Guarding Our Outdoor Heritage

...The answers furnish you the basis for constructive action built on an informed judgment...

...Wastelands of stumps in New England and in Michigan and Wisconsin told dramatically what would happen along the Columbia, Colorado, and Snake Rivers if government were not RICHARD L. NEUBERGER, United States Senator from Oregon, is a member of the two Senate Committees most concerned with conservation—Interior and Public Works...

...The proportionate increase in recreation is not far behind...

...But, gradually, some 14,500,000 acres of matchless outdoor grandeur were swept into National Parks and Monuments...

...But more lasting benefits resulted from the Public Works Administration, and many of these projects advanced the cause of conservation...

...They had seen the entire inventory...

...The career of The Progressive during the past half century has paralleled the great surge of concern among Americans for the future of their outdoor heritage...

...The Eisenhower Administration, four decades later, began somewhat along this theme, albeit a little less blatantly...

...The answers published in your daily newspaper are not fleeting messages, but are an indelible record that give you and your neighbors the basis for discussion and for rendering the ultimate decision on unpopular and unjust actions...

...Tragically, people often could not discern where their own genuine welfare lay...

...Such concern was thoroughly justified...

...But now a Republican regime set back the conservation clock...

...Could resources in such profusion ever thin out...

...The New Deal had come into office at a time of widespread unemployment...

...America's hardwood forests had lasted barely a generation...

...Nature has done well by our United States...

...Thus your daily newspaper is an extension of your power to ask questions about policies that affect you...

...The most eternal source of power, falling water, was serving to unlock the riddles of the universe...

...4. Continuation of the wise multiple-use program of timber management, grazing, mining, and recreation within the bulk of our National Forests...

...In Oregon, greatest of the tree-growing states, the legislature memorialized against Pinchot's program for Forest Reserves...

...8. A law forbidding the Federal Power Commission to license either a public or private dam on a river inhabited by migratory fisheries, unless the Fish and Wildlife Service approves the fish ladders and similar protective devices...

...Without these resources, America could be as bereft as the Middle East, as hard put as China, as reliant upon imports as Western Europe...

...The park system is tor recreation and scenic enjoyment alone...

...As a result, the federal dam-building program lagged...

...Ranchers claimed that the high terraces of the Colorado's chasm were more useful for grazing than sightseeing...

...2. No substantial diminution in the size of either National Parks or of Wilderness Areas within the National Forests...

...galvanized into bold action...

...Preservation was intensified for vanishing species like the California condor and the whooping crane...

...So it was that national anxiety over the preservation of timber, soil, water, minerals, and wildlife came into existence at just about the time that one of Theodore Roosevelt's associates in the Progressive political movement, Robert Marion LaFollette, Sr., of Wisconsin, was founding the forerunner of The Progressive magazine...

...The Forest Reserves became known as National Forests, eventually encompassing 181,000,000 acres...

...In 1912 President Taft's Secretary of the Interior, Richard A. Ballinger of Washington state, had said: "You chaps who are in favor of this conservation program are all wrong...

...In addition, the modern Fish and Wildlife Service came into existence during the long Roosevelt Administration...

...Now, the National Park system began to contain many companion pieces during the period that Senator LaFollette's magazine was beginning its demands for greater adherence to the public welfare in this and numerous other fields...

...Travelers on the first overland railroads fired at the shaggy beasts from Pullman windows...

...7. Legislation to prevent the commercial sale of trees on National Forest land that has been patented as the result of mining claims...

...Indeed, such controversy had only just begun...

...His constituents retired him...

...You are hindering the development of the West...

...In Oregon the public became thoroughly alarmed over the prospect that the great Ponderosa pine forest of the Klamath Indians might be exploited and clear cut...

...But no longer would the citizenry as a whole look on with drab indifference when forests went unprotected from fire, when rivers were turned into cesspools of sewage and offal, when big game and fisheries and waterfowl could be decimated without regard for the future survival of their species...

...He is the author of the federal law controlling signboards on our interstate highways, and he was recently appointed as a Senate member of the National Outdoor Recreational Resources Review Commission...

...In America, everyone with pub-He responsibility knows he must be prepared to answer for his actions...

...Yet great natural wonders like the Grand Canyon, the Yosemite, and the "rain forests" of the Olympic Peninsula were not spared for forthcoming generations without angry political battles...

...This did not mean that conflict between exploiters and the public was over—far from it...

...It was a question of the looters being present in the West, too, and they sometimes could dictate to state legislatures, which in that period also had the authority to appoint United States Senators...

...In my opinion, the proper course to take is to divide it up among the big corporations and the people who know how to make money out of it, and let the people at large get the benefit of the circulation of the money...

...The outcome was an enlightened bill for alternative federal purchase of this vast and rich reservation that I introduced at the request of the Eisenhower Administration, which by 1958 had learned something of a lesson regarding the fervent interest of the American people in their natural resources...

...On March 4, 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Forest Reserves Act...

...Yet the principle of perpetual supply is preserved...

...It was an epochal event...

...Ira N. Gabrielson, was instrumental in negotiating agreements with Canada to protect the millions of ducks and geese traveling nomadically the prodigious flyways between the Arctic and the tropics...

...The adverse policies of the Eisenhower Administration stirred new militancy and determination in the ranks of national outdoor groups...

...And water pumped for irrigation brought about thousands of new farm homesteads, which produced specialty crops that were not in surplus...

...Never again would Americans deal so cavalierly with their resources...

...Pinchot himself frequently speculated on the sad fact that much of his opposition came from the West, where were concentrated the natural resources which he and his President sought to save...

...Lumbermen wanted the borders of such parks as the Olympics and Crater Lake kept to narrow proportions so that few forested stockades would be taken out of lumber production...

...The complacent 1920's saw scant progress...

...It is my personal hope that their thoughts tend in the direction of such policies as these: 1. Strict adherence to the longstanding National Park tradition of no commercial impairment or invasion, plus recreational development of the Parks under the splendid "Mission 66" program...

...Yet every disease frequently produces its own antidote...

...The bearded naturalist, John Muir, had warned that, while only God could grow a tree, only Uncle Sam could save a tree...

...This was a happy contrast to the era in which federal forest rangers had been warned off the holdings of some companies at the point of a gun...

...Greater attention to scenery and natural grandeur and aesthetics, such as keeping billboards off our highways and making inns, lodges, and other facilities more in keeping with the natural terrain...

...Indeed, President Roosevelt had called the first Governors' Conference on Conservation at the White House in May of 1908, and there he said to the chief executives of 46 states: "The wise use of all our natural resources is the great material question of today...

...The newspaper is a guardian of your freedom...

...President Roosevelt also authorized the construction of huge river projects for hydroelectricity, navigation, flood control, and irrigation...

...Under President Harding, Republican politicians from the Southwest connived at the looting of Wyoming oil lands dedicated to the use of the Navy...

...The upland desert was being made to bloom, and this helped to encourage a vast migration westward to California, Arizona, and other Western states...

...From that time on it was fight, fight, fight...

...In my own state of Oregon, for example, there is only pride in the gleaming blue majesty of Crater Lake, which occupies the deep cauldron of a volcano that blew off its summit in geological times...

...Another contrast in the field of conservation occurred early in 1953, when the Eisenhower Administration took office...

...The frontier was closing...

...Gifford Pinchot, that determined woodsman with handlebar mustaches who became President Roosevelt's chief forester, later wrote of this era: "We had the power, as we had the duty, to protect the Forest Reserves for the use of the people, and that meant stepping on the toes of the biggest interests in the West...

...One persuasive theme threads through my own mind...

...They rallied to the programs jettisoned by the President and his counselors...

...Herbert Hoover, often considered the epitome of Republican conservatism, had authorized this great structure while he sat in the White House, but the Eisenhower Cabinet was opposed to a comparable federal dam along the Snake...

...No more was there another untrammeled valley just beyond the next hill or mountain peak...

...This was the atmosphere during the years from 1907 through the end of Theodore Roosevelt's two terms in the White House, in 1909...

...Great lumber companies like Weyerhaeuser and Crown-Zellerbach now realized that the era of "cut out and get out" had to end if their industry were to survive...

...Some segment of America should remain as it was before the white men came...

...Termination of federal supervision over Indian tribes was legalized, without any real heed to the fate of timber, wildlife, and other natural resources that had received prudent custodianship while the tribes were under government protection...

...Tree farms" began to dot these private holdings—wide areas where reforestation was carefully nurtured...

...Wild animals were slaughtered indiscriminately to make way for domestic herds...

...Every day your newspaper, through its reporters and wire services, covers a multitude of news-fronts probing for answers to the whys and wherefores of actions that affect your job, your home, your family and your safety...

...And so half a century after the setting aside of original Forest Reserves by Teddy Roosevelt and Pinchot the citizens of the United States are thinking more zealously than ever about the fundamental importance of conservation...

...Grasslands were turned over and planted to wheat and corn...

...They plowed the prairie, cleared the slopes, and settled the valleys...

...The modern conservation movement was just being born...

...The other became mankind's largest power plant and, at the same time, furnished water to reclaim 1,200,000 acres of upland desert...

...Boys were taken off the streets of Eastern cities, where unemployment and crime had been rampant, and sent into the solitudes of the West as the Civilian Conservation Corps...

...James B. Craig, editor of American Forests magazine, has written: "The cry of 'no more land' is something new to Americans only one generation removed from pioneering ancestors . . . Healthy recreational outlets should have a high priority on any planning totem pole...

...And the land means natural resources—all of them...

...In the Pacific Northwest, last great citadel of commercial lumbering, the allowable annual cut within the National Forests has leaped from 577,000,000 board-feet in 1940 to nearly 3,000,000,000 today...

...In our time about 55,000,000 people visit the National Parks each year and at least 52,000,000 trek to the National Forests...

...Their fate meant so little that wranglers drove them over cliffs in order to save expensive ammunition...

...It is man's part which needs constant attention and improvement...

...In the end, after all, there are only the land and the people...

...One rehabilitated a wide section of the Southeastern states...

...In fact, a number of lumber corporations adopted with much heraldry the Pinchot philosophy of "multiple use," and they announced that their lands could produce game, water, and scenery as well as 2x4's and plywood...

...Three small dams, capable of barely half the output of energy, replaced what might have been a high barrier equal to the lofty Hoover Dam on the Colorado River...

...It is ominously evident that these resources are in the course of rapid exhaustion...

...It was an era of profligacy...

...Fire hazards have never again been quite so grim as in the days before the CCC...

...It came about after many decades of plundering and exploitation...

...An Idaho Senator said forest fires were of no particular importance, because there were always more trees where the burned ones had come from...

...National Forest receipts from the sale of timber stumpage, in the 11 Western states alone, amounted to nearly $90,000,000 during 1957...

...Wasn't there always another horizon ahead where the booty was unlimited...

...They had "got" religion and it was an opportune development...

...It heralded an eventual end to what the geographer, J. Russell Smith, has described as "the American cycle of cut, slash, fire, and land abandonment...

...Nobody had worried over the future...

...The Izaak Walton League conceived the bold idea of a National Outdoor Recreational Resources Review Commission, which would inventory all the country's possibilities for rest and fun beneath the open sky...

...Nor was it government alone which motivated the conserving of resources...

...There were voices in our nation for conservation—voices like those of Teddy Roosevelt, Robert Marion LaFollette, John Muir, George W. Nor-ris, Stephen T. Mather, Franklin K. Lane, and others...

...At first, with hunger and misery to alleviate, men had been put to work raking leaves—anything for jobs...

...Reclamation reservoirs, storing the precious waters of the arid inter-mountain states, received little encouragement from the parsimonious regime of Calvin Coo-lidge...

...These trees were prudently harvested under the watchful vigilance of trained forest rangers, so that each year the allowable cut would be kept in permanent balance with new growth...

...Some of the timber companies began operating free public parks for the benefit of hunters, fishermen, and campers...

...Visiting European potentates rode furiously all day to learn how many animals they could kill between dawn and sunset...

...The great multi-purpose damsite at Hells Canyon, on the Snake River, was surrendered by the government to the Idaho Power Company...

...Railways and wagon roads threaded out through the solitudes...

...It signified that the American government suddenly cared about its natural resources...

...After Lewis and Clark had come with the flag, Americans moved tempestuously westward...

...These include Denver, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle...

...The first director of the service, Dr...

...GI's from America's wars enjoyed priority in settling on the reclaimed lands...

...But in 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt brought into the White House a fondness for his own private arbo-retums, a keen appreciation of the wide open spaces, and a philosophy of government which envisaged great social responsibility...

...A network of refuges for game and birds was expanded...

...These now contain 33 per cent of the country's commercial timber, a large part of the summer range for the Western livestock industry, and some 70 per cent of the big game of the West...

...And when the lumber industry finally got under way in the Northwest, almost as much lumber was left to rot on the ground, in stumps and slashings, as reached the market in boards and beams and ship's decking...

...As the source of cheap hydro-electricity, these impounded reaches of our rivers not only saved countless tons of exhaustible oil and coal but made possible the pioneering atomic developments at Oak Ridge in the Tennessee Valley and at Hanford on the banks of the Columbia...

...At other natural damsites, the soldier President recommended that the public pay for such non-revenue-producing features as navigation locks and fish ladders, but that private utilities be privileged to install the valuable powerhouses...

...Whole animals were slain so merely the tongue could be eaten...

...At least 50,000,000 bison had thundered across the plains at the time of Lewis and Clark...

...Once wilderness is mined or grazed or logged, it never can be true wilderness again...

...Visits to the forests have gone up 113 per cent since only 1950...

...Now it was their task to preserve it—or else...

...A nation can become "have not" almost overnight...

...This meant positive action by the federal government if the great watersheds of the Rockies, Cascades, and Sierras were not to be stripped bare—with eroded slopes, flash floods, starved wildlife, and stranded fisheries as the inevitable result...

...The New Deal and Fair Deal of the Democrats had brought to new heights the resource concept of a Republican, Theodore Roosevelt...

...Still worse, pressure was placed to choose alternate sites where great peril was involved to migratory salmon runs—particularly on the Salmon River watershed of Idaho...

...These resources are the final basis of national power and perpetuity...

...6. Sufficient Congressional appropriations each fiscal year to keep on schedule "Operation Outdoors," by which the Forest Service hopes to rehabilitate many of the recreational projects started by the CCC troopers nearly a quarter of a century ago...

...He knows that your representative —the skilled reporter of the daily newspaper—will appear, pencil in hand, to ask pertinent questions that he had better be prepared to answer...

...Never before had recreation in the fastnesses benefited by so intensive a program...

...Funds from "duck stamps," considered by hunters as inviolate to develop game refuges, were diverted for purely administrative expenditures...

...Few such decisions ever were regretted...

...Forest Service...

...5. Authority in the office of the U. S. surgeon-general to levy penalties against industries or communities which create a menace to health by dumping sewage and waste into our rivers and streams...

...These were symbolized by the Tennessee Valley Authority and by Grand Coulee Dam...

...The Power to Ask Protects Your Right to Know Every day some policy-makers in government, or leaders in other Walks of life, make decisions which vitally affect your future and that of your family...

...Theodore Roosevelt and his associates ushered in the modern era of conservation...

...This touched off a House investigation, which condemned such a policy as inimical to the basic conservation purposes of the game and waterfowl sanctuaries...

...This means that camping, lumbering, mining, grazing, fishing, dam-building, and hunting all take place simultaneously under rules and regulations prescribed by the U.S...

...9. Legislation modifying the authority of the Federal Power Commission and other agencies to disregard the views of state conservation bureaus in licensing projects on rivers wholly within the borders of one particular state...

...Both sides already have mounted strong and convincing arguments regarding a Wilderness Preservation Bill, now before Congress...

...The carcasses rotted on the plains...

...They began to duplicate the sustained-yield policies practiced by the Forest Service...

...This should induce Americans to proceed slowly when they alter the character of their few remaining primitive realms, because such a process inevitably becomes irreversible...

...These groups, such as the National Wildlife Federation and the Wildlife Management Institute, mobilized public opinion so vigorously that the President had to drop his Cabinet officers who had been the most aggressive about abandoning conservation policies of long standing...

...Settlers migrating into the vast Northwest set virgin forests on fire to hasten the clearing of the land, burning a crop which had taken centuries to mature so they could sow seeds that would blossom during a season...

...They hired professional foresters of their own...

...Nearly every major city in the West, the fastest-growing realm in the nation, receives its drinking supply from watersheds safeguarded behind the boundaries of National Forests...

...National Parks also came into abundance in the years that the forests were being saved...

...It seems evident that one of the prolonged conservation controversies, during the next 50 years of The Progressive, will be how much of the public lands in the American outdoors to leave as primeval wilderness and how much to adapt to supervised use...

...These were next in the ruthless path of the primitives in the lumber industry, who thought only of profits rather than of future generations...

...Billions of cubic feet of water had been escaping wasted to the sea...

...The forests, however, are managed according to what Gifford Pinchot described as "multiple use...

...3. Protection of wildlife refuges and waterfowl sanctuaries from oil-drilling and similar exploiting activities...

...The CCC boys also cut in half the previous losses from forest fires, as they erected lookout towers and other equipment...

...As public lands came to be used for the general welfare rather than for private plundering, fluctuations of course occurred in the pace of conservation...

...The Pacific Ocean had been reached...

...Farmers were encouraged to provide wetlands where migratory birds could breed and find sanctuary...

...In fact, many of the lumbermen and logging operators, who originally opposed creation of the Forest Reserves, now depend almost totally upon these federal sanctuaries for their own sources of timber...

...Americans realized they had to survive on what they had...

...In many countries of the world you would be forced to follow these dictums blindly, unable to ask why, or in many cases unable even to know that they had been made...

...They built trails and roads, improved campgrounds, and developed ski bowls...

...Yellowstone, the first park, had been set aside as early as 1872...

...Furthermore, the Interior Department licensed wholesale oil drilling on wildlife refuges under its protection...

...50 Years of Conservation Guarding Our Outdoor Heritage by RICHARD L. NEUBERGER After ax and saw and blasting powder had laid waste the green groves of the Great Lakes states, wise men in America feared that the same desolate fate awaited the upland forests mantling the foothills and mountainsides of the Far West...