Untrammeled

I began last week a series of columns about Yosemite National Park in anticipation of my trip there next month.  At the end of last week’s column about John Muir, Yosemite’s advocate and savior, I noted that he died 100 years ago this year, 1914.

Today we recall another important anniversary being celebrated this year in Yosemite and in 800 other wilderness area; The US Wilderness Protection Act, signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Here are some untrammeled ramblings about wilderness and staying out of traps.

John Muir wanted to take everyone camping in the wilderness.  His beloved Sierra Club was all about making more people aware of wild natural wonders, and improving their access to them. Only slowly did this gentleman’s club of western nature lovers realize that, while public awareness was good, too much access was becoming a problem.  Instead of just sponsoring hikes, they needed to sponsor legislation.  After their devastating failure to stop the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir near Yosemite, they began to lobby for protection of special landscapes, like the Grand Canyon, from development, recreation, drilling, and logging.

But it really fell to the next generation of American wilderness lovers to realize that federal legislation was needed that was comprehensive and stronger.  And in an ironic twist, these new leaders actually worked to reduce access to wilderness areas.   They were also less trusting of government laws and agencies than their mentors had been; these new activists noticed that these so-called land agencies had in a few decades become beholden to commercial interests; the Forest Service was ruled by lumber interests, and the Army Corps of Engineers was devoted to dams and locks and levees.

Howard ZahniserHoward Zahniser, president of the Wilderness Society, was one of this new generation of conservationists.   His particular skills met the needs of this new time; he was a good writer, he was persistent, and he was willing to work with others. From 1958 to 1964 he wrote 66 drafts of a Wilderness Act that would provide a federal wilderness policy and protection.  He got various competing environmental groups, like the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and the Isaak Walton League, to work together for the first time, and he shepherded them through 16 congressional hearings.  Sadly, Zahniser  died months before Congress overwhelmingly passed the legislation. 

It was the first wilderness act of its kind in any nation and has served as a model for others.  Immediately 9 million wilderness acres that had previously been set apart piecemeal and with fragile protections that could be rescinded by a new administration, were placed under permanent, comprehensive conservation policy.  No development, no permanent human presence, no recreational vehicles, no forestry or mining.  In the past 50 years, the scope of those protected areas has grown to 109 million acres, more than half of it in Alaska.

Zahniser defined wilderness this way: “ 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.”

Yosemite’s valley floor is not considered wilderness.  It’s developed, has permanent residents, and 4 million visitors a year.  But 95% of the whole park is managed as wilderness.  In those high remote Sierra landscapes is the only place in the whole US where one can draw a 150 mile line on a map and cross no roads.  That’s how developed our nation is.  That’s how precious is our wilderness.

Zahniser intentionally chose this old fashioned word, “untrammeled” to describe wilderness.  Many people thought he meant “untrampled,” that wilderness is where people do not tramp or tromp.  But actually the word means free, unfettered, literally, not in a trap.  A trammel, or tre-mail, in the Middle Ages, was three layers of chain mail (tre-mail) placed in a stream to catch fish, and by extension it meant a bridle to restrain a horse. 

Untrammeled land is not trapped or bridled, it is free.  From us.  We may visit, but must respect its freedom.  And we can’t stay, we have to leave.  The forces of nature can operate unrestrained and unaltered, free.

Howard Zahniser (See Note*)Zahniser was roughly a contemporary with Adlai Stevenson, another liberal intellectual Midwest politician good with words.  As Zahniser has an air of tragedy because of his early death, Stevenson is something of a symbol of loss, of what might have been a very different 1950’s in the US, had he not lost presidential elections twice to the Republican General Eisenhower.

Stevenson also liked the world untrammeled.  He wrote; “The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.”

So here’s to wilderness, to the Wilderness Act, to Howard Zahniser and Adlai Stevenson, and to all things untrammeled; nature, free society, and even our spirits, occasionally untrammeled, when we set ourselves free from trap and bridle.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter

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* "Howard Zahniser's son says of his father's custome made suit: Around the time the wilderness bill was introduced, my father found an older tailor, E. 'Sye' Silas, in Georgetown who made custom-made suits for about the same price as off-the-rack suits. My father convinced Mr. Silas to make him suits whose coats featured four supersized inside pockets. These became veritable fabric filing cabinets that usually held wilderness bill propaganda, Wilderness Society membership information and applications, a book by Thoreau, and another book by either Dante or Blake. Most conservationists and their organizations were poor then, so my father read these while riding trolley cars and buses, not taxi cabs, to appointments around the Nation's Capital. Some of his books still hold transit transfer coupon bookmarks." (See Wilderness.net)