PROTECTOR OF THE NATION'S WILDERNESS
Neuberger, Richard L.
Protector Of The Nation's Wilderness By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER AMAN named "Bob" Yard is dead. Robert Sterling Yard was his full name. His obituary notice did not receive great prominence in these...
...He lived to be 84 years old...
...This is a proud record...
...thus financial sinews were available and telephone calls, telegrams, and leaflets could be paid for...
...But as editor of the Century Bob Yard found a new interest...
...This long period he was to spend exclusively in a crusade for the protection of our wilderness...
...A young forester with great inherited wealth, Robert Marshall, made generous gifts to the Wilderness Society...
...He was one of those people who live out useful lives in comparative obscurity...
...For a time he edited The Larrup and in 1913 became editor-in-chief of Century Magazine...
...He soon became an editor of the Herald in the same city and then went with Scribner's publishing company...
...The Wilderness Society is still going forward...
...MANY kings and rulers have done less good in their careers than did Bob Yard...
...He was an outstanding newspaperman who devoted his life to the preservation of the last remnant of America's original scenery...
...He stayed with the service until 1919, when he returned to private life to organize the National Parks Association, which he said would keep the Park Service working diligently, despite political and economic pressures, to maintain the wilderness areas of the United States...
...Hunters wanted to shoot the mule deer on the rim of the Grand Canyon...
...Kittredge knows what it is to fight for conservation—to hold up an intangible ideal against the persuasive dollars-and-cents arguments of men who want to turn trees into lumber, grass into beefsteaks, slopes into metal bars, rivers into irrigation ditches...
...YARD was now 58 years old, but he was to live for another quarter of a century...
...The Living Wilderness 4 times a year accompanies membership in the organization...
...Michigan's Porcupine Mountains were in peril of being logged bare...
...Membership costs $1 annually, a subscribing membership is $2 and a contributing membership costs $5...
...It requires 600 years for a forest like the Douglas firs of the Olympics or the Ponderosa pines of the Feather River Canyon to develop as a living entity...
...Here are the purposes of the Wilderness Society, as Robert Sterling Yard set them down: 1. To enlist the American people in the preservation of the American wilderness...
...In Yard's own words, the society was established "to meet the emergency of a sudden excessively dangerous decline in America's unequalled wilderness...
...The vast majority of Americans never heard of him...
...The Quetico-Superior forests of Minnesota often stood close to the axe and saw...
...And Bob Yard left the Century to become educational secretary of the U. S. National Park Service...
...Manuscripts came in from the Far West...
...The remnant of wilderness that survives is a more enduring tombstone than many potentates will have...
...Theodore Roosevelt once said, "There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty...
...IT took a long time for Americans to learn this truth...
...The Wilderness Society has fought many hard and bitter fights...
...But Robert Sterling Yard was known to the men on back trails in a dozen mountain ranees, in a score of upland valleys, on a hundred forested plateaus...
...The Wilderness Society was organized to protect from destruction and exploitation what still remains of the primeval fastnesses which greeted the men and women who first landed on this continent...
...And when Marshall died, after a short career spent in the woods, he left much of his money in trust for the Wilderness Society, with Bob Yard a trustee and manager of the Robert Marshall Wilderness Fund...
...If you want to invest a few dollars so that people yet unborn can collect the dividends, write to 1840 Mintwood Place, Washington, D. C, and join the Wilderness Society...
...If you agree with this program in general, add your name to the roster of the Wilderness Society...
...He edited the National Park Bulletin, he conducted the National Park News Service, he wrote five books on conservation, and he founded the Wilderness Society...
...Bob Yard was the founder and moving spirit of an organization known as the Wilderness Society...
...Such forests can be destroyed in a few days...
...In the high fastnesses of the Yosemite country I told Frank Kittredge, Yosemite's veteran superintendent, that Bob Yard was dead...
...Yet a century from now, Americans will camp in the shade of great trees and look up at mighty peaks because of Bob Yard and the Wilderness Society...
...Then he gazed across the uplands to the peaks of the Sierra Nevada Range...
...He read what indiscriminate logging and reckless lumbering was doing to our final frontier...
...But the Wilderness Society has helped to save for the American people the Douglas fir forests ,of the Olympic Peninsula, the redwood groves of California, the trees of the Kings River Canyon, and the Lake Superior forest country...
...It is anathema to lumbermen, wealthy cattle raisers, mining interests, and big-game hunters...
...Bob Yard helped save the American West but he was born in Haverstraw, N. Y., in 1861...
...2. To spread the conception that the wilderness is a valuable natural resource of the people and should be conserved as such...
...He was now near the apex of American publishing...
...And when the society was well under way he undertook the editorship of The Living Wilderness, a little magazine published 4 times a year with the mission of trying to persuade the American people to preserve their legacy...
...His obituary notice did not receive great prominence in these times when the papers are full of news of many deaths...
...So Bob Yard himself is dead now...
...The struggle for conservation continues...
...Like Bob Yard himself, this organization is not widely known in America...
...When he knew that Bob Yard was dead, Kittredge looked for a moment at North Dome's lofty nob...
...He went West to see the looting for himself...
...Lumber mills sought to block creation of a National Park on the Olympic Peninsula...
...Not much of our original continent is left...
...Bob Yard.spent his life asking this question...
...But what about leaving the forest for the next generation to see...
...Grazing interests hungrily eyed the lush meadows of the Yosemite...
...He graduated from Princeton and went to work as a reporter for the old New York Sun...
...It is easy to convince people that a forest should be cut down...
...He turned his back on what might have been a lucrative career so that he could spare trees from the axe, wild animals from the hunter's bullet, and mountain peaks from the scar and blight of the miner's dredge...
...The American wilderness which our children and grandchildren will see is a monument to Bob Yard...
...He was a champion of the wilderness...
...Spots of primeval grandeur in America attest to the effectiveness of his work...
...The Wilderness Society soon was warring on a dozen conservation fronts...
...Robert Sterling Yard led all these fights...
...Well," said he, "Bob Yard has a real monument...
...3. To promote nationwide cooperation in resisting the invasion of the wilderness by sights, sounds and other influences of civilization, including (a) routes which can be used for mechanized transportation, (b) all commercial developments, and (c) those non-commercial improvements and influences which clash seriously with the primeval environment...
Vol. 9 • August 1945 • No. 32
