Howard Zahniser led The Wilderness Society through two decades of wilderness battles and landmark accomplishments. It was a time that saw, due in large part to Zahniser's sheer persistence, the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the political maturing of The Wilderness Society.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 established the National Wilderness Preservation System, which now encompasses more than 104 million acres. In the Act, Zahniser penned for the nation the essence of wilderness:
"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
Zahniser served as executive secretary of The Wilderness Society and editor of its magazine, The Living Wilderness, from 1945 until his death in 1964. Together with director Olaus Murie, he carried on the legacy of the Society's principal founder, Robert Marshall, who had died in 1939, and Robert Sterling Yard, a charter member who had administered the daily activities of the Society until his own death in 1945.
Between 1956 and 1964, Zahniser wrote 66 drafts of the bill and steered it through 18 hearings. In his last appearance before Congress, Zahniser spoke eloquently of the bill's implications for society:
"Civilization's ambition can encompass wilderness protection. And so sublimated, it can make preservation a prevailing purpose. We maintain the gallery of art, even though few use it.... The wilderness system that has come to use from the eternity of the past we have the boldness to project into the eternity of the future. It seems presumptuous for men and women who live only forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, or eighty years to dare to undertake a program for perpetuity, but that surely is our challenge."
Zahniser, confident of success, died one week later in his sleep in early May 1964. Zahniser's wife, along with Mardy Murie, was present in the Rose Garden when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Act into law on September 3, 1964.
Personal History
Howard Zahniser was at heart an intellectual whose passions included art, music, and books. The son of a Pennsylvania minister, Zahniser became a member of the Junior Audubon Club in the fifth grade and in time developed a deep love for the Adirondack Mountains. Generally, though, he preferred to admire the wild country from afar and to ponder its inherent goodness from a philosophical standpoint.
Equal to Zahniser's respect for nature was his affinity for the written word. Trained as a journalist, Zahniser worked as a book reviewer for Nature Magazine and as an editor for the U.S. Biological Survey before co-heading The Wilderness Society in 1945. Under his direction, The Living Wilderness, the Society's magazine, addressed the greatest conservation issues of the times for the entire environmental movement.
While drafting the Wilderness Act, Zahniser felt compelled to go beyond the constraints of formal bureaucratic language. He particularly struggled to find the best word to accurately describe wilderness lands. Not just any word would do for a connoisseur of both literature and nature. One day when a friend remarked to him that she enjoyed the "untrammeled" Olympic National Park seashore, he knew his search was over. Although the Wilderness Act went through numerous revisions, the word "untrammeled" was retained in all 66 versions, including the last.
Howard Zahniser came to realize the urgent need for a federal wilderness law during the early 1950s, when The Wilderness Society was fighting the Interior Department's 1950 proposal to build two dams in Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado. By joining forces with other conservation groups for the first time in history, the Society and the Sierra Club gathered enough public support to defeat the projects in 1956. This new spirit of cooperation set the stage for further achievements in conservation and gave Zahniser confidence.
After playing a crucial role in saving Dinosaur National Monument from the destructive presence of dams, Zahniser could not rest in the victory. He knew that unless federal legislation was enacted to permanently safeguard millions of acres of wildlands under the jurisdictions of the National Forest and National Park Services, conservationists would be destined to fight for protection on a reactionary, piecemeal basis.
"Let us try to be done with a wilderness preservation program made up of a sequence of overlapping emergencies, threats, and defense campaigns," he said in support of his wilderness bill.
After a series of concessions, the final version of the bill called for the protection of nine million acres and authorized Congress to designate recommended lands as wilderness. In the spirit of compromise, the bill also accepted mining claims through the year 1983.
Zahniser's health was failing throughout the eight years he spent championing the Act. Its passage stands in testament to the dedication and perseverance of a man who felt deeply the worth of wilderness to humankind.
