Beloved Wilderness
Borland, Hal
Beloved Wilderness My Wilderness: The Pacific West, by William O. Douglas. Doubleday. 206 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Hal Borland W7"illiam O. Douglas is not only " a wise and liberal justice on the...
...The wilderness stands as the true 'control' plot for all experimentation in the animal and vegetable worlds...
...He can tell how he drifted down on an unsuspecting bear on a stream in the Olympics, got within three feet of him, slapped him on the rump and laughed at the bear's panic...
...He takes us down the Middle Fork of the Salmon, in Idaho, "one of the finest fishing streams in America," an area so rugged that the Forest Service puts fire fighters in by parachute and tells them to return to the river when they have the fire under control...
...Only about two per cent of this country, around 55,000,000 acres, remains a roadless wilderness...
...A civilization can be built around the machine...
...So we have about one-third of an acre apiece, each of us, and as Justice Douglas points out this is the absolute minimum we must have...
...he is also one of the wisest and most outspoken of our present day conservationists...
...His chapter on that area glows and shimmers...
...Back in Washington, Douglas reports, plans are on file to put as many as nineteen separate dams along the Middle Fork to harness it for hydroelectric power...
...We have none to lose to whimsical or wasteful decision...
...Then he takes us on a hike along the shore area of Pacific Beach at the northwest tip of Washington, where there is constant pressure for "a highway that would turn it into another Atlantic City or Coney Island," and he asks, "Do roads have to go everywhere...
...Can't we save one per cent of the woods for those who love wildness...
...He starts with the Brooks Range in Alaska, the "last American living wilderness," a place where man "can experience a new reverence for life that is outside his own and yet a vital and joyous part of it...
...He covers eleven areas, and each chapter reads as though it were written from extensive notes taken on the spot...
...boats pick them up, because "it's so rugged that trails are not much use...
...This passion for roads is partial evidence of our great decline as a people...
...Apart from Alaska, there are few places left where one can get more than ten miles from any road...
...Lumbering and real wilderness, motoring and real wilderness, hotels and real wilderness are mutually exclusive...
...But it can be destroyed by the stroke of a pen...
...The Middle Fork—one of our finest wilderness areas—must be preserved in perpetuity...
...And there again he comes back to the road problem...
...He needs a measure of the wilderness, so that he may relax in the environment that God made for him...
...There he now finds the threat to the wilderness made acute by the passion for building roads...
...and those who would know those areas should go by trail, not by road...
...And we had better listen, every last one of us...
...And as the roads multiply, the trails are neglected...
...Once the interior is tapped by roads, the wilderness is gone forever...
...He also shows his knowledge of ecology and his fundamental belief in nature's own ways...
...With them intact, man need not become an automaton...
...Without effort, struggle, and exertion, even high rewards turn to ashes...
...Moreover, he is one of the few who speak from personal knowledge and observation, since he probably has walked more wilderness miles, fished more wilderness waters, ridden more wilderness trails, than any of the professionals...
...Yet he cannot live a full life with the products of his own creation...
...So what he has to say in this book about the wilderness areas of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska has special importance...
...All through this book Justice Douglas shows his broad knowledge of wild life, both plant and animal...
...Douglas loves the Mount Adams area, but it seems to me that he is in reverent awe and passionately devoted to the Olympic Mountains, with their rain forests...
...There is no possible way to open roadless areas to cars and retain a wilderness...
...Man sometimes seems to try to crowd everything but himself out of the universe...
...This," he says, "would be the greatest indignity ever inflicted on a sanctuary...
...The last three chapters deal with Glacier Peak, in northern Washington, the High Sierras in California, and the Wallawas...
...Every acre of wilderness lost will take at least a century to renew itself—if it ever gets that chance...
...It is almost sacred ground to him, and understandably so...
...Too few people, especially people in a position to do anything about it, seem to care...
...Most of this is in the public domain, technically protected but actually at the mercy of bureaucratic decision...
...He can exult over trout, and saddle horses, and camp fare, and even over a rain-wet bed...
...There is hardly a place these days a jeep will not reach...
...The struggle of our time is to maintain an economy of plenty and yet keep man's freedom intact...
...But it is doubtful that a meaningful life can be produced by it...
...From there he takes us to Hart Mountain, a rugged upland in southeastern Oregon, with its notable herd of pronghorn antelope...
...Reviewed by Hal Borland W7"illiam O. Douglas is not only " a wise and liberal justice on the Supreme Court of the United States...
...He can defend the wolves in the Brooks Range, for instance— "The sight of a wolf loping across a hillside is as moving as a symphony" —and insist that predators belong in any wilderness area...
...Roadless areas are one pledge to freedom...
...Then to Mount Adams, Goat Rocks, and Goose Prairie, interrupted by a chapter on the Olympic Mountains...
...With the roads, of course, is the threat poised by lumbering and by grazing...
...That is what Justice Douglas is saying...
...Only through knowledge of the norm can an appraisal of the abnormal or diseased be made...
...The Mount Adams-Goose Prairie area is especially close to Justice Douglas' heart, for he knew it well during his youth, afoot and on horseback...
...The choice must be made...
...Those of us who do care'should insist that this book be read and acted upon by our Congressmen and, if such a thing is possible, by those bureau heads and Cabinet officers who have the final say...
...But every chapter has his urgent demand that the wilderness be cherished and preserved...
...and he says a good deal, with cogency as well as color...
Vol. 24 • December 1960 • No. 12
