A well-used canoe hangs from a ceiling at Northland College in Ashland, WI. It belonged to the man whose name also graces the school's environmental institute: Sigurd Olson. That craft, in that place, tells much about the man who paddled it and much about the life he lived.
If the right measure of a person is not only what he did but what he helped others to do, Sig was a titan. Ever the teacher, he mentored countless young people. He was an avid outdoorsman who nurtured a life-long love for wild places everywhere. But he treasured most the Quetico-Superior canoe country of northern Minnesota and adjoining Ontario. He was also a scientist. He approached nature with awe and affection, certainly, but with a dedication to methodical study as well.
Sig was a writer, too, and his dogged determination to succeed at it surmounted early criticism and rejection--a model for anyone who dares creativity. Perhaps we remember him best, though, as an activist leader who turned his personal beliefs into public advocacy and thereby helped shape and define contemporary understanding of wilderness values. For that, as much as for anything else, The Wilderness Society honored Sig with its first Robert Marshall Award in 1981.
Sig's life span parallels the rapid growth and industrialization of our continent. Urban centers burgeoned and wild country began to slip away as undeveloped land and natural resources were carelessly exploited as commercial commodities. He argued strongly for a different vision, one shaped in large part by his time at Northland College.
During the 1920s, Olson fought to keep roads and dams out of the Quetico-Superior region of northern Minnesota. In the 1940s, he spearheaded a successful and precedent-setting fight to ban airplanes from the area. That work propelled him into the front ranks of the budding American conservation movement.
As he matured, Olson's conservation leadership positions multiplied. He was a wilderness ecologist for the Izaak Walton League of America, president of the National Parks Assn., and of The Wilderness Society. He was also an advisor to the National Park Service and the Secretary of the Interior
Sig was a leader in passage of what became the Wilderness Act of 1964. Howard Zahniser, executive secretary of The Wilderness Society, drafted the measure and began laying plans for its passage. It was Sig Olson, as much as anyone else, who enlisted the support of Minnesota Sen. Hubert Humphrey. Olson's biographer, David Backes, notes that Humphrey asked Olson for his opinion of the measure and Olson urged the senator to sponsor it.
In June of 1956, Humphrey introduced the bill in the U.S. Senate. It wouldn't pass the Congress for eight long years. When it did, it established our National Wilderness Preservation System and made an initial deposit into that system of around 10 million acres. Its protections now extend to over 106 million acres of our finest public lands. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation adding Olson's beloved Boundary Waters Canoe Area to the system. Today, the 1.1 million-acre area is the nation's most visited wilderness. The Boundary Waters, and the like-sized and adjacent Quetico Provincial Park, comprise a 2.2 million-acre wilderness complex for today's recreationists, much as it afforded an essential highway to the fur trade voyageurs two centuries ago.
Voyageurs National Park along the Minnesota-Ontario border commemorates the route of the voyageurs and Olson was instrumental in its designation as the state's only national park.
A contemporary of Olaus and Mardie Murie, Sig stood with them in the fight to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to identify other pristine lands ultimately protected under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980.
Despite the highest awards from four of our largest conservation organizations (The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation and the Izaak Walton League), Sig Olson remained who he'd always been, fully within reach of ordinary people. He was a private and deeply spiritual man and his writing reflects that. It appeals to everyone that seeks respite, healing and growth in unspoiled nature.
He especially encouraged the young, who he called "the hope of the world," to find their own best path toward environmental action. In the end, all Sig's work flowed from a bedrock belief: "Wilderness…is a spiritual necessity," he said, "an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium. I have found that people go to the wilderness for many things, but the most important of these is perspective. They may think they go for the fishing or the scenery or companionship, but in reality it is something far deeper. They go to the wilderness for the good of their souls."
In 1972, Northland College dedicated the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute to honor one of its most renowned, and eloquent, alumni and trustees. Olson's call for combining environmental awareness and action remains the animating force for the Institute's programs.
In his book, "Reflections from the North Country," and in a chapter entitled "Courage," Olson wrote of "sisu," a Finnish notion that speaks of a feeling of a home worth dying for. Sisu imbues environmentalists. He said:
It is what gives environmentalists the strength to battle for the land they love, to take scorn and epithets in their stride, knowing they are fighting for something eternal; if they win, the world will be a more beautiful place in which to live. They have dedication and resolve, an inherent vision that will not accept defeat."
Sigurd Olson's remarkable heart finally failed him while he was snowshoeing near his Ely, MN, home on January 13, 1982. He was 82. The day after his death, his son Sigurd Jr., went to his father's writing shack. He found paper in the typewriter with these words on it: "A New Adventure is coming up. I'm sure it will be a good one."
