Page 58 - Flathead Living Fall 2014

BOB MARSHALL DEvOTED HiS
adult life to wilderness preser- vation, eloquently promoting it as both an environmental and
social obligation. he held chief executive forestry positions within the federal gov- ernment and was instrumental in creating The Wilderness Society in 1935. he viewed 30-mile day hikes through rugged country as a reasonable means to better understand the natural world that he so wished to protect, and nobody questions his claim to being a founding father of the wilderness movement.
Yet, after all of that, Marshall never got
to see his movement’s crowning achievement: the 1964 passage of the federal Wilderness Act. he died of heart failure in 1939 at age 38.
But there’s no doubt Marshall would have beamed with pride 50 years ago when the act was signed into law, just as there’s no doubt how proud he would be today to wit- ness the act’s 50-year anniversary. And one might guess if he were around, he’d come up to northwest Montana, where the wil- derness complex of his namesake is located, to celebrate with the modern disciples of his movement.
As an environmental concept, wilderness
is the preservation of land in its most prime- val state, “untrammeled” by humans, to quote howard Zahniser, the act’s primary author. As a policy implementation, wilderness is the designation of land under protections that generally prohibit commercial activities and development, while safeguarding it for public recreational uses that don’t involve motor- ized or mechanized transportation.
to conservationists, the Wilderness Act is one of the most singularly important legal expressions of environmental progress in U.S. history. to its most ardent opponents, it’s an enduring example of government’s heavy hand squeezing out land-use opportu- nities. The polarity of its politics reflects the importance of its impact. Just how socially beneficial that impact is depends on where you stand, but tectonic land-management shifts are supposed to be felt deeply, and for generations.
When President lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law on Sept. 3, 1964, after more than eight years and 66 revisions, he placed 9.1 million acres in 13 states under the national Wilderness
ABOVE Lake-Levale in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
LEFT The Prairie Reef Lookout.
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FLATHEAD LIVING | FALL 2014