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The struggles continue



The Wilderness Act of 1964 did not, of course, close the book on struggles between utilitarians and preservationists. During the 1960s dams were proposed for two sites in the Grand Canyon itself. The Central Arizona Project had the support of the President, but in a result that would have been almost unimaginable in 1913, environmentalists, led by David Brower, defeated the dams and preserved the canyon. Today, the broad concept of wilderness has achieved a certain sanctity; wilderness, in its dotage, has become hallowed. "For it can be a means," Wallace Stegner wrote, "of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

Still, there are at any given time numerous firestorms over wilderness raging in this country. Some of the hottest of the moment: the bush Administration, despite the huge Exxon Valdez oil spill, still hopes to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil development; the U.S. Forest Service is under fire for logging 450 million board feet of timber annually from Alaska's Tongass National Forest; and environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest are pushing hard to save old-growth National Forests and protect the imperiled spotted owl.

The battle sites change, but the basic problem remains the same: "the very old problem," as Roderick Nash wrote in Wilderness and the American Mind, "of whether parks, reserves and wildernesses are for man ... or for nature." In conservation, as in everything else, some things never change. But what has changed, in the 77 years since the Hetch Hetchy decision, is the face of the land itself. So much less wild land remains that the reasons for developing it need to be that much stronger before they begin to make sense. In short, we need wilderness more because there is less of it.

As the next century gallops closer, a second change in the ongoing Man vs. Nature argument grows increasingly clear: One of the species that has become endangered by the rush of progress is humankind itself. The accidental but terrifying byproducts of modernity such as nuclear waste and acid rain have made preservation, in the end, perhaps the most utilitarian stance of all. So the old duality of Nature and civilization is, in some sense, no longer a duality; the two have become an environmental version of the Odd Couple -- their fortunes curiously but inextricably linked, from now on.

History, of course, is the playground of irony. It is certainly true that the steady growth of the preservationist cause is John Muir's revenge for the Hetch Hetchy defeat; but I've recently discovered that Muir's revenge has a second, more private side.

Exploring the grounds of Villa Montalvo -- James D. Phelan's lovely Saratoga, California, estate, I found a bust of John Muir, of all people, in a central place. So the craggy visage of John Muir himself now lords it over James Phelan's garden, gazing out from atop the steps. Meanwhile, the former utilitarian mayor no doubt turns ceaselessly, furiously, and uselessly in his grave.