Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Lands for the Public: America's Best Idea  Dayton Duncan  10/17/2012 UP785  cc >> 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]