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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]