, be

myself for good or ill, and see

what will be the upshot.

As long as I live I'll hear

waterfalls and birds and winds

sing.

I'll interpret the rocks, learn

the language of floods, storm

and the avalanche.

I'll acquaint myself with the

glaciers and wild gardens, and

get as near the heart of the

world as I can.

As you all know, Muir would go

on to become a national voice.

Not the only one, but the most

eloquent one, in a growing

conservation movement as the

19th century entered its closing

decade.

When more and more Americans

became alarmed at what the

nation's headlong rush westward

had done to the land and to the

natural world.

Buffalo that had once teemed

over the Great Plains numbering

in the tens of millions had been

annihilated for their hides and

reduced to a few hundred, or

even fewer.

Great flocks of birds that had

once darkened the skies had been

devastated on an industrial

scale by market hunters seeking

to supply restaurants with meat,

or women in big cities with

exotic plumes for their hats.

Timber syndicates that had laid

waste to the uplands of the

upper Midwest were now mounting

an assault on the public domain

forest of the mountain west.

Mining had long since switched

from being a swarm of individual

prospectors panning in a stream

to powerful hydraulic hoses

dismantling entire hillsides, or

deep open pits next to smelters

that belched arsenic-tinged

smoke day and night.

Railroads now reached into every

corner of the country.

Indians had been conquered and

forced onto reservations.

Towns had sprung up in enough

places that the director of the

census of 1890 announced, "there

can hardly be said to be a

frontier line."

Seizing on that, another man

from Wisconsin and the

university here, the historian

Frederick Jackson Turner,

proclaimed, "And now four

centuries from the discovery of

America, at the end of a hundred

years of life under the

Constitution, the frontier has

gone, and with it's going has

closed the first period of

American history."

The census bureau, by the way,

had an interesting turn of

phrase in discussing the

nation's westward march.

Once a place had a population

density of more than two people

per square mile it had been

"redeemed from wilderness and

brought into the service

of Man."

Hear that.

Redeemed from wilderness.

Redeemed from wilderness.

A virgin forest, in other words,

was redeemed when the trees were

clear-cut.

A wild, flowing river was

redeemed by a dam.

Miners could redeem

mountainsides.

Iron rails and barbed wire could

redeem the plains.

Now the great forced-march

across the continent seemed

over, and here was Johnny Muir

insisting on the opposite point

of view.

Wilderness wasn't redeemed by

Man, he was saying.

Man is redeemed by wilderness.

With his influential friends in

the East Muir pushed congress to

create a few more national parks

including one in the high

country surrounding the still

state-owned and managed Yosemite

Valley and Big Tree Grove.

In 1891 he pushed for yet

another park farther south

around Kings Canyon.

But this time congress wouldn't

go along.

In again, another one of these

last minute, very little

understood additions to a piece

of legislation, it ended up

handing presidents the

unilateral power to set aside

forest reserves in the west.

No one was entirely sure what

the purpose of these reserves

was, water-shed protection?

Forest preservation?

A momentary break on the

pell-mell advances of the timber

syndicates?

But President Benjamin Harrison

soon flexed his new power.

With strokes of his pen he set

aside forest preserved covering

13 million acres,

including the forest surrounding

Yellowstone and four million

acres along the Sierra Divide

between Yosemite and Sequoia

National Parks and surrounding

the Kings Canyon area that Muir

had described.

With this, another model for

protecting large landscapes had

been born, the National Forest

System.

Through a process that was just

as messy, just as seemingly the

result of happenstance, just as

reliant on the earnest and

sometimes behind-the-scenes

efforts of individual citizens,

and just as interconnected with

Yosemite as the one that had

created the National Parks.

Together, the environmental

historian Donald Worster has

written, "The two kinds of

federal conservation would

eventually protect nearly 300

million acres, reaching from the

Everglades of Florida to the

Brooks Range in northern Alaska.

The birthing of those ideas," he

said, "occurred in the

Yellowstone and Sierra regions

during the infamous Gilded Age,

but especially during the

1890-1893 period when it became

clear that land conservation had

become a legitimate and

necessary part of American

democracy."

Let me jump to another

milestone.

In the late spring of 1903

President Theodore Roosevelt

made an unprecedented,

cross-country, whistle-stop tour

of the nation, 14,000 miles by

train, 25 states, 150 towns and

cities, and more than 200

speeches in the space of eight

weeks.

In the midst of it he camped for

a while in Yellowstone National

Park where he also gave a speech

that focused on what he called

the "essential democracy" of the

national parks.

He said, This park was created

and is now administered for the

benefit and enjoyment of the

people.

It is the property of Uncle Sam

and therefore of all of us.

The only way that the people as

a whole can secure to themselves

and their children the enjoyment

and perpetuity of what the

Yellowstone Park has to give,

he said, is by assuming

ownership in the name of the

nation, and jealously

safeguarding and preserving the

scenery, the forest and the wild

creatures.

A little bit later on this

trip he stopped briefly at the

Grand Canyon, a sight he had

never seen before, but

recognized immediately as a

place needing greater federal

protection.

"Leave it as it is," he advised

the people of Arizona,

"The ages have been at work on

it, and Man can only mar it."

And then Roosevelt came to

Yosemite where he spent three

glorious nights camping with

John Muir, once in the grove of

Sequoias, once at Glacier Point

overlooking the valley, and once

on the valley floor itself.

Now, believe me, Roosevelt was

already a committed outdoors man

and conservationist, but that

camping trip, I believe, was the

most important camping trip in

American history.

Around the camp fire-- and this

is from a Louis & Clark addict,

okay, so that's a big statement.

[laughter]

If I said this at a Louis &

Clark meeting I'd now be run

out of town on a rail.

But it still was the most

important camping trip in

American history.

Around the campfire, Muir said

later, "I stuffed him pretty

well regarding the timber

thieves, the destructive work of

the lumbermen and other spoilers

of the forest."

The camp cook and guide

reported that the two men talked

late into the night "about the

conservation of forests in

general and Yosemite in

particular."

Adding that he "heard them

discussing the setting aside of

other areas of the United

States for park purposes."

The biggest problem, the cook

said, was that both men wanted

to do all the talking

themselves.

[laughter]

Within three years Roosevelt

would sign the bill that would

return the Sequoia Grove and

Yosemite Valley from the state

of California to the federal

government as part of a unified

national park.

The seed had been planted and

had been taken root in

Yellowstone with a different

mutation, had floated back to

the Sierra and sprung up as a

national forest, and finally

unified itself as one national

park in all of Yosemite.

Roosevelt would go on to be the

greatest conservation president

in our history, adding five new

national parks.

That's doubling the number of

national parks at that time, by

the way, 51 bird sanctuaries,

four national game refuges, and

often in the face of fierce

congressional opposition, 100

million acres worth of national

forest.

Under his leadership more than

280,000 square miles of federal

land, an area larger than the

state of Texas--

[laughter]

would be placed under one kind

of conservation protection or

another.

Roosevelt would also sign one of

the most important laws in the

history of public lands, the

thing called the Antiquities

Act.

It was originally intended to

protect places like ancient

cliff dwellings from being

dispoiled and vandalized.

It granted a president the

extraordinary power, the

exclusive authority, without any

congressional approval, to

preserve places that would be

called, not national parks, nor

national forests, but national

monuments.

Roosevelt not only signed that

into law, but he used it 18

times in his presidency.

Places like the very first one,

Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and

then, named for his good friend

and camping companion, Muir

Woods in California.

The Antiquities Act allowed

protection of places so called

"scientific interest."

Although it had been aimed at

only small-sized parcels, it did

not absolutely restrict the

number of acres a president

could set aside.

There was Theodore Roosevelt as

president remembering standing

there on the rim of the Grand

Canyon saying, "Leave it alone."

On January 11, 1908, Roosevelt

stretched this law as never

before, declaring the Grand

Canyon "the object of unusual

scientific interest, being the

greatest eroded canyon within

the United States."

With a stroke of his pen, he set

aside 806,400 acres.

An area larger than, not Texas,

but the state of Rhode Island,

as a national monument.

Now, I'm going to stop there, at

the rim of the Grand Canyon,

with Theodore Roosevelt

deploying the Antiquities Act in

a way that subsequent presidents

would do on behalf of protecting

public lands.

The lands, I will remind you,

that belong to all of us.

Each one of us are owners of

those lands.

Franklin Roosevelt saved the

Grand Tetons with it.

Jimmy Carter doubled the amount

of protected land, the Louisiana

Purchase of conservation, when

he used it in Alaska.

Bill Clinton used it at Grand

Staircase-Escalante in Utah.

All of them got the same

response as Roosevelt did when

he used the Antiquities Act at

the Grand Canyon.

The locals reviled him.

Congress berated him.

And history, history still

honors and remembers him for it.

There would be other types of

public land protection in the

years to come.

The blown out farms of the Dust

Bowl.

By the way, November 18 and 19

on your local station--

The blown out farms of the Dust

Bowl of the 1930's that ruined

farmers, sold back to the

federal government.

Homesteading in reverse.

They were selling their

homesteads back to the federal

government.

They were re-seeded in grass

instead of cash crops, and

turned into four million acres

of national grasslands.

The 1960's would witness an

explosion of national seashores

and lakeshores, national

recreation areas, national

trails, and wild and scenic

rivers, and of course, national

wilderness.

It's, you know, incumbent for me

to say, here in Wisconsin, of

how many prominent Wisconsin

people were involved in all

those things I just mentioned.

People with names like Gaylord

Nelson and Bud Jordahl and two

generations of Leopolds.

I hope that in your future there

will be more lectures and those

could be the topic of one or two

of them.

Because that is still the

evolution and growth of this

idea.

But as I said, we're back at the

Grand Canyon with Theodore

Roosevelt, looking down on the

Colorado and pondering the

weaving course of America's

public lands from the time

Thomas Jefferson preserved

Virginia's Natural Bridge as a

public trust.

The Grand Canyon, I would

submit, is as self-evident a

national park as any place in

America.

In fact, there was a bill

proposing making it a national

park, what would have been the

world's second national park, in

1882.

It was defeated easily because

of the special interests that

had other ideas for making it,

as de Tocqueville would have put

it, useful.

Or put another way, too many

people, in terms of the census

bureau, wanted to redeem it.

The same thing happened in 1883

and 1886.

Bills for a national Grand

Canyon Park were proposed and

defeated.

John Muir called for making it a

national park in his book

Our National Parks in 1902.

Still no action.

Theodore Roosevelt had wanted to

make it a national park too.

But even he, this most vigorous

and powerful president, couldn't

get it done.

Though he did move the ball

forward with the Antiquities Act

and making it a national

monument.

Every repeated attempt to place

it along Yellowstone as a

protected space was beaten back,

and beaten back, until 1919 when

the Grand Canyon became the 16th

national park.

37 years of constant struggle to

decide that the grandest canyon

on Earth ought to be a national

park.

That is what defenders of the

park idea, and public lands,

have always been up against, and

always will be.

There will always be someone who

looks at a river flowing though

a canyon and thinks, "What a

perfect location for a dam."

There will always be someone for

whom a forest of ancient trees

is a business opportunity.

There will always be someone,

who while contemplating a

magnificent mountainside

considers whether it could be

dismantled for the minerals

underneath.

Or upon entering an exquisite

valley, calculates the potential

for a development of trophy

homes behind a locked gate.

There will always be someone

whose definition of the pursuit

of happiness is chasing a

buffalo herd on a snowmobile, or

careening across a slick rock

wilderness in a dune buggy.

Anyone who understands our

national history, springing as

it does from our national

character, knows this.

Are we the people who

systematically drove a uniquely

American animal like the buffalo

to the brink of extinction?

Or are we the people who created

the uniquely American refuge for

them in the world's first

national park, where they were

ultimately spared from

elimination.

We have never, and never will,

resolve that question, this

tension at our core.

We take our identity from the

land in ways people of few other

nations do.

Yet, in our predilection to make

the beautiful useful, we often

make it ugly, or at least

sullied and tawdry.

Nothing and no one is redeemed

in that process.

We end up fouling of own nest

and looking for some other last,

best place in which to start the

process all over again.

With boundless optimism, we set

out to leave our mark on the

world around us, but deep down

there's an uneasiness, a sadness

at the heart of our exuberant

energy.

Perhaps the world would be

better off without our mark upon

it.

"The battle for conservation,

John Muir observed, "will go on

endlessly."

So whether the future will

generate new threats to the

public lands, America's best

idea, is not in question.

The only question is whether the

future will supply a fresh

supply of public land champions

as the counterbalance.

Our children and our children's

children will need those

champions.

If they do step forward,

springing as they must, from

that other half of our national

character, and finding their

salvation through their

surrender to the land, John Muir

has already written their

epitaph.

It is, "They will not be

forgotten.

The trees and their lovers will

sing their praises, and

generations yet unborn will rise

up and call them blessed."

Thank you very much.

[applause]