The Forest “Primeval”

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be some changes to the audio you hear above.**
ED: This is BackStory, I’m Ed Ayers.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong, and America the free, but America the beautiful.

ED: That’s President Lyndon B. Johnson, describing his Great Society. And 50 years ago this month, Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, pledging to protect America’s beauty. Today on this show, how Americans came to love wilderness in the first place. From the spiritual–

CHAR MILLER: Imagine yourself in Hetch Hetchy on a sunny day in June, standing waist deep in grass and flowers, while the great pines sway dreamily with scarcely perceptible motion.

ED: To the endangered.

EMMA MARRIS: If you said, it’s not wilderness if humans have influenced it, well then, there’s no wilderness.

ED: A history of wilderness in America. Don’t go away.

PETER: Funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory. We’re the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER: That’s me. And we’re going to kick things off with a clip of tape from 50 years ago this month, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, signing the Wilderness Act of 1964.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: The Wilderness Bill preserves for our posterity, for all time to come, nine million acres of this vast continent in their original and unchanging beauty and wonder.

PETER: Original and unchanging beauty. It’s a sentiment central to the law itself. The act defines wilderness as land, and I’m quoting, “retaining its primeval character and influence.”

There was this notion, and there still is today, that by keeping these lands off-limits for anybody but hikers, we’d be able to encounter nature in its pristine state, and the state that European settlers encountered it 500 years ago.

BRIAN: I’m zipping up my backpack now, Peter.

PETER: But if you actually read what those settlers had to say about the American landscape, you’d quickly see that it was anything but pristine. Take for instance, New England.

CHARLES MANN: The first real reports we have are from Verrazano in the 1520s.

PETER: This is Charles Mann. He wrote about some of these early accounts in a book called 1493. He says this report by Giovanni de Verrazano suggests that in southern New England, at least, the wild forests we imagine today were few and far between.

CHARLES MANN: He marched for quote, “many leagues” across the landscape and saw nothing but cornfields, farms, and so forth, with the trees just a distant line in the horizon.

BRIAN: Peter, it sounds like you’re telling me it they saw a few trees, but never did find the forest.

PETER: That’s right, Brian. And when they finally did find the forests, those forests didn’t really look primeval. Here’s how an English colonist named Thomas Morton described what he saw happening in Massachusetts in the early 1600s.

CHARLES MANN: The savages– which was, of course his way of describing the native people– are accustomed to set fire of the country in all places where they come, and to burn it twice a year at the spring and fall of leaves. The reason that moves them to do so, is because otherwise, it would be so overgrown with under weeds, that the people would not be able, in any wise, to pass through the country out of a beaten path.

And this custom of firing the country is the means to make it passable. And by that means, the trees grow here and there, like our parks, and make the country very beautiful and commodious.

ED: So you’re telling me that New England’s forests used to be like parks in England?

PETER: Believe it or not, they did. And this practice of using fire to make them that way, well, Mann read me another account by a Dutchman named Adriaen van der Donck, that underlines how widespread it was.

CHARLES MANN: “Such a fire is a splendid sight, when one sails on the rivers, [INAUDIBLE], the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers at night, while the forest is ablaze on both banks. Fires and flames are seen everywhere on all sides, a delightful scene to look on from afar.” It was like a light show for them, right? Boats would go up the Hudson River, and Dutch people would presumably sit on the deck and drink some beer, and watch the show.

PETER: So Charles, taking the broad view of, well, New England and what becomes Anglo-America, how much of it is subject to management by native peoples?

CHARLES MANN: A whole lot of it. Now, you have to remember, native people were here for 15,000 years. And so if your question is did, sometime in those 15,000 years, the forests and X place get cut down, or managed, or burned, or manipulated in some way? The answer is, everywhere. Which, over time, means that practically nothing is quote, “wilderness.”

PETER: And if nothing is, quote, “wilderness,” 500 years ago, then how do so many of us come to believe in this idea of land with primeval character? The idea that’s so central to our understanding of wilderness today?

ED: Well Peter, that sounds like a set-up question for a BackStory episode, if I ever heard one. And in fact, that’s what we’re going to be exploring today, just like our intrepid ancestors. We’ve got stories about how the widespread 19th century fear of wilderness was exploited by the US Department of War; about two men who went head to head over the value of wilderness, 50 years later; and about how the creators of one national park dealt with the fact that there were people already living in the woods that they wanted to, quote, “protect.”

BRIAN: And yes, we’ve got the story of how the Wilderness Act of 1964, signed into law 50 years ago this month, came into being in the first place.

PETER: But first, let’s return to my conversation with Charles Mann. One way of understanding how we got this image of dense, primeval-looking forests in New England is that a lot of those forests have actually looked that way for centuries. But according to Mann, that is a product of human history.

You see, right around the same time those Europeans we heard about were writing about the park-like woods, the people who made those woods look that way were dying off in droves. Over the period of a few decades, upwards of 90% of New England’s native population was wiped out by old world diseases. So when the pilgrims famously arrived in 1620–

CHARLES MANN: What they saw was this agricultural landscape. They saw farm fields, they saw skeletons of bodies all over the place. And so what they settled in was an emptied, not an empty, an emptied landscape. It was a tragedy, it was a cemetery. What happens is they move into these cleared areas. Something like the first 50 English settlements in New England were on top of abandoned native villages.

PETER: Right, so that erases those villages completely.

CHARLES MANN: Yeah, erases those villages. And then of course, the people who come 15 years later don’t even really know that there was a village there to begin with. Meanwhile, the landscape around them changes, as well. And part of it they clear, and then they plant a whole field of wheat, or something like that. And then the stuff that they don’t clear, they leave alone. They don’t burn.

And the result is that the undergrowth grows up, and it become thick and dark and entangled. And you get this bifurcated landscape that’s much more similar to what they would have been familiar with in England. So New England, the name is right, they literally did their best to re-create the landscape they were familiar with.

PETER: And as they erased evidence of prior management and occupancy, then there’s a collective amnesia, or forgetfulness, about what the first settlers had right in front of their eyes. They could see this, they moved to these areas that were open, because they had been cultivated.

CHARLES MANN: Absolutely. Until by the 19th century, you had this curious thing where Thoreau– right, who we think of as Mr. Wilderness, right? In the 1850s, 1857 I think. He talks about how when he goes into the Maine woods, in that wonderful three-part book, the Maine Woods, he actually can’t go into the woods for large sections, because the undergrowth hasn’t been burned. And it’s so thick that it’s impassable. So what they do– Here’s the report. “The walking was worse than ever, because of the fallen timber. The fallen trees were so numerous, that for long distances, the route was through a succession of small yards, where we climbed over fences as high as our heads.”

Now think about this. He’s going into the Maine woods. He actually can’t walk in the woods. He has to go from one farmland to the next, with the woods over here. Which shows you how much the landscapes– You have John Smith who’s reporting, and goes to a place like Jamestown in about 1610, that the woods are so open, that he can ride through them at a gallop. He was so crazy, he may actually have done that.

And here, Thoreau can’t even walk through the woods in 1850. So you see a huge ecological transformation has taken place.

PETER: So in a way, our modern notions of wilderness really focus on what we take to be untouched places, and we want to cherish these as if they were a route back into a deep past. When it might be more appropriate to have a better understanding of what has happened to the lands we live on.

CHARLES MANN: Thoreau, and again in The Maine Woods, keeps talking about the universal, dense, evergreen forest. He took that as this timeless thing that had always been there. He didn’t know better. I mean, we have the advantage of 100 years of historical research. And I don’t want to dis Thoreau, who was a remarkable guy in every way. But he got that part wrong.

PETER: But now we are becoming more aware of changes in the land, that we have more of an historical consciousness. And there is a sense that what was once there, if we could save some remnant of it, needs to be preserved. How do modern ideas about wilderness relate to the first images that you’ve been studying of people who settled in New England?

CHARLES MANN: Well the modern images of wilderness relate in a very uneasy way to what was actually here. Many, many, many of American ecosystems evolved for a thousands of years in the presence of native fire. And a lot of the environmental problems we’re having in the west relate to the fact that when we start managing them a la Smokey the Bear– no fire– we end up creating a kind of ecosystem that hasn’t been seen on the continent for a really, really long time. And something unnatural, quote unquote, and new. Something distinctively modern.

And so when we think we’re recovering the past, what we’re actually doing is creating something that hasn’t been there for a very, very long time.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PETER: Charles Mann is the author of 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. And before that, the best-seller, 1491. He spoke to us from the wilds of New England public radio.

ED: It’s time for a short break. When we get back, to dam or not to dam, that is the question.

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. Don’t go away.

ED: We’re back with BackStory, the show that looks to the past to understand the America of today. I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, we’re marking the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act with an hour on Americans’ changing ideas of wilderness.

ED: A century before the Wilderness Act, Americans were mired in their civil war. Ulysses Grant had taken the citadel of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Philip Sheridan was raging through the bountiful Shenandoah Valley, and William T. Sherman was getting ready to march through Georgia. Wherever the Union Army went, it stripped the fields and slaughtered the livestock.

For many Southerners, this slash and burn strategy was terrifying. Their farms, their barns, their fences, all these were the things that they and their families had created to beat back the wilderness. And if those things were destroyed, then wilderness might soon reassert itself.

LISA BRADY: Yeah, this was the threat.

ED: This is Lisa Brady, a historian at Boise State University. I sat down with Lisa to talk about the threat of wilderness, not only on the landscape of the South, but also on the psychological well-being of Southern whites.

LISA BRADY: The Southern people, whether they supported the Confederacy or not, had spent generations in managing and trying to exert some kind of control over their ecosystems, over their environments. And to take that control away was to throw them back into a state of wilderness. And so these battles where Grant in Mississippi, and Sheridan in the Shenandoah, and Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas, went through and destroyed agricultural implements, and laid bare the agricultural landscapes, they were taking civilized landscapes and making them into wildernesses. And so that’s the language they used. This was the threat of taking Southern civilization, and throwing it back into an uncivilized wild state.

ED: “Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can. Carry off stock of all descriptions, so as to prevent further planting. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”

How literally should we take this? I mean, how much did they really convert this bucolic landscape to a wilderness, Lisa?

LISA BRADY: Well I think that there is certainly some hyperbole on the side of Sheridan and Grant. And I would suggest there are even some hyperbolic statements on the part of those who experienced the campaign, some of the Southerners. But I don’t think we can dismiss their views entirely. Especially not those who were the victims of it.

There are some really fantastic letter and diary entries by some of those who lived in the Shenandoah Valley who talked about how Sheridan had, in fact, turned this lovely, gorgeous, fertile valley into a wasteland. And so, again, whether or not it was materially turned into a place where nothing could grow– which I think we could demonstrably say was not true– psychologically, had that impact.

ED: Now I can’t help but notice that Yosemite and Yellowstone are a long way from the Shenandoah Valley. But it’s also 1864 that the same Republican regime that’s prosecuting the American Civil War, also makes a big move toward protecting wilderness. Can you tell us about that, and what the connection is, do you think?

LISA BRADY: Yeah, here we have incredible devastation. And there is a sense that humans are capable of doing some pretty horrible things, and that needs to be offset by humans doing some pretty wonderful things. And in my sense of reading the letters and the official reports and some of the political tracts and that sort of thing, it’s that they see that protecting nature– and in particular these grand landscapes of the West that are unique to the United States, things that will bring some kind of awe to visitors to the United States– I think that that is something that the Republicans want to counterbalance the war with.

ED: So does the definition of wilderness somehow change during the war, then? It goes from being something that was already there, just given by nature, to something that humans can create themselves if they’re not careful? And so you need to compensate for humans’ power by preserving something that’s sort of beyond humans’ power to create?

LISA BRADY: I think that’s a perfect way of saying it. And then what we see in the West is actually not wilderness, but sublime nature. They don’t actually apply wilderness to it, because wilderness in 1860 still does have that negative connotation. They talk about it as this sublime nature. Wilderness really comes into something that has a positive notation to it in later years in the 1870s, 1880s.

ED: Lisa Brady is a historian at Boise State University. She’s the author of War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes During the American Civil War.

BRIAN: In 1906, an enormous earthquake rocked San Francisco. Much of the city was reduced to rubble. But the rebuilding effort that followed offered city officials the opportunity to realize a long-time goal– a new and expanded water supply. For years, city officials had been wanting to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley 167 miles away in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The valley, they thought, would be an ideal place for reservoir that would provide water for the city forever.

But there was a catch. Hetch Hetchy was part of Yosemite National Park, which meant that it was federal property. And so San Francisco couldn’t do anything to the valley without congressional approval.

PETER: Because Congress was involved, the question to dam or not to damn sparked a seven-year debate that was followed by Americans all over the country. City officials had the support of Gifford Pinchot, head of the US Forest Service, and close ally of President Teddy Roosevelt. But the plan met fierce resistance from legendary naturalist John Muir, who had been instrumental in making his beloved Yosemite a National Park. He wasn’t going to give up Hetch Hetchy without a fight.

BRIAN: Char Miller is a historian who has written about this battle. He sees Muir knew his best hope was to win over the American public, much of which had never heard of this place.

CHAR MILLER: For Muir, the case was easily made through religious language, language that he knew his audience would understand– straight out of the Bible, even though couched in more romantic terms. And from Muir’s point of view, what made mountains so important was their capacity to humble us. So to go up into the mountains is to get close to God. To get close to God is to realize how small we are. To realize how small we are would lead us to go back down into our valleys and lowlands and fight for the preservation of that experience.

And so his language was couched in not only the aesthetics and the beauty, but the subtext is, you are fighting for God. Well, if you’re fighting for God, the other side has to be the devil. For instance, when we think about the religious language, listen to this framing of John Muir in a chapter he wrote in a book published in 1911, as part of the opposition to Hetch Hetchy.

“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for nature. And instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the almighty dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy, as well dam for water tanks, the people’s cathedrals and churches. For no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

It’s powerful stuff. And so imagine reading this in the Century Magazine in New York City. And if you’ve got an ounce of sensibility in you, you are enraged. Because you’ve never seen Hetch Hetchy, you don’t understand, and who cares about San Francisco?

BRIAN: And you’ve got plenty of water.

CHAR MILLER: And you’ve got plenty of water. So this is not your struggle, but John Muir has made it your struggle because of the language of divinity framed around a political calculation that says, act, fight, now.

BRIAN: So I guess we’ll put Muir in the green trunks, that would make sense, weighing in at 190 pounds. In the black trunks, is Gifford Pinchot. Where was he coming from?

CHAR MILLER: The classic antagonist to Muir in the case about Hetch Hetchy is always framed around Gifford Pinchot, who, like Muir, was tall, spare, thin, deeply in love with nature. But his love of nature and its aesthetic power– and also spiritual ethos, which he felt deeply as well– is tempered by political sensibility. That part of the calculation that any land manager has to follow is that these lands produce value for community. Some of that can be aesthetic. But if you’re going to have National Forest and reservoirs and the like, they need to have economic value for the communities surround them and that make use of them. Or otherwise you’ll never get what you want. That is to say, people who don’t see value in these landscapes are going to devalue them, and thus not support them.

BRIAN: Use it or lose it would be Pinchot’s model, really.

CHAR MILLER: Yeah, I think if you did not use it, then the publics that surrounded it would say, you can’t have it anymore.

BRIAN: All right, I understand where Muir and Pinchot are coming from, but who are they appealing to? Describe some of the supporters for each.

CHAR MILLER: So if you think about Muir’s brilliant, evocative rhetoric, who’s reading that? Well, it turns out that much of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, the huge population base in the United States– and including the Great Lakes cities as well– these big industrial places where no one has seen anything like Yosemite, is transfixed by his language about this landscape. And they start to go out as tourists. I mean he’s really a kind of barker for Yosemite in a way.

Pinchot, whose language is not this divine flowery rhetoric in the ways that it is for Muir, speaks to the rising middle and upper middle classes in those same cities, who are also reading Muir, about the prospects for a more progressive society that would benefit enormously from those who have expertise, like Pinchot and like many of his readers, and who want the United States to be a better place than it is. And so, you could read Muir and Pinchot. You could be the same person reading them, and be pulled by both of them, because both of these men are offering dreams of a future that are pretty beguiling.

And so much of this is about an urbanized population drawing off of its own industrial energy that’s now beginning to think about landscapes in ways they probably had never thought about before.

BRIAN: Well how was this resolved?

CHAR MILLER: The dam was built. The water is still impounded. San Francisco is wet as a consequence of Hetch Hetchy disappearing under all of that volume of water. And so in 1913, the debate reaches its crescendo. In the end, Congress voted in a really interesting way to enact legislation that would provide money to build the O’Shaughnessy Dam. And the interesting way in which Congress acted, you can look at the votes, and the farther away the voter was from Hetch Hetchy physically, the more likely they were to vote with John Muir. The closer they were to Hetch Hetchy physically, the more likely they were to vote with Gifford Pinchot and those who were promoting the Hetch Hetchy dam.

Because the West saw its interests as allied with those of California. If San Francisco could do this, maybe Denver could do the same thing.

BRIAN: So this was the opposite of Not In My Backyard, which we’re so familiar with today.

CHAR MILLER: Oh yeah, no. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s kind of funny actually that the first great battle not only goes national, but it meant that it was about somebody else’s water that you are happy to either give away or take. And yet it also helped shape the dynamic that in time would say, wait a second. Maybe we don’t want these dams plural, because every river in California and most in the West have been dammed subsequently.

And part of what we’re looking at is the first shot across the bow, which says, maybe not all development is good. And what we’ve slowly come to over the last 100 plus years is figuring out what that actually means.

BRIAN: Char Miller is director of the Environmental Analysis program at Pomona College. He’s the author of Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot.

Ed, Peter, I want to go back to the beginning of that interview. Because I’m really struck by the degree to which Muir’s languages is simply steeped in religion. And I want to make a case for a religion in Pinchot’s view of the world. Pinchot felt that nature should be used in a practical, pragmatic, utilitarian way, which is the point at which I turn to you. Let’s talk a little bit about the history of the religious imperative to be useful, and to work, and to use nature.

PETER: Yeah, well I think the first thing to say, Brian, is that Pinchot’s religion, Muir’s religion, is not the good old time religion. Because if you go back to the 17th century, if you go back to the first encounters with the American wilderness, it’s not a great place. It’s not a cathedral. In fact, it’s the devil’s playground.

BRIAN: It’s a house of horrors.

PETER: It’s a dangerous place, and it really is a dangerous place. And there may be a certain amount of awe involved in that, but there is more a need to overcome that wilderness, that wild place, because that is emblematic of the wilderness inside. Because we are the devil’s playground, just as the wilds are the devil’s playground. So that theological orientation is very alien to both of your guys in this dialogue they’re having in the early 20th century.

I would say, Brian, you’re exactly right about Pinchot drawing on a religious tradition. It’s not that he’s a secularist, and that he doesn’t care about nature, he does. He has religious feelings, sensibility. But it comes from really the enlightenment, natural religion, Deism, think of nature’s God. That’s in the Declaration of Independence. What does nature’s God intend for us to do? Nature’s God is disclosing his secrets to us, that is the laws of nature, so that we can flourish. We can develop wilderness into a cultivated landscape.

And there’s an aesthetic there, that is a notion of beauty in development.

BRIAN: So it’s really about realizing God’s intent for man by getting the maximum use and value out of nature.

PETER: You might say higher use. The first English settlers in America were quite aware that they were human beings in that nature, that wilderness. They were the minions of the devil, that is Native Americans, they were savage. And the settlers put that savagery at the beginning of civilization. You had to overcome that savagery. You had to displace those people.

Be fruitful and multiply, because that land can sustain a great and flourishing population. And the fact that there are few Indians running around hunting animals, in effect the Indians are animals. You need to cultivate and civilize them to bring them to a higher state. So what’s beautiful in 18th and 19th century America is improved and perfected nature.

BRIAN: Got it, and that clearly is where Pinchot is coming from. But Muir has this very flowery vision of nature, if you will. Ed, where does his very different kind of religious language come from?

ED: Well let’s think literally we’re Muir is coming from. First of all which is Scotland, but he moves to the United States to Wisconsin when he’s 11. There he memorizes– Brian this will give you some hint– the entire New Testament and most of the Old Testament. He can recite it. And then he and his brother both avoid the draft of the Civil War, and go to Canada where they work at a sawmill. And then during–

PETER: He just couldn’t cut it.

ED: Ah, apparently he could. And so then he walks all the way to Florida from the upper Midwest, in 1867, in the midst of the wreckage of the Civil War. And so, we pick up our story with Muir as an old man in which he’s basically retreated to the far west as his last refuge to protect wilderness. But he has watched the story that Peter’s describing unfold over 200 years. That story of reducing the wilderness happens over and over and over again, over this vast territory of the United States.

By the time Hetch Hetchy comes along, there’s been a whole lot of development going on.

BRIAN: Do you think that that clears the way, clear cuts in a way, the way for a more romantic view of wilderness, Ed, in the second part of the 19th century?

ED: Yeah, you talk about Muir’s language, it is romantic, but it’s also desperate. I mean it’s filled with a sense, this is our last chance.

PETER: Right, in a way, development is degradation. Development is a forfeiting God’s gift to us. Nature is something to cherish. It becomes something outside of us, just as the wilderness was outside of early settlers. It was a dangerous place. Now this precious place depends on us, on our stewardship, or it won’t exist anymore.

BRIAN: It’s time for another short break. When we get back, the tricky business of clearing a landscape of people so that tourists can enjoy a wilderness view.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory, and we’ll be back in a moment.

ED: We’re back with BackStory, I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. The occasion for today’s show is the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, which began the process of putting certain land off limits to all but the lightest impact visitors. But before we get to that important law, we’re going to take a few minutes to consider an earlier version of federal land conservation, and that’s the national parks.

BRIAN: A few years ago, reporter JP Dukes headed up the road to Shenandoah National Part here in Virginia to find out more about the park’s beginning. We included his story in our second episode ever. And when we sat down to produce today’s show, we thought it would be worth another listen. Here’s JP.

JP DUKES: This is maybe my 30th time visiting Shenandoah National Park. And usually when I come up here, I’m trying to remember what the world looks like without people or roads or houses. But this time I’m with a park ranger, and we’re looking for something specific.

CLAIRE COMER: Well, we’re striking out. This happens every time.

JP DUKES: The only problem is, we can’t find it. It’s not looking familiar? My guide is interpretive specialist Claire Comer, and she wants to show me a site where humans once lived.

CLAIRE COMER: Well, and I know at this particular site, there’s shoes, there’s shovels.

JP DUKES: Before it was founded in 1936, Shenandoah National Park was just an idea, one that began in 1924 when the federal government decided we needed an eastern park. Something like Yellowstone or Yosemite, but closer to where all the people lived.

CLAIRE COMER: It looks so different.

JP DUKES: Wealthy people from Washington were already visiting the Blue Ridge, most famously at Skyland Lodge. Skyland was a kind of dude ranch of East, where people could stay in rustic cabins, ride horses or hunt. Its owner George Pollock saw a national park as a way to bring more visitors to the area. And he recruited some of his friends in government and business to the cause.

CLAIRE COMER: So they filled out a nomination form, and sent that in, and this was chosen as one of the sites to look at.

JP DUKES: The federal government had a specific idea of what a park should be. In the mold of Yellowstone and Yosemite, they wanted stunning beauty, sites for fishing and hiking, and access to roads. But most importantly, they wanted it to be a wilderness, free of human settlement and development. So the Virginians fudged a little bit on their application.

CLAIRE COMER: They said that this area was pristine and free of inhabitations or developments.

JP DUKES: This, as they knew full well, was not true.

CLAIRE COMER: Now look, there’s a rock pile.

JP DUKES: And Claire has just found the proof of that.

CLAIRE COMER: And there’s the shoes, see? An old pair of boots.

JP DUKES: What we’ve found is one of some 500 home sites that existed before there ever was a Shenandoah National Park.

CLAIRE COMER: And evidently something collapsed here, maybe a chimney or something.

JP DUKES: But this one is not just any home site. This one belonged to the great grandfather of Claire Comer. He actually lived in the valley below, and he paid tenant farmers to live up here and graze his cattle.

CLAIRE COMER: And the nice thing about it is it stayed about 10 degrees cooler in summer, so the cows were much more comfortable up here.

JP DUKES: You said something about driving the cattle up. Like a cattle drive? Like drive them up into the mountains?

CLAIRE COMER: Yeah, right up Tanner’s Ridge Road.

JP DUKES: That’s amazing. So they would drive what, like 50 cattle up right up into the Blue Ridge?

CLAIRE COMER: Oh, probably way more than that.

JP DUKES: Along with the thousands of farmers and ranchers in the mountains, there was also industry. Mines, apple orchards, tan bark harvesting, lumbering. So in 1926, when the federal government OKed future park, the Virginians had a problem. What were they going to do with all these people living in the mountains?

CLAIRE COMER: Here’s a looks like an old tanning jar.

JP DUKES: It just so happens that at the same time, sociologists and anthropologists had begun to focus their attention on the people living in remote mountain communities.

NANCY PURDUE: “The hollow dweller has no ordered routine of toil. He is unafflicted by the weariness of those doing the work of the world.”

JP DUKES: This is scholar Nancy Martin Purdue, reading me an excerpt of a book called Hollow Folk, written in 1933 by journalist Thomas Henry, and sociologist Mandel Sherman.

NANCY PURDUE: “His affections are much closer to the animal level, than in the population at large. Death of loved ones does not plunge him into the depths and darkness of grief, which humanity has evolved.”

JP DUKES: The people promoting the park didn’t commission the so-called work of sociology, but they also didn’t shy away from using this image of the backward mountaineer to forward the idea that the residents of the Blue Ridge should be removed. Not just because Virginia wanted a park, but that they should be removed for their own good. The claim was that these people were devolving in the mountains, and needed to rejoin civilization.

NANCY PURDUE: “Mountain life not only does not tend to stimulate mental growth, but also acts as a handicap. The older the child, the less ambition he appears to have.”

JP DUKES: In the end, the park promoters got their way. And in 1934, the state of Virginia decided that the people living in the 200,000 acres that was slated to become Shenandoah National Park had to leave.

NANCY PURDUE: And people came in and moved them out. Burned their house down in some cases, took their things, and carted them off to some other place.

JP DUKES: So what’s left behind up in these Blue Ridge hills? Well, nature enthusiasts like me, and people working for the park like Claire Comer.

CLAIRE COMER: I want to see the people that visit the park, for the reason that it was established– they come here to hike, to recreate with their families, to feel some re-creation through the recuperative powers of nature–

JP DUKES: But that’s not all she wants them to feel.

CLAIRE COMER: I want to simply make them aware of the sacrifice. That this did not come without cost to some people.

JP DUKES: Why couldn’t you have a park that allowed people to stay?

CLAIRE COMER: Well I think you’d run into all kinds of things. If the park’s purpose is to be where you can walk through virtual wilderness and experience nature, then what choices are you going to make about what they build and how they improve their homes as time goes on? How do you museumify group of people? You don’t.

JP DUKES: Museumifying the land, on the other hand, now that’s something we can all get behind, right? It’s what the government was trying to do when it started creating national parks more than a century ago. And it’s what’s drawn me up to these mountains for years. I want to leave civilization behind, to spend time in a wild space that hasn’t been shaped by humans.

After this trip, it’s going to be a little harder to experience it that way. When I got back to my car at this enormous clearing, known as Big Meadows, I realize for the first time that it’s not a natural meadow. Claire explained that it was probably cleared by Native Americans before they were displaced. Now the park maintains the meadow pretty much as the Indians did, by mowing and burning. The hands of humans are all over this place. We just don’t let them live here anymore.

BRIAN: That’s JP Dukes. He’s a reporter in New York, currently working with a little outfit called This American Life. We’ll post some photos from his reporting in Shenandoah National Park at backstoryradio.org.

Now, if you’ve ever visited Shenandoah National Park, chances are you spent some time taking in its grand views from the comfort of your car. Running north-south across the ridge line through the entire 105-mile span of the park is the famous Skyline Drive. That drive is actually emblematic of the crucial role that driving has played in the development of national parks all over the country.

Well, in 1935, the very same year that Shenandoah became a park, a group of outdoors enthusiasts concerned about this trend, got together to fight this trend. One of them was a forester named Aldo Leopold.

PAUL STUTTER: He called national parks, “vast, overcrowded hospitals, coping with an epidemic of aesthetic rickets.” That’s my favorite Leopold quote.

BRIAN: This is historian Paul Sutter.

PAUL STUTTER: The point was that the automobile had created a kind of impetus to zip out into these wild places and experience them briefly, and then just keep moving on.

BRIAN: The group that Leopold and his fellow conservationists founded was called the Wilderness Society. In the tradition of John Muir, they believe that you had to take time to be in nature. You couldn’t appreciate wilderness with a quick pit stop at scenic sites.

PAUL STUTTER: Some of these were fairly sophisticated ecological thinkers. But they weren’t necessarily concerned, foremost, about the ecological impacts of roads and automobiles. They were concerned about the ways in which roads and automobiles were driving the modern into even the most remote and wild spaces on the continent. And they wanted to protect some of those spaces from that kind of intrusion.

BRIAN: What began as an effort by a few guys who wanted to tromp around in the woods in peace, soon grew into a much more high-stakes endeavor. That’s because by the 1940s, cars no longer seemed like the biggest threat. Much more serious were the massive public works and resource extraction programs fueling America’s wartime boom. And because the majority of these timbering, mining, and damming projects were taking place on federal lands, the Wilderness Society focused its efforts in the belly of the beast, Washington DC.

They hired on a new public relations chief, a guy who worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service, named Howard Zahniser. Over the next two decades, Zahniser dedicated himself to building a broad base of support for wilderness preservation. One that included urban easterners. People, in other words, like himself.

PAUL STUTTER: He was an advocate for wilderness areas, even if he knew he would never see them. And I think he, more than any of this early generation of wilderness advocates, made an argument for the importance of wilderness areas, and just knowing that they’re there. That in this world we live in, surrounded by all of this development, it’s important to know that there are landscapes out there that are truly wild. That are places where humans can go and really be surrounded by the forces of nature. Humbled by them, even.

BRIAN: Zahniser envisioned a new federal system that would designate and protect a network of public lands in advance of any threat, so that activist wouldn’t have to go to bat for specific areas each time they were threatened. In 1956, Zahniser introduced the first draft of legislation that would do just that. And while opposition to this bill quickly materialized among mining, timber, and agricultural interests, Zahniser’s effort to win over the American public couldn’t have come at a better time.

America’s postwar economic boom meant that people had more disposable time and more money on their hands. And at the same time, there was growing consensus that American life should be about more than simply the quest for wealth and power.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson described his vision for a Great Society in 1964, he talked about a government that would help improve the quality of life in American cities, the quality of education in American schools, and the quality of the water, air, and land in America’s countryside.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty, or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither, and his sustenance be wasted.

BRIAN: Eight years, 18 congressional hearings, and 66 drafts after it was first introduced, Congress passed the Wilderness Act, nearly unanimously. And President Johnson signed it into law in 1964.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: The Wilderness Bill preserves for our posterity, for all time to come, nine million acres of this vast continent in their original and unchanging beauty and wonder.

ED: In the 50 years since, those nine million acres have ballooned into 110 million acres. But consistent throughout has been the law’s definition of wilderness. Places, quote, “untrammeled by man. Where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The law goes on to say that these places should have a quote, “primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.”

And that, says science writer Emma Marris, leaves a whole lot open to interpretation.

EMMA MARRIS: The very notion of wilderness is a cultural concept. And the two parts of that that are enshrined in the Act, the idea that wilderness is primeval, and the idea that wilderness is on untrammeled, are our ideas about what counts as wilderness. The idea that it should look the same as it did in the old days, and the idea that it should not have any human influence.

ED: Marris is among a group of contemporary ecological thinkers, who says that it’s not really possible to have untrammeled land and primeval land in the same place.

EMMA MARRIS: You can’t have uncontrolled and historically contiguous. If it looks like it did when Europeans first came to North America, or when it was made, designated a wilderness, then that’s usually because there has been some management.

ED: Take Yellowstone National Park.

EMMA MARRIS: Yellowstone, of course, is a landscape that all Americans feel belongs to them, even if they’ve never been there. And people have a lot of really strong feelings about what it should look like. And most people want it to look like the way it did the year it was made a park, back in the 1800s. So it is managed to look that way.

And a lot of that work is somewhat obscured. As a tourist to the park, you don’t really see that. You don’t see how hard they worked reintroducing wolves, and doing careful work with some of those streams, and trying to get the beaver back. I mean they’re working their butts off to make it look like nobody’s touched it.

And so there’s a paradox there. If you really left Yellowstone alone, if you really let it go wild, and just walked away from it, it might look like a very different place.

ED: But Marris says, we couldn’t really leave Yellowstone alone, even if we tried. In the age of climate change, even places we think of as remote are being actively shaped by humans.

EMMA MARRIS: If you said, it’s not wilderness if humans have influenced it, well then, there’s no wilderness. Because even a place where no one has ever been, no one has ever stood there, there’s still 35% more carbon dioxide there because of our activities. The climate is still changed. So there really is no place that’s uninfluenced by humans. And pretty much no one is going to dispute this.

ED: So, if we want our land to look primeval, we have to get involved. We have to trammel it. On the other hand, if we decide our wilderness has to be untrammeled, it would mean letting it succumb to climate change, and all the species loss that would entail. Marris thinks that true wildness is a threat to a lot of our so-called wilderness. And yet, Marris does see a value in wildness for its own sake.

She envisions a new kind of wild space. One that is allowed to grow up in places where species aren’t threatened. Perhaps in certain post-industrial landscapes, or abandoned farmland. These places would be completely untrammeled, without any active management at all.

And they would be places where we could observe nature at work. And nature that, yes, includes the processes set in motion by humans. And change, something written out the Wilderness Act of 1964, would be embraced as, well, natural.

EMMA MARRIS: But what I don’t know, and what I will be very interested to see, is which kind of land will inherit the title of wilderness. Will it be the land that looks the way it did back in the 1850s, when lot of these places were first mapped and surveyed. Or will it be the places that are not managed, that are going to start looking very strange and interesting, and with lots of nonnative species. I don’t know which one is going to get to be called wilderness in another 50 years.

ED: That was author and environmentalist, Emma Marris. Her book is called Rambunctions Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. We also heard from Paul Sutter, history professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He’s the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement.

[SONG – IGGY POP’S I’M A REAL WILD CHILD]

PETER: That’s going to do it for us today. But we’re eager to hear your thoughts about the proper role of humans in the wilderness. Is it time to put the Wilderness Act behind us, and embrace our role as active managers of wild spaces? Or are the wild parts of our country best left alone?

ED: Leave a comment on our website, backstoryradio.org. We tweet at backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

BRIAN: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Earnest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, Bruce Wallace, and Robert Armengol. Emily Gattic is our digital producer, and Jamal Millner is our engineer. BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Weinstein Properties, by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of history emeritus at UVA. and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.