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Reviews
WILDERNESS FOREVER: HOWARD ZAHNISER AND THE PATH TO THE WILDERNESS ACT
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by Mark Harvey
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2005.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 343 pages. $35.00 cloth. |
| Mark Harvey's Wilderness Forever is a superb biography of the nation's preeminent postwar wilderness lobbyist. Harvey has given readers a detailed portrait of an activist who most environmental historians know was important but do not know well. Yet, writing this biography of Howard Zahniser was not without its challenges. Unlike other American wilderness figures such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, David Brower, or Dave Foreman, Zahniser did not have a big personality or leave a towering literary legacy. Although he was no stranger to the wilderness, he never climbed to the top of a tree to better experience a fierce storm, hiked seventy miles in a day, advocated ecotage, or saw the fierce green fire dying in a wolf's eyes. Zahniser was the wilderness movement's bureaucrat-activist, the man in the legislative trenches doing the dull work of wilderness freedom. However important Zahniser was, and Harvey makes a compelling case that Zahniser stands tall in such distinguished company, his life was ultimately more mundane. |
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Despite this challenge, Harvey breathes life into "Zahnie," as he was known. Zahniser was born in 1906 in northwestern Pennsylvania, the son of a Methodist minister. His faith, rooted in family, played a powerful role in his career as a wilderness activist. At Greenville College in Illinois, he studied English and joined his passion for nature with a love of the written word. Upon graduating, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he held a series of editorial jobs in the federal government — first in the Commerce Department, then with the Biological Survey, and finally with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (where he worked on the Victory Garden campaign during Word War II). As William Cronon notes in his foreword, Zahniser's early life and career were remarkably similar to those of Rachel Carson, who also grew up in western Pennsylvania, combined a love of nature and literature, and came to environmental consciousness as an editor in the federal bureaucracy. That parallel is fascinating, and Harvey might have done more to examine the role the federal bureaucracy played in producing postwar environmental activists. Nonetheless, one of the signal achievements of this book is its portrait of the interwar Zahniser, the man who came of age environmentally between 1929, when he took his first government position, and 1945, when the dropping of the atomic bombs jarred him into a deeper environmental consciousness and commitment — and when he made the fateful decision to leave the security of federal employment for a job with a small wilderness outfit in transition. |
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Among his many activities in the mid 1930s, Zahniser joined The Wilderness Society (TWS), a group founded in 1935. By the mid 1940s, with TWS facing major changes, Zahniser's skills allowed him to move into a leadership position as executive secretary and editor of TWS's publication, The Living Wilderness. With their new executive director, Olaus Murie, running the Society's affairs from his home in Moose, Wyoming, Zahniser emerged as the face of TWS in Washington. He was a central player in several notable preservationist successes over the next decade, including the protection of Dinosaur National Monument (which Harvey chronicled in A Symbol of Wilderness, published by University of New Mexico Press in 1994) as well as lesser known victories such as the defense of the San Gorgonio Primitive Area in California and the protection from parkway development of the C&O Canal corridor. Harvey intimates that this was a period of remarkable success for the nascent wilderness movement, success that emboldened Zahniser and others to dream of federal legislation that would create a statutorily protected wilderness system. Harvey devotes the last third of his book to the achievement of Zahniser's dream, which he rightly calls "one of the greatest stories in American environmental history" (p. 186). Rather than a dense legislative blow-by-blow, Harvey provides a compelling personal history of the pragmatic but driven Zahniser, who built support for wilderness legislation and crafted the legislative language that would make the Wilderness Act preeminently his. Readers also see Zahniser and his family visiting many of the places he did so much to protect, which challenges the common portrait of Zahniser as more at home in the halls of Congress than in the wilderness. Zahniser's great effectiveness, Harvey intimates, was his ability to travel easily between these worlds and to frame the importance of wilderness preservation for an audience eager to do the same. Tragically, Howard Zahniser died just months before Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law. |
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Mark Harvey's Wilderness Forever is an admiring biography, built upon prodigious archival and oral history research. Like the man it chronicles, Wilderness Forever is quiet and humble but also forceful and convincing. |
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| PAUL SUTTER
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| University of Georgia, Athens |
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