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Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2014

https://archive.org/details/nieaningofwildernOOwild

OTHER SIERRA CLUB PUBLICATIONS

This Is the American Earth

by Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall

Studies in the Sierra
by John Muir

Portfolio III: Yosemite Valley
by Ansel Adams

Guide to the John Muir Trail and the High Sierra Region
by Walter A. Starr, Jr., with back-pocket map

A Climber's Guide to the Teton Range
by Leigh Ortenburger

Going Light — With Backpack or Burro
edited by David R. Brower

A Climber's Guide to the High Sierra
edited by Hervey Voge

Manual of Ski Mountaineering
edited by David R. Brower

Belaying the Leader: An Omnibus on Climbing Safety
by Richard M. Leonard and others

Glaciers and a Camera
by Arthur E. Harrison

A Climber's Guide to Glacier National Park
by Gordon Edwards

Wilderness Alps: The North Cascades

Proceedings and Summaries

of the Biennial Wilderness Conferences

Sierra Club Bulletin (monthly)

Address: Mills Tower, San Francisco

THE MEANING OF
WILDERNESS TO SCIENCE

PROCEEDINGS, SIXTH BIENNIAL
WILDERNESS CONFERENCE

principal contributors

Daniel B. Beard
Stanley A. Cain
Ian McTaggert Cowan
Raymond B. Cowles
Frank Fraser Darling
Luna B. Leopold
Robert Rausch
G, M. Trevelyan

edited by David Brower

The Meaning of
Wilderness to Science

an

COOPERATING ORGANIZATIONS

» California Academy of Sciences

iV D . ^ ' Conservation Foundation

Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs
Resources of the Future, Inc.
The Wilderness Society

and the following Federal agencies:
Forest Service
Geological Survey
National Park Service
Public Health Service

THE SIERRA CLUB, founded in 1892, has
devoted itself to the study and protection of
national scenic resources, particularly those of
mountain regions. Participation is invited in the
program to enjoy and preserve wilderness,
wildlife, forests, and streams.

Copyright 1960 by the Sierra Club

Designed by David Brower

Printed in the United States of America
by Gillick Printing, Inc.

FOREWORD

SIX Biennial Wilderness Conferences have been held in the San Fran-
cisco Bay region since 1949 under the sponsorship of the Sierra Club. They
began with the idea of hearing out the views of various users and administrators
of wilderness in the Sierra Nevada on the question of how to enjoy wilderness
without wearing it out, or, stated another way, how not to love it to death. It all
could be summarized as the threat from the inside, a threat not to be minimized.

But the first conference had hardly got under way before people realized
that the inside threat, important though it was, paled before the outside threat,
the threat to exploit wilderness to extinction. The vanguard of wilderness pre-
servers saw that it would do little good to argue about whether to bury litter
in wilderness or to carry it out if, meanwhile, mop-up crews of exploiters were
busy rolling up the boundaries of wilderness and getting rid of it.

It was noted that each exploitative group was fond of wilderness, and
wanted only its own special kind of concession in it — just roads to take out the
bug trees and improve the forest so that it would not be a biological desert, or
to enable sportsmen to harvest the surplus game because it was a biological
Eden, or to make it accessible to the lame and the halt, or to harvest the tree
crop to avoid waste; just water development to maintain streamflow or im-
prove forage for deer or to render it more accessible for outboard motors or to
enhance the scenery; just a chance to try out man^s new experiment, wildlands
management. Each concession was admirable in itself. Each necessary in its
place. But was wilderness the place? Or was wilderness something that needed
guarding more than managing, careful respect for the forces that had built it
and kept it, that were still building it and could still keep it, without benefit of
man's technology? Was it possible that the chief managerial task in wilderness
was to manage management lest wilderness, by definition, be managed to death?

There was growing conviction that wilderness could enhance the American
standard of living — if the American standard of having did not extinguish wil-
derness first. It was postulated that if America were to ignore, for utilitarian
purposes, that small part of its land area which is still wilderness, if America
were to consider it there just to be enjoyed for what it is and not for what
it could be remodeled into, then the nation would still survive handsomely —
perhaps even more so. Just pretend it isn't there, the theory runs, and carry on
business as usual around it; you won't regret it. There isn't too much heresy
in the concept. Successful corporations call it a reserve. A successfully civilized
nation ought to be able to set aside a reserve, not of money for a rainy day, but
of wilderness for a rainy century — and enjoy it as wilderness until the rains
come or even beyond that.

[v]

85486

Early conferences cast about for some way to achieve this. Surely there
must be a role for at least two branches of the government of a nation if some-
thing as irreplaceable as wilderness was at stake on the nation's land. The Ex-
ecutive Branch could designate and guard it, but the Legislative Branch should
at least recognize it and grant wilderness an automatic stay of execution, who-
ever might wish to cancel it out. Out of all this the Wilderness Bill emerged.
And out of the extended consideration the various versions of the bill received,
the meaning of wilderness in the whole context of national resources became
clearer. Perhaps what follows is a fair sketch of the relationship that has been
seen to exist.

IT HAS BEEN THE CUSTOM to look at natural resources as of two kinds — renew-
able, such as foods and fibers; and nonrenewable, such as metals, minerals,
and fossil fuels. It is now of major importance to look anew, to consider not
how renewable a resource is, but whether we have prospects of finding a sub-
stitute for it.

This is so for two reasons:

1. Our rate of depletion of the ''nonrenewables" is accelerating in spite of
our knowledge of the following fact, succinctly put by Sir Charles Darwin:
"During the whole of man's history there has been a great deal of mineral ex-
tracted from the earth, gold, copper, iron, coal, and so on. More than half the
grand total of these metals and minerals has been taken out of the ground since
1920" (from the Rede Lecture, 1958, Cambridge).

2. Our renewables depend entirely upon the earth's thin skin of soil, and
we are wasting these, at a rapidly increasing rate, through erosion by water and
bulldozer; through burial, inundation and poisoning; and through eradication
of species of unknown value to man's own future.

We know from the U.S. Geological Survey that the prospects are good of
finding substitutes for the nonrenewables — through vastly improved technology
in the processing of sea water and common rocks, aided by the almost unlimited
store of energy from the atom and the sun that we are learning to control.

We have no assurance that we can find substitutes for the myriad, and for
all we know, indispensable forms of life — in the soil, on the land, and in the air
— upon which the entire chain of life depends.

Wilderness. The most important source of the vital organic forms consti-
tuting the chain of life is the gene bank that exists in wilderness, where the life
force has gone on since the beginning uninterrupted by man and his technology.
For this reason alone, it is important that the remnants of wilderness which we
still have on our public lands be preserved by the best methods our form of
government can find. The proposed National Wilderness Preservation System
(now before the Congress) provides an excellent route to that goal, and espe-
cially dynamic leadership in the Congress and the Administration will be
required during the next decade to really achieve the goal of wilderness pres-

[vi]

ervation which the System would make possible. There will be important sub-
sidiary benefits to recreation, to watershed protection, and to a continuation
of the beauty of the native American scene.

A growing economy will have availed us nothing if it extinguishes our all-
important wilderness. A gross misunderstanding of wilderness, in which it is
evaluated according to the number of hikers who get into it, has been fostered
for the past several years, to the great detriment of all the future. There must
be no more needless, careless losses. There is no substitute for wilderness. What
we now have is all that we shall ever have.

Other resource problems are of secondary importance, but still far more
important than one would assume from a regular perusal of the nation's finan-
cial pages, or from most public speeches.

Forestry. The government badly needs a program that will bring to forestry
a full realization that forests mean far more than timber and pulp. On many
forests other uses should be given precedence, but rarely are. The overwhelming
emphasis in the training of forest-land managers, and in the decisions they make,
is on timber production. Reforestation, watershed protection, recreation, wild-
life restoration, and wilderness preservation are suffering severely as a result.

Water. Reliance upon the reimbursable dollar as the primary criterion for
water development can bring about bad projects and prevent good ones as
long as there is no satisfactory means of assessing the perpetual dollar value of
natural land and streams. The nation needs to proceed without delay to a classi-
fication of streams that will present to future generations a countryside with
optimum water development and wild-stream preservation. Some of the streams
should be primitive, some semi-primitive, some partly developed, and some fully
developed. We have waited too long already to develop a national water plan
based upon this simple and clearly necessary foundation. The interim delay
in the effort to clean up open sewers cannot be continued.

Parks. Little time remains in which to rough out the undedicated areas hav-
ing high scenic, wilderness, and wildlife values which should be added to the
National Park System. The only error we can make now is to preserve too little.
It has been much too long since a major scenic reservation was made in the
United States proper, either by creation of new national parks by Congress or
national monuments by proclamation. There has been too much "Let Roose-
velt do it" — Teddy or Frankhn. There is far too much parochialism evident
now that the effort to round out the parks is getting belatedly into motion. Some
180 million acres were set aside as national forests in a bold, sweeping motion
more than half a century ago. Within these areas are some of the finest poten-
tial parks, and a transfer of a small fraction of the national-forest total could
greatly enrich the National Park System without appreciable impoverishment
of our national forests — especially when the nation has some fifty million acres
of forest land that was allowed to become impoverished and is critically in need
of reforestation.

[vii]

Wildlife. We need an expanded program of habitat improvement on devel-
oped lands and a fuller understanding of the importance, to many species, of
preserving a natural regimen, in wildlife refuges and game ranges as well as in
wilderness. Of primary importance is a still more intensive program of research
in methods of control of herbicides and pesticides so as to reduce peril to wild-
life and to man.

Roads and highways. Construction of roads has proceeded so rapidly that
there has not been time to evaluate properly their cost to the nation in terms
of impairment of the economic feasibility of efficient mass transportation, or
in terms of the cholesterol laid down in the cities' arteries, or in terms of soil,
beauty, and wilderness lost. It is now time to reappraise the high priority given
to roads in the expenditure of public funds in view of the lagging programs in
many critical fields, such as education, world health, redevelopment, and pres-
ervation.

We have lately been playing a game of strip poker with the American
earth. A relatively few people have been winning the early hands — people
interested in quick profits from the sale of conveniences — and all but guaran-
teeing that our children will lose as the game goes on, not just conveniences,
but necessities as well.

We need wider realization that milk does not come from a bottle, nor water
from a tap, nor gasoline from a throttle. These are all part of our natural
resources, wealth put by nature on the only world we are ever Hkely to live on
comfortably. The nation needs men who can match its mountain depleters, who
will realize that man must never again deplete, at the rate he has been depleting
since World War I, resources of the earth for which there are no known substi-
tutes, including the tiny vestige which constitutes all the remaining wilderness
on the earth.

Perhaps this would have been thought an extreme appraisal and not a fair
one, a few years ago. But not any longer. For there is a rapidly growing readi-
ness to scrutinize these issues, and not to dismiss them merely because they
may not accord with the Conventional Wisdom. These are issues to be faced
honestly in man's own interest, if survival interests him. Other species — and
wilderness too — will then also survive as a happy coincidence.

David Brower

Executive Director, Sierra Club

Berkeley, California
April 28, 1960

[ viii]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN THE NOVEL The Roots of Heaven one of Romain Gary's characters
says, "What this world needs is an Einstein of biology." Perhaps one exists
now. Conceivably, one of the biologists represented in this book is that person,
and only needs to be given public recognition as such. The reader is free to
select his own candidate or nominate someone from the outside, free also to
think hard about what such an Einstein should accomplish — if it is to be accom-
plished in time — and what help he will need.

The reader who does think hard will realize soon that this volume only
begins to tell what its title encompasses. The title should at the very least have
a "Volume I" added to it, but this would depart from the title of the Wilderness
Conference which this book reports and might tend to make static the titles of
succeeding conferences. A great many sciences are not represented, not the
least of these the Social Sciences and Political Science. We hope that wilderness
will engage the attention of these sciences more fully than it has — and soon
enough. Meanwhile we can only suggest, in an Appendix, some of the subjects
that they might be pondering. The Appendix is an extraordinary paper that
was brought to our attention by the late Judge Robert W. Sawyer. To us, it
puts this whole volume in the round — or at least gives it another side.

The principal papers evolved a little differently from those of the usual
conference. The speakers prepared drafts, but none followed this draft to the
letter, and some used the draft chiefly as a point of departure. The conference
was put on tape, the tape transcribed, the transcription edited by Warren
Olney IV to add a few of the written amenities not always present in the
spoken word, and the final version submitted to the speaker and corrected
again by the speaker in galley — with the inhibitive request that everything be
left just as much as possible as is to avoid further delays in publication. Thus
the papers may or may not be the literary product the authors would otherwise
have liked. They are, however and at last, published.

He * >K * *

We think the Biennial Wilderness Conferences are unique in the array of
talent and devotion they bring forth from volunteers. The Sierra Club is grate-
ful to its members and its friends who made the Sixth Conference possible, and
in particular to the sister organizations who lent both financial and moral sup-
port— Resources for the Future and the Conservation Foundation. We are
grateful, for illustrations, to contributors to the Sierra Club Bulletin annual
magazine numbers for 1950, 1952, 1953, and 1956, as well as to Vivian and
John Schagen, who, in giving this book their extra, expert scrutiny, suggested
that there was a unity in these photographs of Alaska which deserved wider
audience here. — DB

[ix]

THE SIXTH BIENNIAL WILDERNESS CONFERENCE
SAN FRANCISCO, MARCH 20, 21, 1959

ORGANIZATION

Robert C. Miller, Chairman
Paul J. Zinke, Vice-Chairman
Doris F. Leonard, General Secretary

PRESIDING

Harold C. Bradley, President, Sierra Club

Public Information
George Dusheck, Chairman

George L. Collins

Gary Barrett

Reporting and Recording
Ivan Sack, Chairman

Pauline A. Dyer

Grant Morse

Stuart R. Dole

Lowell Sumner

Timekeeper
James Gibson

Summaries and Recommendations
Karl W. Onthank, Chairman

Darwin Lambert

David B rower

Paul J. Zinke

"^Exhibits and Literature
John DeWitt, Chairman

Lelia Crouch

Ned Jack

Reception and Decorations
Peggy Wayburn

Arrangements and Registration Dinner Reservations

Mary L. Paige Howard Hirstel

*With the cooperation of Oliver Kehrlein, Ivan Tarnowsky, and members of
the staff of the California Academy of Sciences.

CONTENTS

Welcome Harold C. Bradley 1

Plants and Animals in Natural Communities

Daniel B. Beard 3

Ecological Islands as Natural Laboratories

Stanley A.Cain 18

Ecological Systems and the Water Resource

Luna B . Leopold 3 2

The Outlook for Conservation in Alaska

Robert Rausch 46

Science and the Wilderness Ian McTaggert Cowan 64

Population Pressure and Natural Resources

Raymond B. Cowles 79

Wilderness, Science, and Human Ecology

Frank Fraser Darling 95

Report of Committee on Recommendations 107
Appendix

The Call and Claims of Natural Beauty

G.M.Trevelyan 117

Forty-eight pages of plates

WELCOME

ON BEHALF of The Wildcmess Society, the CaHfornia Academy of Sciences,
Resources for the Future, the Conservation Foundation, and the other
cooperating organizations, I welcome you all to this conference. It is the sixth
of a series which began in the spring of 1949 and which is devoted to the values
and the problems of wilderness.

Previous conferences have been motivated by our love for our wild lands
and the values they represent to us in terms of inspiration and recreation: in-
tangible values which are intensely individual and intensely personal, pro-
duced by a type of environment which can evoke a mood. Because we love
and need to experience this mood, the environment which can produce it is to
all of us very precious. It grows more precious as it grows more scarce and
more difficult to find. Because we love it, we instinctively seek to understand
and to preserve it.

Problems of the use and preservation of wilderness have been our major
concern in the conferences which have preceded this one. Today, we turn
more specifically to explore the values of wilderness — not in terms of the human
spirit so much — but in terms of their value to the fields of science. We have
here assembled a galaxy of experts in the broad field of ecology. They are from
all over the world and represent many specialties. It is a rare privilege indeed
to have this opportunity to share some of the fruits of their work and the wis-
dom which it has brought to them. I would welcome them and thank them for
what they contribute.

Since this is a conference devoted to the value of wilderness to science, it
is fitting indeed that we should have as chairman, now and in the long plan-
ning stages that have preceded, Dr. Robert C. Miller, himself a distinguished
scientist, the Director of the CaHfornia Academy of Sciences.

Harold C. Bradley
President of the Sierra Club

[1]

DANIEL B. BEARD

Plants and Animals

in Natural Communities

Daniel B. Beard brings to his subject a considerable back-
ground of experience. His work has taken him to New York,
Florida, the Midwest, Utah, and most recently to the State of
Washington. He became Superintendent of Olympic National
Park in June, 1958. Mainly, his affiliations have been with
the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service,
but he has worked with other Government offices as well. On
January 1, 1960, a promotion took him to Washington, D.C.
to take office as Chief, Division of Interpretation for the Na-
tional Park Service.

Mr. Beard argues that scientists and conservationists have
a mutual interest in wild lands preservation. Wilderness is
necessary to science, and science is necessary to preserve the
wilderness. But this common interest lies in wilderness as a
self-sustaining whole, composed of dynamically interrelated
parts: as such it is important to science, and only if it is ap-
proached as such can it be preserved by science: by awareness
of wilderness as a whole, we mature as conservationists, and
we are better able to make a case for conservation in terms of
its positive scientffic value.

AMISSION 66 objective of the National Park Service, . . proposes a much
strengthened program of research and observation. . . . The normal pace
of nature is slow, and the influence of man upon his environment is often in-
direct, obscure, and delayed, and often not recognized in time to take preventa-
tive action. . . . Guesswork, rule-of-thumb, and intuition are not good enough.
. . . The preservation of this irreplaceable (wilderness) resource requires pre-
cise knowledge and scientific procedure. ..."

When we think of research or investigation in wild land areas, we naturally
picture the zoologist, botanist, forester, ichthyologist, geologist, or geographer
as the scientists most interested. I think it is most encouraging that you have
brought into this conference the discussions of other branches of knowledge —
philosophy, sociology, economics, and psychology — and by so doing urged
their practitioners to become more actively interested in wilderness as it relates
to our civilization. We need them.

Someone has made the provocative suggestion that we need a distinctive
wild land or wilderness literature. One might say that this is already in exist-

[3]

4

BEARD

ence although admittedly scattered. I doubt it. The real student of wilderness
— ^and there are very few — ^will find it rather difficult to find data that can be
used as a springboard for his inquiry.

Perhaps I am not making myself altogether clear on this point. Much has
been written on various phases of wild lands. Studies exist, and even our friend
Walt Disney has used his persuasive medium on this subject. But, except for
the philosopher who has been inspired by wilderness, how much has been ex-
plained about this very fragile, almost nebulous phenomenon when compared
to the total output of science?

So, perhaps we are trying to sort this out a little here, to get the measure of
the need, to attempt some overdue self-appraisal if we are to substantiate or
even develop to acceptable maturity our ideas on wilderness.

Except in well protected public areas, there is the abhorrent spectacle of
something precious apparently melting away before our very eyes. And there
is concern because we are challenged on every hand to prove that there is such
a thing as a purely economic wilderness — and if not, why in the world should
it be allowed to exist? It is hard to explain it to one who is insensate, yet we
hope that the popular conception of a wilderness area as just a place that has
not yet been found of economic value is receding. That idea, which developed
during our long history of wilderness exploitation, is certainly an entirely under-
standable one, but it is now becoming slightly old-fashioned.

To repeat, it appears that a distinct wild land or wilderness literature is
required to bring into positive focus the values of such areas and such conditions
to modern society. It would seem that the appeal to date has emphasized the
emotional value of wild lands mainly as historic relics interwoven with the
inspirational.

It seems to me that the need for research in wild lands is especially important
in the biological fields, even though the intriguing science of ecology is begin-
ning to contribute a great deal to our knowledge. Up until this vigorous young
science became important, the biologist was often busy with the ABC's of his
profession: naming, cataloging, describing, and inventorying plants and ani-
mals. Aldo Leopold pushed the broader concepts of wildlife management onto
the stage, where other hands had already been busy with such props as predator
control, manipulation of the environment, and other techniques for rebuilding
or even overbuilding wildlife populations in an environment changed by man.
Those scientists whose business or interest carried them into the wilderness had
to borrow their tools, techniques, and knowledge from those whose interests
were to increase game or timber yields. I hope that I am not doing them a
disservice when I suggest that these wild land scientists have been all too few
and that not many were permitted the luxury of being true investigators of the
wilderness itself, as were and are John Muir, John C. Merriam, F. Fraser
Darling, Starker Leopold, the Muries, and a few others.

The ecologist uses the idea of natural communities as one of the foundation

PLANTS AND ANIMALS IN NATURAL COMMUNITIES

S

stones of his craft. It is a term that has opened many new doors, but most of us
find that the doors open into technical mazes wherein we can easily get lost.
However, it is not too difficult to grasp what natural communities mean: that
plants and animals have a relationship one to another even to an interdepend-
ence for their very existence.

The authors of the book Basic Ecology wrote: "Though the communities
themselves, because they overlap and because they change, have not yet been
completely pinned down, the community concept is clear enough. And it is
perhaps the most significant of all ecological concepts — it brings together into
meaningful story the myriad details about plant and animal structure, distribu-
tion, and habits that have accumulated through the centuries. The wholeness
of the community, the interdependence of its members is a simple enough idea
once it is pointed out. Yet it was not clearly apparent even to the most careful
scholars before the necessary facts became known." To use the old saying:
ecology explains something everybody can understand in terms nobody can
understand.

Paul Shepard, Jr. said in part: "The discovery of this interdependent, self-
adjusting community, dynamically in balance with the total environment, is a
landmark of human thinking . . . The influence of this ecological information
may lessen the gap between man and nature which has been developing since
the industrial revolution." Along the same line, Aldo Leopold was quoted in the
Sierra Club Bulletin as saying: "The outstanding scientific discovery of the
twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexities of the
land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how
little we know about it." [From Round River (Oxford, 1953).]

Well, I am not so sure that I bristle with such enthusiasm for the discovery as
do Shepard and Leopold, but I do get their point. And I thank them for saying
it so that my authority can underscore theirs. Certainly, the artist who under-
stands composition, juxtaposition of light and shade, repetition of shapes and
figures, texture, and color is better able to appreciate a picture than the person
who does not know these things. In the same way, appreciation of wild places,
aesthetic enjoyment, and regard for nature are related directly to the degree
in which we are aware of the existence of these natural communities of plants
and animals. A wild landscape thus becomes meaningful and so intensely inter-
esting that the avid bird watcher becomes so absorbed that he forgets to note
every species for his life list, and the sturdy rock climber neglects to climb the
topmost crest.

And, as we mature as conservationists and human beings we develop a
sensitivity to natural surroundings that we did not know existed before. But
above all, we become less preoccupied with just one ingredient of the natural
community — birds, lichens, trees, mammals, butterflies, or whatever the hobby
or interest. Paul Sears summed this up in this way: "The whole history of the
conservation movement has been an evolution from concern with single resources

6

BEARD

to realization of their interdependence and of the need for viewing the problem
in its entirety."

If my audience of Californians will permit, I would like to illustrate this
point by reference to a Florida area, the Everglades. At the time the new
National Park was being created, many objected to its size saying that since
the great bird rookeries and roosts were the central attraction, then why not
include them alone. These people failed to realize that preservation of the whole
living community was the purpose of the Park. They did not know, until told,
that a hundred thousand or so ibises, egrets, and herons had to find tons and
tons of food — crayfishes, filHfishes, snails, and so on. Water levels had to be
such that these food organisms would be concentrated. Alligators needed to be
present so that the 'gator holes would form reservoirs for the food organisms
in the dry seasons and so on and on and on.

In the past however, the preservation of natural communities such as are
found in our National Parks has sometimes occurred more because of luck
than anything else. If you should read about the early campaigns to create
Yellowstone National Park, it will surprise you to find little reference to plant
and animal conservation. Stress was placed upon the thermal activity, the can-
yon, and the lake. The reason is simple enough: the wildlife, forests and grass-
lands were not yet in short supply.

But they are now, and I wish we could say that we have now seen the light
regarding the need to give adequate preservation to the best of them. But it is
not that simple. Anyone who has ever faced the task of determining or changing
the boundaries of a National Park, Refuge, or National Forest knows that a
hundred ecologists armed with all the knowledge we have gained in the last
hundred years might not be able to prevail! But there are certain indications
of progress.

The much disputed boundaries of Olympic National Park's west side were
established to protect the range of the spectacular Roosevelt or Ol3mipic Elk
and the remnant of the great rain forest that identifies one of the most magnifi-
cent natural communities in this country. Biologist Coleman Newman found
many reasons why the rain forest and the elk were, as the Spanish say, "muy
simpaticos."

Scarcely noticed here on the West Coast, the boundaries of Everglades
National Park in Florida were recently completed after one of the longest and
most hotly contested controversies in conservation history. The decisions were
made and the final boundaries drawn, after competent scientists in and out of
the Federal Government had identified natural plant and animal communities.
These scientists included among many others ornithologists, botanists, geolo-
gists, and marine biologists, not to mention philosophers, economists, industrial-
ists, and practical politicians who also were indispensable in this community of
effort and achievement. It was a good job, and we are proud of it.

The National Park Service has made some pioneering attempts to show

PLANTS AND ANIMALS IN NATURAL COMMUNITIES

7

the value of establishing certain areas through investigations and studies of
their most important resources, and the meanings and uses of such resources
to science. One of the outstanding achievements which comes to mind is the
Katmai Project. That project was occasioned by our reahzation that we knew
very little about the scientific significance of Katmai National Monument, in
Alaska — the largest in the National Park System. The Service went to work
with various other agencies, including the Office of Naval Research, the Office
of the Quartermaster General, the U. S. Coast Guard, the Air Force, the Uni-
versity of Alaska, and many others, undertaking a pretty complete field
investigation of the geology, mineralogy, biology, entomology, geography,
archeology, terrain appreciation, visitor use potentials and administration,
transportation and communications, and a number of other factors and phases.
The results of that project, which extended through two or three years of field
work, are encompassed in a series of about 12 articles and reports (including
one definitive report on biology by Victor Cahalane), all of which the Service
is using penetratingly and diligently in developing Service awareness of the
area's needs in utilization and protection now and in the future.

Those who have knowledge of the history of Big Bend National Park will
remember that much the same thing happened there. These are but a few
examples. So it appears that there are instances where reasonably well defined
plant and animal communities are being preserved in approximately their
natural condition.

You will recognize that my remarks apply mainly to National Parks,
because that is my field. What I have said might be applicable to other wilder-
ness or wild land areas. You may have noticed also that I have made several
qualifications such as ''reasonably well defined" and ''approximately natural
condition." We might say that Mount McKinley National Park is an excellent
place for the Dall sheep, and that that species fits nicely and neatly into its
so-called ecological niche as a part of the whole community. You could not
very well say that about the caribou, except at the particular time when it
happens to be migrating through the Park. This is oversimplification, I admit,
but you know as well as I do that it is probably impossible to find anywhere —
in the 50 states at least, with the possible exception of Alaska — any large
natural plant and animal communities left that can be called complete down
to the last detail.

The wilderness wherever it can be found today is certainly the place where
the scientist and the wild land manager can work in full accord with benefit to
both. It is a place where the emphasis on research is badly needed, because the
measure of our success is in how closely we can approach the goal of approxi-
mating natural conditions. It is not enough to be satisfied with the conditions
as they are, because the status quo may itself deceive us.

The concept of the balance of nature in the older sense has already fallen
before the ecologist. He ventures the term "steady state" but qualifies it by

8

BEARD

speaking of a changing, shifting, moving equilibrium that tends to move in a
determinable direction but never settles into a static, comfortable climax as we
used to suppose. As John C. Merriam often told his students: "Creation is a
continuous process." The ecologist tells us that nature attempts to determine
what species and associations are best suited to the maximum efficient use of a
site or environmental resource — but nature never stays quite still enough. In
point of fact, there are indications that the North American continent was in a
pretty unstable situation when the white man first arrived.

As a result, we have somewhat tardily become aware that we are in danger
of trying to freeze the status quo of our wilderness or wild lands at a certain
point, or a certain stage — an idea that never occurred to most of us twenty
years ago. Not only that, but by overprotection of our wild lands and wild land
communities, we are beginning to suspect that our efforts might be pushing
nature into directions she might not want to go. We know only too well that
this might eventually lead to some entirely unexpected and tragic results.

For instance, fire can be very destructive as everyone knows. F. Fraser
Darling and Starker Leopold showed that in the study of fires that destroyed
the lichen food of the Alaskan caribou. But wildfire has been a factor in the
natural landscape. It has favorable effects on certain species of plants and
animals. It causes some seeds to germinate. It reduces grass litter and allows
tree seedlings to come up. Research recently completed on one forest t3^e
shows that fire protection has endangered the existence of the dominant trees
along with many endemic plants that grow only where wildfire has been. The
distribution of brown spot disease on longleaf pine seedlings in the South is said
to be naturally controlled by fires. In many areas, fire protection has allowed
the build-up of fuels and set the stage for catastrophic fires.

Simply stated, we are beginning to recognize that the role of fire is really
not as well understood as we thought. Starker Leopold has touched on this
point in past wilderness conferences. The battle to prevent and control fires has
so preoccupied some of us that we have, once more, carried the techniques and
knowledge of economic landscape management into the wilderness and perhaps
have unwittingly placed ourselves to some extent in the way of natural organic
evolution which surely is nature's process of handling all life, including man.

Control of injurious species is another management technique that has
sometimes spilled over from economic to wilderness practices. Although preda-
tor control has long been abandoned in National Parks, it used to be acceptable
and has left its scars in extirpated or greatly reduced species which, in turn, have
at times caused an eruption of prey. Obviously, control of wide-ranging preda-
tors beyond the wilderness boundaries has had the same effect. It is much the
same with insect pests and disease or anything else we consider harmful or
inimical to our concepts of wilderness preservation.

This all sounds extremely easy to solve: reintroduce extirpated species, let
the wildfires burn, allow the insects to attack. And, while we are at it, let's get

PLANTS AND ANIMALS IN NATURAL COMMUNITIES

9

rid of all the things that were not a part of the natural scene, even including
ourselves. It is not that easy. For one thing, the fire might not stay in the wild
lands and the insect might find a way out too. And I would just like to see you
get rid of people!

John Muir found the great forests of Washington in various growth stages.
On closer examination, he discovered that this was because of fire, natural
wildfire. Olympic National Park in Washington has the finest remaining stands
of Northwest forests in their natural condition, in that they have not been
severely molested by man. But the forests in the Park are less than one per cent
of the Northwest's forest area. Fire, severe insect infestation which would
devastate large areas, disease, or other things, no matter how natural, have
the capacity to destroy this remnant or reduce it to a one-stage condition. To
quote from the National Park Wilderness publication: "This requires that
natural forces be regulated to the degree necessary to keep them in scale with
the reduced size of the wilderness that remains today." And that is not so easy
either.

Those of us who have anything to do with wild lands and natural plant
and animal communities are warned, threatened, admonished, scolded, and
bludgeoned with the logic of critics if the term "managed wilderness" escapes
our lips. Yet we have been fumbling along these very lines for years and years.
I think the boogieman conjured up is that of an Old World forest with trees
neatly pruned, the litter cleared, and that intangible quality of mystery that is
the hallmark of wilderness gone forever in a man-made landscape. Quite so.
But if we are aware of the danger, why walk into it? I think we are sometimes
so afraid of what we might do that we make the mistake of doing nothing or
waiting until a real crisis has developed that intelligent, well-controlled inter-
ference would have prevented. But we had better know what we are doing and
the only possible way is through continuing scientific research.

In this connection, I was amused by a barbed statement in the Yale Con-
servation Studies SL year or so ago which went as follows: "Although the most
important single element in the Parks is the visitor, one looks in vain for
sociologists, anthropologists, or psychologists on Park staffs. Apparently the
assumption is that the Park Service is still an agency which deals with land,
enduring the public in summer."

In the so-called practical field, which we administrators and planners think
of as our special province, there is always at hand overshadowing our imme-
diate day-to-day material needs the larger concept of area meaning and use-
fulness in the philosophical and spiritual sense, which is what we are talking
about here today. In other words, we are constantly conscience-struck at the
enormity of disaster that might befall an area if we should as parkmen unwit-
tingly admit something or other that would be too much for it in terms of
overuse, or non-conforming use. Visitation itself in concentration zones becomes
a nightmare which can only be met in the long run, I am convinced, through

10

BEARD

scientific determination of just how much and what type of visitor impact is
possible commensurate with preservation. This should determine the facilities
and services. By the same token, we can agree that nothing in park administra-
tion is static, any more than it is in the life history of an area. The change,
for instance, of the traditional old lookout on the top of Clingman's Dome in
Great Smoky to something modern and useful is a justifiable undertaking from
various viewpoints, however unhappy it may leave some who feel that nothing
at all should ever be done. They feel that the old log and rock architecture
which we so frequently hear mentioned as ideal for the parks would be the best.
Scientifically, the evolution of park architecture and pubHc service generally,
as illustrated by our modern techniques in construction and in facilities and
services, is but a reflection of the progress made in understanding and utilizing
intelligently basic park resources. It is far less expensive and decidedly more
sensible today to use modern, less perishable materials from all the standpoints
of design, construction cost, public use, and perhaps above all maintenance,
than it ever was to use the materials which our forefathers, the pioneers, found
locally and used only because they didn't have anything else. Except in some
remote places as Katmai, the back country of Olympic, or some other where as
a temporary stop-gap or frontier expedient, it is not necessary to resort to what-
ever is at hand. The Service is not justified today in the Administrator's trans-
lation of his area's meaning in using mud, rocks, logs, sod, or anything but the
most modern materials except in highly specialized circumstances.

Last month, Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that under
controlled conditions in the laboratory scientists have learned that if they
"bathe" tadpoles in an ultrasonic "bath" stirred at a rate of four million vibra-
tions per second, the tadpoles will shake their tails and peel off an extremely
thin layer of skin. This is of much interest to neurosurgeons of Massachusetts
General Hospital as a surgical tool capable of aiming an ultrasonic beam to
hit just fifty nerve cells without damaging anything else. The lowly tadpole
that was needed for all this came from some wayside pool, and the controlled
laboratory conditions sufficed for the studies. Some biological studies can be
carried on without reference to habitats or other creatures and plants, others
cannot be separated without reference to environment relationships. Great as
our scientific advances may be, we are as yet unable to create wilderness in-
doors. Some say that we cannot restore wilderness either. Once it is gone it is
gone, they say, and you might as well plow it up and plant corn.

The idea of wilderness restoration is not a popular subject in wilderness
groups or, let us say, among livestock growers. The first group fears that it might
lead to the entirely fallacious idea that existing wilderness need not be handled
so carefully after all. The other group, livestock growers or farmers, or perhaps
some chambers of commerce, or others would not like to see land now used for
other purposes made into wilderness. Both groups are right and both groups
are wrong, too. Wilderness restoration is now going on. For instance. Great

PLANTS AND ANIMALS IN NATURAL COMMUNITIES

11

Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina is more of a
wilderness today than it was before it became a Park, in spite of the fact that
over 3 million people visit it every year. The forests are regrowing, the pristine
areas are secure, and the animals once so scarce are coming back. In other
words, communities of living things once depleted or changed are returning. It
is a strange thing that man the destroyer is capable under many conditions of
moving about in a wild land without adversely affecting it. The Great Smokies
is a good example.

In the burned, beaten, and abused Everglades of Florida, the amazing
fertility of the tropics is already re-establishing the mantle of wilderness
throughout the 1,400,000 acres of interrelated natural communities, almost
within sight of flamboyant Miami. The same recovery is noticeable at Big Bend
National Park in Texas and at the desert National Monuments of California.
Admittedly in each case, the ingredients were there; wilderness had not been
completely eradicated. Numerous National Wildlife Refuges contain restored
habitats, albeit artificial in places, where dust storms occurred twenty-five years
ago.

Ecologists, agronomists, botanists, and many other scientists have spent
years studying the grasslands which covered so much of the interior of this
continent. They have had to work from traces only, because there was no other
general vegetative type as completely destroyed as the prairie's. A few acres
here, an old cemetery or railroad fill there, was all that could be found. Men like
Weaver and Fitzpatrick could only reconstruct an idea of what it was like,
because the prairie grasses grew on soil that was admirably suited for corn and
wheat and could support grazing herds of cattle and sheep instead of bison and
antelope.

Here was a case where the scientist was almost too late, where the biggest
change had taken place before he came, but even at that the httle pieces can be
put together. In retrospect, we can wish that the dream of the unhappy painter,
George Catlin, might have been realized — a great grasslands preserve with all
its spectacular wildlife, including, according to Catlin, the wild Indians! But
even as we say it, we know it would have been impossible on the scale Catlin
visualized.

An attempt was once made to establish a grasslands preserve on a lesser
scale, but it failed. Perhaps this is an example of a situation where a wilderness
might still be restored, or recreated. What a fascinating opportunity for science
to attempt!

These ideas sometime fall upon deaf ears out here in the West, because
you have been more fortunate than those of us who came from the East, South,
or Midwest. Our American culture had advanced far enough to spawn the
conservation movement before the West was destroyed. The forests of the
Olympics were not fated to be devastated like those in the northern lake states,
Pennsylvania, and Ohio. You did not lose any heath hens, passenger pigeons,

12

BEARD

or great auks, although the golden bear of California now inhabits the football i

field only. But you are going to lose your seacoast if you do not watch out — a I

loss that will occur because so few conservationists or public officials have ever ■

thought about the marine littoral as falling within their sphere of interest. I \

hope that the hike lead by Justice William O. Douglas along the Olympic 5

Coastal Strip last summer and the recently completed — but not yet released — j

Pacific Coast Survey of the National Park Service will spark interest in and ;

some realization of the very immediate problem of saving scarce seacoast areas. |

I mean of course the marine littorals, salt marshes, rocky shorelines, mud ;

fiats, sand dunes, and all that defines the seacoast. i

About this time last year I was with an expedition to the Exuma Cays, a 1

day's sail southeast of Nassau in the Bahamas. It was sponsored by the New j

York Zoological Society and the Bahamian Government. Our objective was to i

find and study an unspoiled coral reef, shoreline, and landscape. Shall we say !

we were looking for a seascape connected to a landscape. The only protected j

bit left (and it was not reef t3^e) along the Atlantic seaboard in the United j
States was at Fort Jefferson National Monument at Dry Tortugas — a few acres
only. Everywhere else in the States and around Nassau, Abaco, and other areas

of the Bahamas, the living coral reefs with associated fishes, sponges, gorgonias, |

and so on had been destroyed or were in the process of being changed by com- '

mercial collectors, skin divers, pollution, sedimentation, or other causes. A i

reservation of Crown Lands and Waters at Exuma Cays was almost the last j

chance to save anything. I

Along the eastern seaboard and gulf there are several National Park areas, ;

Federal Refuges, State Parks and so on: Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, |

interesting little Fundy National Park in New Brunswick, Acadia National I

Park in Maine, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Everglades National Park, i

and Fort Jefferson National Monument. But only at the latter two is there ;

any jurisdiction which permits protection below high tide. Parks and reserva- i

tions usually end right where the amazing biological phenomena of the marine j

littoral begins. In parks where you would be arrested for picking flowers you j

can step off into the intertidal zone and take all the sea urchins, starfish, and '
other things you want. The old adage that conservation ends at the water line

still seems to apply. ;

The same thing seems to be happening on the Pacific Coast. Skin divers, |
scuba divers, spear fishermen, collectors both professional and amateur are
taking to the biologically fascinating littorals. The coastal communities of
plants and animals will unquestionably suffer and be depleted. Up along the
Olympic National Park coast, where federal jurisdiction goes only to high

tide, seals are shot from the beaches. I

The maritime ecology is still relatively untouched at Channel Islands
National Monument, located off the southern California coast, and the boun-
daries there do include the waters five miles offshore from Santa Barbara and

PLANTS AND ANIMALS IN NATURAL COMMUNITIES

13

Anacapa Islands. However, under the Submerged Land Act it is possible that
the National Park Service has no real jurisdiction. My information is that
there is no place along the California coast where the intertidal marine life is
protected.

So while we worry about mountain peaks, a great and very rich area of
natural plant and animal associations, thousands of miles long and of varying
width, is being lost.

In many ways, the wild lands can be a barometer for land use. Not only
that, but they permit us to examine situations that have adjusted over a long,
long time — longer than the existence of man himself. Just as the scientist can
help the wilderness, it can aid the scientist by providing him with a variety of
outdoor laboratories, where nature relatively unaffected by man has already
determined the plant and animal communities best suited for growth and
development, and where the dynamics of nature exist. I suggest that this value
of wild lands has been scarcely touched, surely not to the extent that seems
indicated in the future. Perhaps this is because our science has not advanced
far enough to take full advantage of the opportunities, or more possibly, we
have not set up the incentives or the apparatus whereby the scientist can
effectively obtain, interpret, and apply his wild lands findings for the benefit
of society.

Much has already been done in forestry, because timber stands do not ripen
like corn in one growing season, so natural laboratories or check plots, if we
may call them such, offer opportunities to study the natural processes which
relate or can be related to forest growth. It has been noted by others that
knowledge of original habitats (including of course the checks and balances of
natural communities) can be important and save many years of work in
learning what conditions favor pests and diseases. There are no natural checks
left after a DDT spray! The natural factors, including possibly such insig-
nificant things as the saprophytic fungi living in the soil and litter of the
forest floor, might be important to the vigor of the forest and the determination
of types and species. Then of course, the wilderness forest permits one to note,
compare, and evaluate changes that occur outside as a result of exploitation
and forestry practices.

If a man had decided to stake out a claim containing uranium ore instead
of one containing lead, thirty years ago he would have been considered a
candidate for the psychologist's couch. Not wishing to make the same mistake,
who among us today dares to call worthless which animal or which plant or
what interdependent group of them, developed by nature through the eons of
time? Would there have been such a thing as civilization if all the puny grasses
that were ancestors for our cereals had been wiped out because of some mixup
caused by man? I wonder what course history and technology would have
taken if the native rubber trees of South America had been chopped down
and made into broom handles for Spain before any were moved to the Middle

14

BEARD

East, Malay Peninsula or Indonesia? Can we calculate what the central Euro-
pean plain owes to the person who found a use for the ancestral white potato
of the Andes?

Antibiotics, for instance, are not something invented by man. They did
not come from a test tube. In nature's dynamic relationship, antibiotic sub-
stances are generated by many different kinds of fungi and bacteria. When man
found out that peniciUin, streptomycin, aureomycin, and other antibiotics
produced by fungi were antagonistic to various pathogenic bacteria, he began
putting the antibiotics into his own body and the bodies of his livestock to fight
the bacteria there. Science has scarcely scratched the surface on the study of
how species producing antibiotics utilize these substances to protect themselves.
The field of, shall we say, antagonisms in nature is hardly explored. One would
suspect that its benefit to man would have unlimited potential, and that what
we have seen in antibiotics is merely a foretaste of the future. Algae, fungi,
microorganisms, all sorts of life in all sorts of natural situations in sea or on land
offer opportunities for the study of antagonisms produced as a part of the
natural communities of living things and inseparable from them. Thus the
scientist must work in the living community, where the interplay of nature is
unfettered. Later on, it can be carried from the field to the laboratory for experi-
mentation, perfection, and adaptation for use.

Man's mischief has extended so far that he now pollutes the atmosphere
that he breathes into his lungs. The internal combustion engine, furnaces, blast
furnaces, and the other manifestations of progress have done unpleasant things
to the air, and radioactive pollution looms ominously, too.

It is well known that research is going on to find the extent and the effect of
radiation upon organisms. It is known, in spite of necessary secrecy, that
research has extended to wild lands in an effort to discover what has or might
happen there. So here too the wild lands play their part as check areas free
from the frightening pollution, or containing it perhaps. How is unaltered nature
reacting to this, or what differences exist between the situation in the wild
lands and country radically altered by man? With concern about heredity
and mutation in connection with radioactive pollution, the importance of
research and observation upon established and known natural plant and animal
communities offers many opportunities.

These are but a few examples, picked more or less at random, in an attempt
to suggest the importance of wilderness to science. It is certainly obvious that
the relatively young science of ecology must have natural communities of living
things upon which to base its inquiry. As we have seen, recognition of these
natural communities represents something very important in man's under-
standing of his environment, an environment that must form the basis for his
continuing civilization.

If it is possible to develop what I have called a distinctive wild land or
wilderness literature, those who must make the plans and decisions on wilder-

PLANTS AND ANIMALS IN NATURAL COMMUNITIES

15

ness management will have better opportunities to be informed, and of course
the values of wilderness to society will be made clearer. Our National Parks and
Monuments are already profiting from research which will undoubtedly be
more important in the years ahead, not only in park protection and enjoyment,
but in environmental restoration as well.

Although our National Park System is an important factor in national
cultural maturity, it is still not complete, and the supply of areas worthy of
preservation as National Parks continues to shrink.

Erich Zimmerman, writing in World Resources and Industries, challenged
us in these words: "The tacit assumption is that homo sapiens does not willingly
spoil his own environment and that, on the contrary, cultural changes represent
improvements in the natural landscape As civilization becomes more com-
plex, however, the dangers of misdirected effort and poor judgment, and at
times even complete lack of comprehension of the best interests of man
increase. . . . The errors or lack of judgment may be due to inadequate under-
standing of ecology, to an insufficient regard for the future, or to the inability
to master the growing complexities of world economy, but above all it is due
to man's refusal to reconcile properly the conflicting interests between opposing
groups and between the present and the future. Hence, what may appear as
culture from the standpoint of short-run private property interests may not
be culture in the light of long-run social welfare."

DISCUSSION Ned Robinson, Discussion Leader

Starker Leopold (Berkeley) : I'd like to pose a question to Mr. Beard, regarding a
very interesting point he touched on earlier: the possibility of managing wilderness areas.
Specifically, I wondered, Mr. Beard, if you would comment on the Everglades in a little
more detail than you did in your main address — the regulation of water levels and the use
of fire as a management tool in the maintenance of that natural wilderness area.

Mr. Beard: As I said, concerning that particular National Park, there was considerable
debate as to whether it should be a National Park, because it had been so badly abused.
As a biological area, we felt it could be restored by natural means. The Central and Southern
Florida Flood Control District — a tremendous big thing, which was written up in Harper's
recently — is north of the Park. The natural flow of water into the Park is the ecological
kingpin of the Park, and since I left there, they have made a careful research job on the
water levels, trying to relate them to the flood control problem. As I understand it, it might
cost several millions of dollars to attempt to get the same water conditions — the natural
water conditions — into the Everglades, that existed before drainage. They are trying to do
that, but it will never, never ever, become completely natural again. There can never be the
same amount of water, flowing along the same channels in the same amounts, as there used
to be. As I said, we are trying to approximate natural conditions. You mentioned burning
in the Everglades National Park — your ears are very big — I didn't know that people out
here knew about it. There is in effect a controlled burning program. The Caribbean pine
lands were being destroyed, because there was fire climax occurring in that country long
before man. That has been proved, and so, under certain predetermined conditions, these
forests are actually being burned, in order to preserve the natural conditions. Otherwise, it
would be completely an unnatural situation. That is a very interesting thing.

16

BEARD

Ardis Walker (Kernville, California) : This matter of burning is very interesting to :
me, and I would like to ask a question — or, perhaps, incorporate a statement with a question. j
I notice, in some of the early journals, mention of the fact that the Indians themselves set !J
fires during the fall months, which would be comparable to a controlled burn. I am wonder- i
ing if we haven't gone too far in the other direction, to the dangerous extent of allowing so ?
much tinder and debris to collect in our National Forests, that we are committing slow [
suicide with some of our remaining timber stands. I

Richard Leonard (Berkeley) : I just want to remind everyone again of the very impor- i
tant point that Dan Beard made: evolution is still going on, and we shouldn't try to set a j
forest back at 1850, or 1900, or 1958, or 1959. I agree fully with Starker Leopold, and with j
Dan Beard, and others that we must determine what the lack of fire is doing to some of our j
natural landscapes. But I also think that we ought to consider whether it is necessarily bad i
to have a different set of species, or a different ecological growth and evolution, as a result
of a lack of fire. We are certainly going to have fire in many, many areas, whether we like it ,
or not. Some people have worried as to whether we would lose all of our fire-type chaparral '
of the Coast range, the Santa Lucias, and the Los Padres. Probably that will never happen,
because, with the best control we can possibly get, we are always going to have plenty of !
accidental fires — as you can see in Malibu and other areas. But I think we ought to try to '
get some long range areas, over a number of decades or centuries, without fire and see what j
the changes are that occur in that way. In other words, we've got to consider nature as an
evolutionary force. ;

Earl Bachman (U. S. Forest Service) : Inasmuch as the use of fire in the National j
Forests has been mentioned, I would like to talk about it rather briefly. The use of fire as
a tool is a very real thing in terms of land management. It can or cannot be used, as a land /
manager sees fit, in attaining his objective. But the first thing that must be decided, in terms j
of any land use, regardless of whether it is wilderness or what have you, is the objective J
itself. If, within the framework of that objective, fire can be used as a tool effectively, then !
it should be used. In terms of the National Forests, and the objective of their management, )
fire can be and is used as a tool very appropriately. For example, the Everglades country, the •
Southern forests, have been mentioned. Hundreds of thousands of acres are burned peri- i
odically in the Southern forests as a tool of management. On the West Coast, in California, j
there are hundreds of thousands of acres, in country that had once supported other than j
brush, in which fire can be used effectively as a tool for attaining the objectives of the '
management. There are many other acres, however, where brush is very critical in terms of
the objectives of management, and where it should, in the judgment of the land manager, i
be continued and preserved in the condition it is in today. In these places, fire is not regarded '
as a suitable tool. So, it is a very difficult thing to generalize. There is a place for fire, and
there are places where it should not be used, but it all ties right back to the basic objective
of management in terms of the individual area. .

F. Eraser Darling: I don't quite know where I come from at the moment — whether ■
from this country or Great Britain. I would like to add a few words on fire in Africa, where
the normal, accidental incidence of fire might be every one hundred years or every forty '
years, we scarcely know. It certainly isn't every year. But, at the present time, a very large
part of Africa is burning every year, and it is quite obvious that degradation of the habitat
is going on. Our friend in the Forest Service has just spoken of what you are trying to do
by burning and what a useful tool it is. I have been quoted this morning as being very much
against fire, but I do not at all wish to imply that it isn't a very effective part of the l
natural progression of the wilderness. But when, for example, our friend of the Forest j
Service said that we want to know exactly what we are doing by burning, he was thinking j
as a Forester of the increase in forest growth. But supposing, in a semiarid land, or one in !
which you get distinct dry and wet seasons, that the grasses there have arrived by adapta- j

i

PLANTS AND ANIMALS IN NATURAL COMMUNITIES

17

tion to the phenomenon of translocation of the carbohydrate materials. From the upper part
of the grass — the leafage — it goes down into the base of the stems and even the roots.
Well, take a beast like the elephant. He comes along in the dry season, expecting to be able
to whip his trunk around some of this grass, give it a pull up, give it a knock against his
knee to get the earth off, and then to have a good chew of the carbohydrate food reserves
left in the bottom. Then he throws the tops away. Now, what happens if you have had a
burning program, which as in Africa at the moment insists on early burning, because it is
less damaging to the flora ? He is then faced, in the dry season, with having to scratch with
his feet in order to get up these little bases of the stems, and it is very difficult for him to
get his living in that way. He is, in addition, damaging his habitat much more by this
scratching around with his feet than he would be by taking an occasional whip around and
eating it that way. You do find that to decide exactly what you are doing by fire is very
difficult, and that is why Mr. Beard is very timely in his explanation to us of the need for
understanding communities, and what actually is going on within them and the need for
understanding when we use tools to one end, what we are doing somewhere else. Thank
you.

George Marshall (The Wilderness Society) : It is indeed interesting, in a discussion of
fire, that certain new dangers seem to be facing wilderness from the well-meaning manipu-
lators who will burn part of the forests themselves but will put out the fires that burn
through natural causes, I wonder whether part of the danger in burning isn't the fact that
our National Park and wilderness acreage is much too limited. We don't have enough of
these areas to withstand the burning of considerable portions of them. Formerly, and today
as well, there is the other side to this whole fire thing — namely, the administrators' sense of
responsibility for putting out the fires and their desire to get into wilderness areas (whether
they be in National Forests, or National Parks, or where have you) with roads, and to build
these roads right up to the crest of land at the edge of these areas, so they can jump in there
with a lot of machinery to fight the fires. I think there is a problem there of calculated risk
(if you don't mind that overworked phrase) : can you continue to have wilderness and
still use the amount of equipment that might be ideally necessary to suppress fire? I think
that is an important aspect of this whole problem we have been discussing.

STANLEY A. CAIN

Ecological Islands

as Natural Laboratories

Stanley Cain is one of today's leading plant ecologists. He has
conducted research projects all over the United States (in
Indiana, Tennessee, Michigan, and elsewhere) as well as in
Brazil and in the Mediterranean Region. The results of these
studies have been published in articles, papers, and books.
Writing on "The Climax and Its Complexities," Dr. Cain inter-
preted and explained the theories of Frederick E. Clemens on
"climax" and "success" in plant ecology. He is well known for
the book Foundations of Plant Geography, and a Manual for
Vegetation Analysis. Currently, Dr. Cain is a professor at the
School of Natural Resources, University of Michigan.

The focus of this paper is interpretation — one of the most
important functions of wildlands administrators. Dr. Cain
asserts that by explaining the fascinating complexities of
wilderness to the public, such agencies as the National Park
Service can increase public appreciation and enjoyment of the
wilds and so spread the conservation spirit. The knowledge
requisite for effective interpretation must be gathered through
research programs substantial enough to expand valuably the
ecological and biological sciences themselves. It is important
that administrators set for themselves these two goals: scientific
research and public information.

I DO NOT KNOW of another conference that has addressed itself to the scientific
value of the wilderness. This is an appropriate and important theme, as so
little remains of this essential source of information. My title refers, in fact, to
the remnants of wilderness, protruding, like the mountains of a sunken conti-
nent, out of our civilized ocean.

Many of us are caught, by stating that the wilderness must be protected
because of its value for scientific research, in an apparently untenable position.
We are unable, in a given situation, to point to any significant research already
performed in the wilderness tract under question. One wins no adherents to the
side of protection by saying only that someday, someone will want to study
something in the wilderness, that it might be important to do so, and that it
would be a shameful loss were the wilderness no longer in existence. I believe
this, but it does not provide a stout verbal cudgel. However, before sa5dng more

[18]

ECOLOGICAL ISLANDS AS NATURAL LABORATORIES

19

about the wilderness as a natural ecological laboratory, I want to use my
license as an invited speaker to make two or three preliminary points.

I would not, in defending the wilderness, try to compete with the dollar
values of the market place. The columns of marching pines, that shoulder the
mountainside in sunset silhouette, do not add up like the columns of dollars
for board feet of lumber. The leaping trout of white-water streams cannot com-
pete with the price of kilowatts of hydro-power, or the tons of sugar beets, or
bales of cotton that could be grown on lands irrigated by impounded streams.

One believes in wilderness, or he doesn't. In your heart, you know its value,
or you don't. You can add up all of the expenditures of wildlands recreation:
for arms and tackle, for gasoline and meals, for cameras, Hcenses, boats, and
fancy clothing; they amount to billions of dollars; yet the economic argument
has never saved a single wilderness nor justified the saving of one. This is true
for the simple reason that the economic argument cuts both ways. If your
appraisal of the wilderness is made on an economic basis, all that has to be
shown is that the dollar value of timber, or minerals, or impounded water is
greater, and the wilderness value has been superseded. To put forward the
economic argument for appropriate kinds of wilderness recreation is to put the
wilderness on the block, for sale to the highest bidder.

I am trying to make it clear that I don't believe it wise or necessary, or that
the public requires, that the wilderness be given economic justification. I am
not saying that it is unimportant that perhaps one per cent of the gross national
product is derived from expenditures connected with wildland recreation. Of
course that is important! I am saying, rather, that the wilderness, broadly
interpreted, would be valuable and its preservation justified even if it con-
tributed nothing to the gross national product.

Another point, sometimes embarrassing to defenders of the wilderness, is
that relatively few persons ever penetrate it on foot, by packtrain, or canoe —
the vast majority see it from automobiles or from points of tourist concentra-
tion. Last summer, in Michigan, an Interim Legislative Committee, and the
Conservation Commission, held some hearings on the question of copper mining
in the Porcupine Mountains State Park. Locally, this was as hot an issue as
Echo Park. Some bitter debaters publicly stated that only "odd balls" and
"out-of-doors" writers ever went into the wilderness; anyway, you could put a
million people in this State Park wilderness and they would never see each
other. (This might be true if you hid one behind each tree.)

But this argument, like the economic one, misses the point: you can't
defend wilderness by counting noses, just as you can't justify the Corcoran Art
Gallery or the Library of Congress by comparing the number who go there
with the number who go to the Rose Bowl or the number who watch "Gun-
smoke" on Saturday nights. You see, these are incommensurables.

We are confronted with a pluralistic society with many value systems.
Rather than economic values, which have a proper and important place, or our

20

CAIN

inclination to evaluate things by size or number, I speak now of quite a different
sort of value. The sociologist Robert Angell has said: "Serenity is a vanish-
ing quality of life ... the world presses in upon us, insistent, confusing, often
tragic." If this is happening, and if, as many of us believe, a sojourn in the
wilderness has restorative powers for moral and social equanimity, then what
other reason do we need for the preservation of wilderness and for its protection?

You might say — it has been said — that this is essentially an aristocratic,
actually snobbish, approach to the wilderness. We are saying that there is a
minority of people, an elite, that can and will — physically, mentally, and
psychologically — be able to enjoy this wilderness. Well, perhaps this is an
aristocratic approach — but the snobbery that is involved is not that of family,
or position, or utility, or concept of progress; it is based on taste, on quality,
and sensitivity; it is based on reverence for nature and knowledge of it. We
would weaken such an esoteric argument by entering it into competition with
other value systems. Nevertheless, we do a disservice to it anyway, if we fail
to put it forward, stoutly and frankly.

Wilderness areas, I think, are of higher usefulness to man when left alone
than when they are utilized for goods and services that have dollar value. So
far, I have not dealt with the problem as a scientist, but more as a humanist.
But this is not just my position, nor that only of us here at the Sixth Biennial
Wilderness Conference. It is the position of a great many people who have simi-
lar tacit standards as to what "ought" to be, as far as wilderness is concerned.
There were thousands who objected to the destruction of the Porcupine Moun-
tains Wilderness for mining. There were hundreds of thousands who objected to
flooding Echo Park. And hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — would get
fighting mad if Yellowstone or Yosemite were to be commercially exploited.

Rather than producing a lengthy polemic on wilderness preservation, I want
to move on to my subject: the value of wilderness as an ecological laboratory.
I will not claim that natural scientists need outdoor laboratories where they
can work undisturbed. This is important, but it is not most important in this
context. Nor will I say that wilderness research will shatter our ignorance or
promote a revolution in scientific understanding. I do not expect another
Charles Darwin to emerge from the dripping Olympic forests, nor from the
prickly desert at Joshua Tree. I do not expect a new geologist like Dana to
come out of the Grand Canyon, nor a Margaret Mead out of Mesa Verde. My
point is this: the Wilderness should be studied to enhance enjo5mient — the
enjoyment of people who are interested in wilderness, who visit, love, and
cherish it.

Why do so many tourists drive to the National Parks and Forests — or to
any other wild land reservations? I think that the motive is appreciation of
nature: each man to his own degree and with wonder, according to his own
capacity. If this is true (and proof is impossible) then the interpretation of
nature to the public is the most important function of wilderness administrators.

ECOLOGICAL ISLANDS AS NATURAL LABORATORIES

21

The American public has adequately demonstrated that it wants the wil-
derness left alone. It appreciates the wilderness, even at a distance. A small
percentage penetrates the wild, to be sure; but there are hundreds who learn
something about it on guided nature hikes, and at information centers, and by
listening to campfire talks. There are also the unknown numbers who get some,
and often much, pleasure from magazine articles and books, from nature
lectures and Disney films. This is the tremendously large public which is recep-
tive to natural history information about the nation's wilderness areas. These
are the people who read Arizona Highways, attend Audubon lectures, and
follow the outdoor and travel pages of newspapers and magazines.

I believe that there is a vast audience for nature interpretation that is
inadequately addressed, despite the fine work already done by Park naturalists.
I think that this is true because there is no adequate program of research de-
signed to feed into the interpretation program the necessary and appropriate
facts. I am thinking especially of the National Park Service, because of its
responsibility for our most spectacular and precious remaining examples of
wilderness, and because it is only the National Park Service that has legal
responsibility for the protection of the entire environment and all that Hves in
it. Of course, roads, camps, and other facilities are necessary for public use
while the land and the people are protected, but the obligation of the Park
Service can't stop there. Housekeeping is necessary, but it still is only house-
keeping. I believe that the central function is that of interpretation. I believe
this because I believe that interest in natural features of the Parks is the princi-
pal attraction of them for the public.

I don't mean to say that the people of the United States are nature lovers
ostensibly. The British, for example, are much more frank about this than we
are. They have their Snail-watching Society and their Friends of the Trees.
But I do think that American foolishness with bears is less the result of stupidity
than of curiosity about the animals. One might ask, of course, "How curious
can you get?" The Chief Naturalist at the Smoky Mountains saw something
ahead of his pickup truck that almost made him drive off the road. A lady was
seated behind a wheel, and a bear was halfway in the front door of the car.
Papa was pushing on the bear's rump, trying to get him on the seat for a group
picture. Submerged appreciation for nature is popular in Michigan: lots of
hunting, lots of fishing. That is, our own people and people who come in (the
Tourist Council interrogates them at check points) say they are going fishing.
That is something respectable. But, you see, they are going outdoors to enjoy
nature ; that is what they are doing. Sometimes they fish a little bit. In Michi-
gan they give up pretty quickly on that! There is pretty good evidence that
many a hunter is less interested in the chase and the kill than he is likely to
admit: deep down, he is more interested in his woodlore and his knowledge of
the habits of animals, and of terrain and weather, and his sense of relatedness
with nature.

22

CAIN

So, to return to the point, I think that the National Park Service is missing
a bet. It lacks an adequate research program of its own to shore up its interpre-
tation program. And so, today, I am speaking not only about the National
Park Service, but to it as well. What I want to do is to promote a wider, deeper,
more adequate research program, particularly in biology and ecology, by the
Park Service itself. To make such an effort effective (and I tried it some years
ago without producing any effect) I needed to know the attitudes of those who
made policy for the Service. The result was that I telephoned Mr. Ronald F.
Lee, Chief of the Division of Interpretation, and found him so interested that I
flew to Washington to talk with him and his associates, Mr. Scoyen and others.
I needed to know how much interest, if any, existed in basic natural history
research. I needed to know also whether outside pressure and cooperation would
be welcomed. Happily, there is, at the Washington level of the Service, a real
interest in basic research, and a warm receptivity to suggestions, cooperation,
and even pressure from the outside. I conclude, therefore, that it is possible,
for those of us who may be interested, to be of real help to them — they would
like to do a great deal more of their own research than they have been able to do.

Now I should take some time to describe the program of the NPS, in terms
of research. Their Annual Reports provide the best summary of the scope, as
well as the limitations, of the program. Following is the statement about
research from the Annual Report for the fiscal year ending on June 30, 1957:
In the National Park Service research is one of the important means which enable it
better to meet its responsibilities. Historical research is done largely by its own historians.
In other fields it is accomplished in various ways. Service employees contribute importantly
to it, but it leans heavily also on the cooperation of other Federal agencies, and publicly and
privately supported institutions of higher learning.

During calendar 1956, 160 research projects were performed by regular and seasonal
members of the Service, collaborators and cooperating groups and individuals. Of these, 148
dealt directly with the areas administered by the National Park Service, four were in the
category of investigations of proposed areas, and eight were general research projects. Gradu-
ate students and staff members of twenty-three colleges and universities, and four private
individuals participated in these projects. Five Federal agencies, seven State agencies, and
three professional societies also performed research or assisted field personnel in research
projects.

Natural science research during the year dealt with such matters as siltation at Mam-
moth Cave National Park, the ecology of Florida Bay, in Everglades, hydrothermal
phenomena at Yellowstone, and the ecology of high mountain meadows and other fragile
environments in several National Parks. The Coastal Studies Institute of Louisiana State
University and the Office of Naval Research cooperated in detailed research on the geology,
botany, archeology, and history of Cape Hatteras National Seashore ; North Carolina State
College is doing further research there in biology. Seven major geological research projects
were in progress in Death Valley National Monument alone,

Texas A.&M. College and the Texas Fish and Game Commission are participating in
a five-year study of Big Bend National Park ecology. Biological and geological studies are
underway in Virgin Islands National Park, with the University of Kansas and Princeton
University cooperating.

Historical research included studies of the appearance and use of Independence Hall at

ECOLOGICAL ISLANDS AS NATURAL LABORATORIES

23

various periods; of details of colonial life and land ownership at Jamestown; of the loca-
tions of specific features at Fort McHenry (a necessary basis on which to prepare develop-
ment plans) and a study of the historic structures remaining at Harpers Ferry,

Archeological methods were employed at such historic places as Fort Frederica and
Fort Union National Monuments, at Jamestown, at Independence and Cumberland Gap
Historical Parks, and, on a minor scale, at a number of other areas. Important archeological
research was continued by the University of Colorado at Mesa Verde, by the University of
Southern California at Death Valley, by the University of California at Yosemite, and by
the Bishop Museum of Honolulu at the proposed City of Refuge National Historical Park.
Washington University, St. Louis, cooperated in the effort to find the original site of
Arkansas Post. Service archeologists excavated at the site of Fort Clatsop, in Oregon,

Under cooperative agreements, sixteen universities and colleges and the Smithsonian
Institution performed river-basin archeological salvage. In addition, the University of Utah,
the School of American Research, and the Museum of Northern Arizona undertook such a
salvage in the Upper Colorado Basin. The Smithsonian, working at eleven reservoir sites
with funds supplied by the Service, recorded more than 200 new archeological sites,
excavated nineteen, and processed more than 179,000 excavated specimens.

The Annual Report for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1958, adds that his-
torical research has been inaugurated at Harpers Ferry and Fort McHenry,
and that the archeological salvage program for basins about to be inundated was
extended to the Glen Canyon and Navajo Indian Reservoir areas. A program of
alpine wilderness research and a project on the biology of the United States
Virgin Islands were initiated, and a research conference in Everglades outlined
needed studies. The Division of Interpretation was given specific responsibilities
for developing the biological research program, by stepping up Service-con-
ducted investigations and encouraging cooperative research by qualified scien-
tists and established research institutions.

In effect, the program amounts to this: the National Park Service has used
its very limited funds primarily to stimulate, to catalyze, and sometimes, in a
small way, to assist research. They have used their good offices to encourage
cooperation, and in some cases work, by the Geological Survey, the Fish and
Wildlife Service, and the Forest Service. Many universities, many private
investigators, some organizations cooperate with the National Park Service.
But, when you add up what they describe as their research program, and sub-
tract from that the work they do in historical research, archeological salvage,
and a few odds and ends, you find, in the biological field, that what they are
doing is investigating the conditions which surround a critical problem. Their
research is — and has been of necessity — directed towards "trouble shooting,"
as Mr. Beard admitted earlier this morning.

Now this does not mean that during years past there was not some very
significant biological research accomplished by Park Service biologists. I would
mention Adolph Murie's Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone (1940) and
The Wolves of Mount McKinley (1944). These were bulletins in the Service's
Fauna Series, which has been inactive now for more than a decade. The study
by Coleman Newman, forester in the Branch of Park, Forest and Wildlife

24

CAIN

Management, of the Roosevelt Elk of Olympic National Park, is an example
of a recent Service-staff investigation that deals with basic biology. As an out-
standing example of cooperative effort between the National Park Service and
several other agencies, I would mention Carl B. Ko ford's wildlife monograph,
Prairie Dogs, Whitejaces, and Blue Grama (1958). The Service facilitated
Koford's study by appointing him a Collaborator, giving him access to Service
studies and maps, and by active assistance of Park personnel. Service personnel
in the Division of Interpretation have, in many cases, contributed funda-
mental knowledge of the fauna and flora of the Parks where they have been
stationed, as in the case of Arthur Stupka, Chief Naturalist of the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park. They and their Park Superintendents have aided
materially the research of many independent scientists. They have often been
graduate students gathering data for their Masters' and Doctors' dissertations.
A recent example is that of Grant W. Sharpe, whose Ph.D. thesis was A Taxo-
nomical-Ecological Study of the Vegetation by Habitats in Eight Forest Types
of the Olympic Rain Forest, Olympic National Park, Washington.

Such a review of research activities which are carried out or facilitated by
the National Park Service is, of course, not complete ; but I do not believe that
it misrepresents the situation. I must conclude that the National Park Service
does not have a program of basic research. These things are fine as far as they
go ; but they fail to approach at all closely a program adequate to the needs of
the Service itself.

The first difficulty, as I see it, is that the research activities of the Service
are directed toward immediately pressing problems. I will illustrate this point
by reference to the program of Ecological Research in the National Park Service
on Alpine and other Wilderness Environments. The following statement was
used in justifying the appropriation of funds (described as modest) for the
initiation of the ecological studies:

Increased visitor use of alpine and other wilderness areas in the Parks presents special prob-
lems of a related nature. The alpine meadows, which if once destroyed are irreplaceable,
are particularly vulnerable to disturbances caused by man, and the unique wilderness values
in the 'back country' of these Parks generally require special attention. Studies on the
ecology and the fundamental requirements for protecting these features are urgently needed.

Research contracts were executed: with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Bi-
ology of the University of Colorado, for studies at Rocky Mountain National
Park; with the Jackson Hole Biological Research Station of the University of
Wyoming, for studies at Grand Teton National Park; and with Dr. Carl Shar-
smith of San Jose State College, for studies at Sequoia-Kings Canyon National
Park. In addition to Dr. Sharsmith, project supervisors and investigators in-
clude Doctors John W. Marr, L. Floyd Clarke, Charles C. Laing, and Beatrice
Willard, all accomplished field ecologists. The purpose of this program, which
may be extended to Yosemite, Mount Rainier, Olympic, and Glacier National
Parks, is:

ECOLOGICAL ISLANDS AS NATURAL LABORATORIES

25

To determine the visitor impact on Park vegetation by studying sections of the Park which
have been receiving extensive visitor use and by comparing these sections with portions of
the same type which have received a minimum of visitor use. This would permit investiga-
tions of alpine meadows and other wilderness areas to determine the ecological status of
fragile plant communities and to ascertain the basic requirements for their protection and
perpetuation.

This is ecological research, but it is directed at "trouble shooting." It is pro-
grammed, and it will yield scientific information about alpine communities, but
it is directed toward the needs of management, not toward the needs of the
interpretation program. It is directed toward a specific problem which has to be
corrected now if great damage is not to be done.

I have no quarrel with such research. It is necessary. It follows an estab-
lished Park policy of management, first enunciated in 1939 by Ira N. Gabriel-
son, and approved by the Director of the National Park Service and the Secre-
tary of the Interior: "No management measure or other interference with
biotic relationships shall be undertaken prior to a properly conducted investi-
gation." I now turn to a suggestion of what, in my opinion, would be the
ingredients of a National Park Service program of ecological research. I think
you will forgive me for limiting myself to biology, in the ecological and geo-
graphic senses, rather than talking about what might be needed in terms of
geology, or history, or archeology, or any other field.

It would be presumptuous of me to state in detail or with finality what a
basic ecological research program should include. I will do no more than discuss
briefly some of the matters which could be given attention and for which
research would yield information directly usable in the interpretation programs
of the Parks. That such investigations might have general interest, constitute
contributions to basic knowledge, or to the advancement of scientific under-
standing or theory, would be no more than a fortunate by-product from the
point of view I am stressing.

I believe that every National Park should have a continuing program in
faunistics and floristics with suitable museum and herbarium vouchers for the
species claimed to be present in the area. Many species are critical of identifica-
tion, and the very existence of these vouchers will, in any case, permit scientific
comparisons and possible revisions at some time in the future. Such knowledge
would be built up over time and would run the complete systematic gamut,
including, for example, small mammals as well as large, mollusks as well as
fish, mosses and lichens as well as trees and conspicuous flowers. Such knowl-
edge is basic to everything else.

Now the thousands of species of plants and animals do not occur in an area
by chance agglomeration ; Dan Beard talked very well about this this morning.
Every Park should program a basic description of the composition and struc-
ture of its vegetation and of the animal life closely associated with the vege-
tation. This would be a modern technological way of organizing information

26

CAIN

according to the existing natural plant and animal communities. It would start
with the major cover types and include the lesser, but interesting and impor-
tant, communities of special habitats, such as hot springs and serpentine rock
outcrops. How are the component species organized in layers and other synu-
siae? What are the dominants? What are the indicator species of high fidelity
to a given community and ecological situation? Having gained information on
the morphology of communities, the Service should then direct investigation
to their ecology. What is their pattern with respect to altitude, slope and
exposure, to microclimate, and to the conditions of the substratum? What are
the important actions, reactions, and coactions in each community? The result
of all this might be a map of some scale or a series of representative maps at
different scales. Texts would complement these and would have the quality
of consummated work, so that the project would stand up in any international
circle as being a justified and magnificent piece of description.

People are interested in biogeography. There is excitement in knowing that
a certain plant or animal is endemic and lives naturally nowhere else in the
world or that, in a given area, it is disjunct, perhaps hundreds of miles from its
main range. (Most species will be found intraneous and well within their full
range, but many species are extraneous, at the place under consideration, and
characteristically range northward or southward, eastward or westward, toward
the coast or toward the mountains.) These irregular occurrences bring up mat-
ters of historical biography: where are the ancestors of the endemics and where
are their relatives now? How did the disjuncts get to where we now find them?
But begin with the basics: what is an endemic? what is a disjunct? how did
the disjunction develop? how can you have relics both of cold and warm climates
in the same place at the same time? Then, what are the dynamics of movement
in time: migration, evolution, extinction? In most parts there are some fossils,
and this brings you to an interpretation of fossils in relation to the life that
exists — not now, in the place you are talking about, but perhaps it existed, or
may exist today, somewhere else in the world.

Life histories should be studied, not only of species causing management
problems but of those which are interesting for any reason. How is the life
cycle carried out? Through what stages and with what relations to the environ-
ment? What are the diurnal and annual aspects of the life activity?

These matters, so briefly suggested, are basic. They ask the question: what
is there? They ask what the conspicuous community arrangements are, and they
go to the point of especially interesting life cycles and biogeographic features.
Every interpretation program should be backed up by an abundance of informa-
tion about such natural history matters; such studies may not be on the frontier
of scientific advancement, but they are eminently respectable and very practical
in the National Park situation.

I will speak now of biological studies that can be made in any wild land area
to produce information with public appeal that goes beyond the names for

ECOLOGICAL ISLANDS AS NATURAL LABORATORIES

27

species and the knowledge of communities. In each case the examples should be
local; that is, they should deal with plants and animals in the area where the
interpretation effort is being made.

What about rare or vanishing species? Why are they in danger of extinc-
tion? What actions are necessary to protect them and to give them a chance to
recover reasonable numbers? Why worry about extinction anyway?

What are the regional prey-predator relations, food chains, and pyramids of
numbers? And, related to these in some ways, what is the nature of territories,
ranges, and home ranges? Why must some wilderness areas be as large as they
are? What is the concept of carrying capacity of land for given species? And
what is the relationship to population size and density and to habitat deteriora-
tion? What are population cycles? What causes them? How do they relate to
prey-predator relations and how to producer and consumer relations? What are
epidemics and infestations? What are some of the problems in a National Park
in disease and pest control and in the control of other populations when the
balance of nature has been upset by reduction of predators or when influential
changes occur outside the Park and beyond the Service's management?

What is the nature of community dynamics? What is succession? What
is the nature of equilibrium in nature? What is a climax and what are the
climaxes of a given region?

Why do species of a genus have the patterns of occurrence that they do?
Why are the most closely related species of a genus allopatric in their areas
and only the less closely related ones sympatric? What is the nature of some of
the barriers to hybridization? What are clines? What is the subspecies as inter-
preted by mammalogists and ornithologists?

Now the National Park Service places great confidence in its interpretation
program. It spends considerable amounts of money in developing visitor centers
and museums and in employing people to do the interpretation on the trail, in
the museums, in campfire talks and in writing. What I suggest is this: this
central function of the NPS — its interpretation program — is dependent for its
information on the happy chance that some other Federal agency, or some State
agency, or som^e independent institution, or some broken-down professor, hap-
pens to have done something in the National Parks in the way of basic research.
This, in my opinion, is no way to run a railroad. Many people will patiently
sit looking at a few dozen slides of spring wildflowers, or nesting birds, or scen-
ery, and have a good time — if the photography is good. But wouldn't they have
a better time, an exciting time, if the intellectual content of the presentation
were not static and at the level of ''what is it?" or "where is it?" If the Park
had a research program to provide a foundation for its interpretation program,
then it could say: "Emphasize ideas, not things"; its program would be a vital
one, and the customers would profit from their travel expenses.

Here, as a postscript, is an excerpt from a telegram I received. I sent the
NPS in Washington a copy of my speech, and this is their response:

28

CAIN

GREATLY APPRECIATE OPPORTUNITY TO REVIEW YOUR PROPOSED SPEECH AT WILDERNESS CON-
FERENCE. WE LIKE IT AND WELCOME CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM AND SUGGESTIONS. WE WANT TO
DEVELOP BASIC ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH PROGRAM ALONG LINES YOU DESCRIBE AND WILL DO SO AS
RESOURCES PERMIT.

There is more, but that is enough. The NPS needs a burr under its tail. They
have money, but they have not been spending it properly. This, of course, is a
question of policy; here, we have an issue.

DISCUSSION Ned Robinson, Discussion Leader

Kenneth McLeod (Consulting Forester) : As an efficiency expert, I am interested in
the problem of mental fatigue — a prevalent malady, now that machines have made it
easier on us physically. Perhaps the wilderness is important as an antidote to this mental
fatigue, a problem of increasing intensity in America and the source of many new problems.
And in this context, who is studying the most important animal of all — genus homo sapiens?

Dr. Cain: About a year and a half ago, I made the suggestion that the State Department
of Conservation in Michigan, which investigates fish, wildlife, forests, minerals, oil, and
everything else but its customers, should have a small branch consisting of persons who
were competent in statistics and in the methods of social science research, such as survey tech-
niques and design of questionnaires. This seemed to be an attractive and somewhat new idea,
but the answer was this: what the Department of Conservation now says is already suspect,
and if we make comments on the people's motivations in using our Parks, we will be even
worse off. They said we should employ people from the University, or someplace else, to
make these studies for us ; then they wiU be acceptable to our critics. You see, this again is a
weak and rather untenable position ; I think that every organization should study its con-
sumers as much as its products.

Edgar Wayburn (Sierra Club Director) : Both of today's speakers have addressed
themselves to problems which apparently pertain to the National Park Service alone. I
would submit that these are not problems just for the National Park Service; these are
problems of the natural terrain of America which need to be seen in a wider aspect. We
have other jurisdictions which have control of the natural landscapes and which must
classify, for one purpose or another, all of the lands remaining in the natural state. I
wonder if the things that have been said don't point to one basic need at this particular time:
the need not to classify for use so much as to classify for the present existing circumstance.
One can always use these areas whenever they are needed; one can't un-use them when
they are no longer needed. It was pointed out earlier that we have the capacity to reconvert
to wilderness status some of the changed areas. Conversely, we cannot reconvert other areas,
and the span of time necessary for this conversion and the amount of time, energy, and
money which is required, is bound to be prohibitive. It seems to me that one of the purposes
of conservation is to save perhaps a little more than we need to at the present time —
perhaps for limited spans of time, just to be sure that we are not wasting too much.

Dorothy Varian (Cupertino, California) : The interpretative program of the NPS
must be a real problem to the Park Naturalists because of the hordes of people. My husband
once told Lon Garrison that the way to solve the traffic problem in a National Park was
to set up a small naturalist booth or information center at the entrance way to the Park,
and then all the people who collect windshield decals and folders about the Parks could just
collect them and not go into the Park. This would save a lot of trouble.

On the other hand, those who do get into the Park, I think, depend upon this interpre-
tative program for the tiny capsules of knowledge that they take back with them. The

ECOLOGICAL ISLANDS AS NATURAL LABORATORIES

29

ability to make these interpretative programs dramatic, something that you can grasp, that
you can photograph and take home and talk about, is the means by which information about
our National Parks really spreads through the large mass of the touring American families.
And I feel that it is just this tiny bit of natural history that the people take back that gives
us the foundation with their children for an understanding of the wilderness in the future.
The majority of parents who take their children may be seeing it for the first time — their
youngsters may go back later and be interested in what they see. The one thing that has
bothered me about the interpretative programs of the Parks we have visited has been their
similarity. You will look at one interpretative program and you will very likely see its simi-
larity to another, so that you don't realize or appreciate the geological or ecological differ-
ences that may exist in those Parks. Dramatizing, I think, is very important in making our
young people understand and remember a little bit more.

Charlotte E. Mauk (Berkeley) : I think one of the things we have to keep in mind in
an interpretative program is what we want to achieve beyond having a person understand
something of what he sees. We want to give him, through his understanding of it, a feeling
that this is something that belongs to him: he has a personal stake in it; he has made it a
part of himself by understanding it. Therefore, he is ready to protect it against the things
that might keep his children from going back to visit the wilderness.

Paul Zinke (School of Forestry, University of California) : I would like to describe a
program which the California Division of Beaches and Parks has instituted in the way of
research on natural areas. They have the problem of maintaining many large old growth
redwood groves in the North Coast Range in what people feel would be a natural state.
Well, these trees do not persist as long as one would think, and when one goes into these
groves he finds that many are dying, falling, and decaying in different ways. But the Park
Foresters who are entrusted with the objective of land management there, of maintaining
the forest in a natural condition, really have a problem on their hands. First they have had
to define just what a natural condition is, and then they have had to find out what the
impact of people is on this natural condition, and thirdly they have to find out how to
institute management in this area to soften this impact on the so-called natural condition.
Well, they found they did not have the basic ecological answers to much of this or enough
knowledge about these forests, and so they have brought about a research program through
contract with the Wild Land Research Center of the University of California, which is in-
volved in investigating the ecology of these redwood stands. This is one way in which this
type of research can be done by agencies administering natural areas: through contract
research with other groups or by members of their own staff doing the basic research that is
necessary for the land managers they hire.

Marietta Voce (UCLA) : Since this is a matter of concern not only to the Park Service
but also to all the inhabitants of the United States, what are we doing in our public school
systems, where we can begin early to train children, to tell them about these things ? What
are we doing in the way of suitable propaganda?

Mrs. Peters (San Francisco Town Council) : I have just travelled 4,000 miles in two
months, studying this proposition of controlling the school children and what to do to keep
them interested. The most interesting place I found was Fort Worth, Texas, where before
a child enters the museum, he first has training in how to behave. There was no mess in that
beautiful museum ; there were no disturbances. I went there various times and hundreds of
children went through. It was the most worthwhile program I found in the 4,000 miles.
Many people here get the bulletins from this museum and know of the splendid work they
are doing.

Pearl Chase (California Conservation Council) : This is to the photographers and
lecturers. I find that we spend an hour and a half's interpretive program — after we have
paid sometimes a good many dollars for hiring these people to spread the news of the

30

CAIN

wilderness in the beautiful parks of our country — and not one word of conservation. It is all
about the scenes, not about the reasons for saving them. And if we could just give those
men a little more of that spark, it would reach thousands within this country. That applies
to the Audubon tour men, as well as to others I've heard.

Ned Robinson: I think you are right: many of us have a tendency to say: "this is a
beautiful area," without mentioning the possibility that it might not be here at some future
date. We can look to ourselves to improve our own lectures and thoughts.

Mrs. Neil Haig (Seattle, Washington) : This program for the children is one I have been
very much interested in myself, and I have found through investigation that school children
know very little about conservation as such. For instance, the Virginia School Department
made a survey of the children, and only fifty per cent knew anything at all about conserva-
tion. And just before I left I received a letter from the Dean of Education at Helensburg
State College, who says the best way to reach all of the children is to give every teacher
before she goes out into the schools a complete knowledge of conservation in all of its aspects.
They cover many fields of conservation — water pollution, trees, soils, erosion, etc.; but they
do not say anything about wilderness or National Parks in their conservation programs. I
have looked at many of the books, and there is nothing about those two phases of conser-
vation. They are the things I think we should make an effort to put forward in all the school
systems of the country.

Dr. Frank Pitelka: First, just two brief comments underscoring two points which Pro-
fessor Cain made. Reference has been made to redwood groves and the problems needing
research information. I would like to tell you about an occasion three years ago at a meet-
ing in the East, when I was at a lunch table with Professor John T. Curtis, Plant Ecologist at
the University of Wisconsin. He teased me: he said, what is the matter with you people out
West? Believe it or not, there is nothing in the botanical literature of western North
America which will give you a rundown on the structure and composition of a redwood
forest at the level needed by a teaching plant ecologist. Surely this is one need which can be
filled by the sorts of activities that we should like to see the National Park Service participate
in more. That is one point.

Professor Cain also mentioned the interest in biogeography, and I would like to tell
you about an occasion in England last year. I spent the year at Oxford University and had
occasion to work in the field with Charles Elton, who is very much interested in the same
sorts of problem from the British standpoint. He took me to one spot, northwest of Oxford,
which is a nature area set aside after some debate apparently because of the difference that
one little bit of factual information made. This bit of factual information was the occurrence
on this area of a flatworm, a small, short, black flatworm, difficult to see, that occurred in
one particular spring and nowhere else in the region. It was a species of flatworm which
otherwise only occurs far to the north, and it is, in other words, a relic which hangs on at
this particular spot because of the pecuHar condition in this spring. And Mr. Elton was
amused at the effectiveness of this little speck of circumstance, which seemed to swing the
authorities with regard to the question of buying the place. There were other justifications,
but he felt that this little bit of biogeographic information and the uniqueness of this spot
because it had this flatworm did make a very big difference. And I do believe that I agree
with Professor Cain that information of this sort can be exploited very effectively.

Finally, Professor Cain referred to the British interest in natural history and he felt, if
I understood his remarks correctly, that although the Americans don't behave as the British
do with respect to the study of birds, etc., their motivation is basically the same. But we
ought to examine, instructively and constructively, differences between us — between the
reactions of the British and the Americans with regard to subjects of natural history. I
would say, that although the motivation may be the same, the performance obviously is not.
And if you think that the people going out into the field in America do so for the same

ECOLOGICAL ISLANDS AS NATURAL LABORATORIES

31

reasons they do in England, one fact surely remains: at this time in England, nature con-
servancy and the scheme of natural areas they have set up have reached the stage of research
effort which is precisely the thing we are setting as an ideal for ourselves here. And I would
welcome comment from Professor Cain and perhaps from others who know the British
system on this particular point.

Ned Robinson: Dr. Cain said he was speaking as a human being when he was talking
about the arguments for conservation. He was also speaking as a person well schooled in
logic. As an individual who makes a living trying to argue at times, I find myself shuddering
as I hear some of my conservationist friends trying to answer arguments of those who say:
"what is the economic value of wilderness?" or: "how many people went down through
Glen Canyon?" And rather than say: "this isn't the argument; the argument is something
to one side," they fall into this trap beautifully. I would like to reinforce this comment:
when you are talking to people who are not too happy about wilderness, and they bring up
"have you stopped beating your wife?" arguments, meet them with our own arguments.
The best defense is a good offense.

LUNA B. LEOPOLD

Ecological Systems
and the Water Resource

Luna Leopold combines the mathematical and naturalistic
approaches to science. He was trained as an engineer at the
University of Wisconsin, became a geology Ph.D. at Harvard
University, and studied meteorology at UCLA. With this
preparation, he created a new school of river morphologists.
A fundamental paper on hydrology, "Hydraulic Geometry of
Stream Channels and Some Physiographic Implications"
(1953), earned him last years Kirk-Bryan Medal, awarded
by the Geological Society of America. He is now Chief of the
Water Resources Division, United States Geological Survey.

Nearly all environments are not only altered from their
original states but are also constantly undergoing still further
change. The impact of man upon nature is great: "There are
very few areas, except in the special hydrological environment
of some mountainous terrain, where one could follow ground-
water changes due to natural causes alone." Until man and
nature are statistically separated, the actual influence of stand-
ard water resource "improvements" is incalculable, and the
development of new and more efficient techniques impossible.
Dr. Leopold outlines here a program of bench mark hydrologic
stations as standard bases for datum points. He contends that
the proposed system would be invaluable for distinguishing
natural changes in the water resource from those induced by
man.

IN ANCIENT Sparta there were two principal classes of people: there were the
so-called citizens and the helots. The citizen was trained primarily to be a
warrior. The helot, a serf, was the tiller of the land, but he could also be called
to military duty. The history of Herodotus makes it amply clear that war was
the biggest business of the times. Because the Spartans were always marching
off to war, they found the land-bound position of their city, located as it is in a
small central basin nearly surrounded by mountains, somewhat of a disad-
vantage. When they were under attack, of course, this situation was a favorable
one inasmuch as a sea-borne enemy had to march inland to come to grips with
the Lacedaemonians. But the relatively small size of the independent states
meant that the Spartans had no direct access through their own lands to the sea.

There is evidence that the Spartans reached an agreement with surrounding
states concerning a free corridor. There would be maintained by all the Grecian

[32]

ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AND THE WATER RESOURCE

33

I

states of the Peloponnesus an access route, stretching essentially from Sparta '

to Corinth, and through which a marching army could have access to a seaport.

As a secondary benefit this "no-man's land," which in our Western lingo might

be called a stock driveway, allowed merchants and their caravans to move freely i

between the flourishing trading port of Corinth and the inland cities to the south

and west. I

Apparently, one condition of the agreement between the states with regard
to the use of this access zone was that there should be no permanent agriculture
or grazing in the driveway. As a result, through several millenia B.C., during
which there was high population density in the Aegean area, one strip of land
was exempted from the pressures of grazing, lumbering, and agriculture which
characterized most of the rest of the landscape. And even today, this driveway i
maintains a forest cover. In contrast, nearby mountainsides with even larger '
annual rainfalls support hardly a tree.

It is not entirely apparent (and certainly I cannot answer the question)
why subsequent centuries did not see this area denuded. But even with the
scanty details known to me, it seems clear that the peculiar history of this one
area potentially offers us a greater insight into some aspects of the forest and
land conditions in classical times than all the extant written records. The several
references to sources of timber and cutting of forests which are contained in the
vivid chronicle of Herodotus are valuable, but they lack species identification
for the most part. Though rich in human understanding and psychological in- i
sight, his history strongly resembles, in my opinion, the travel sagas of the
Spanish Conquistadores of our own Southwest who had no real eye for ^
"country." Even a careful reading of these early travelers — Coronado, Garces,
and Espejo — gives us no picture of the nature of the country, its vegetation,
the conditions of its rivers.

To describe a biota there is no substitute for a sample. But it is logical to
ask, what might one want to know which would require the preservation of a
sample? Whether such a question is asked at all is a reflection of the stage of
intellectual maturity of a civilization. We take it for granted that there is some j
social gain in the erection and maintenance of a museum of fine arts, a museum
of natural history, or even a historical museum. Sooner or later we ought to
be mature enough to extend this concept to another kind of museum, one which
you might call the museum of land types, consisting of samples as uninfluenced
as possible by man.

Now I am in complete agreement with Dr. Cain's remark, that the way to
measure the value of a piece of wilderness is not by the number of people who
use it. He went on to say that the best justification may not necessarily be the '
research that we are going to do on it. But there is evident in these days of
disappearing wilderness a constantly expanding social awareness of the impor- «
tance of science for maintaining and developing further society itself. We ;
seem to sense the intellectual as well as the economic advantages of exploring i

!

34

LEOPOLD

the moon and outer space, but we still have corners of our own backyard which
we are going to clean up and make neat as a pin without reahzing that much
might be learned there if only we left them alone. Some natural processes simply
stop operating when we make it nice and neat, and it may be that those proc-
esses are worth understanding. It is to these undisturbed corners of our own
backyard that I wish to call attention.

It is often stated that water tables are falling, that floods are increasing, that
the soil resource is deteriorating, and that much of our irreplaceable topsoil is
slipping seaward. As scientists, it behooves us to take some interest in these
questions and, as scientists, to obtain the truest and most objective answers
possible. But whether one approaches these problems as a citizen or as a scien-
tist, he immediately faces the fact that answers to these questions must be stated
relative to some standard base or datum. What are you going to compare
against? Is the standard or datum itself a fluctuating one? Can we possibly
agree on a reference point? If each person who tackles such a question uses a
different reference for comparison, it is quite obvious that all the answers will
be different.

Let us take the question of falling water tables. We must begin with a mutual
understanding of certain hydrologic principles. During rainless periods, the flow
of water in any small stream is the water which is contributed from ground-
water storage. Streamflow in periods between storms represents the overflow
of a full ground-water reservoir. When you fill the bathroom basin preparatory
to the morning shave, water flows out the drain holes only after the basin has
been filled. You know that. Such outflow ceases when the water level in the
basin drops to the lip of the overflow orifice. So also in a headwater tributary;
the stream will stop flowing when the water table drops to the elevation of the
nearby stream bed.

When an irrigator drills a shallow well near a stream, pumping may reverse
the direction of flow, which normally proceeds from the valley deposits to the
stream channel. When pumping draws the water level in the valley fill to an
elevation below the surface of the nearby stream, water from the stream tends
to flow into the valley deposits. The shallow well actually may be yielding
water which a very short time ago was flowing merrily down the river. In many
semi-desert areas, on the other hand, the normal flow is ordinarily from the
river laterally into the valley fill.

Under certain circumstances, one can increase the amount of ground water
available by pumping the water out of the ground-water reservoir. Such pump-
ing induces infiltration of streamflow into ground-water storage. Pumping of
ground water results in a local lowering of the water table, because some local
lowering is necessary to provide a water-table gradient toward the well. Thus,
any use of ground water necessarily implies at least local lowering of the water
table. In this sense then, the lowering of the water table is a natural and expected
— in fact, a necessary — result of pumping. The question is not whether there is

ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AND THE WATER RESOURCE

35

going to be a lowering of the water table, but rather how much lowering of the
water table is permissible, how much is deleterious, and in what way?

The answer to this is neither simple nor unequivocal. In the first place, the
natural daily, seasonal, and secular changes in precipitation cause responsive
changes in natural recharge. These changes in the rate of replenishment to
ground-water storage do not show up immediately, because first, water in the
ground usually moves slowly, and second, because available volumes of storage
in an aquifer may be very large.

Ground-water levels are constantly changing owing to natural conditions.
Because of the slow and often damped response, changes due to natural causes
usually cannot be computed with any accuracy. This being so, it is often nearly
impossible to segregate clearly the changes in water level due to natural causes
from those due to man's activities. Among man's activities, you well understand,
we must include not only pumping, but the effects of land use, changes in eco-
logic associations, changes in soil properties in recharge areas, and other kinds
of effects.

There are very few areas, except in the special hydrologic environment of
some mountainous terrain, where one could follow ground-water changes due
to natural causes alone. Nearly all environments are not only altered from their
original state, but are constantly in the state of still further change. For this
reason, only in areas of severe ground-water depletion, primarily in some por-
tions of the southwestern and southern states, is it absolutely clear that ground-
water withdrawal is greatly exceeding the rate of recharge. In those places,
continuation of withdrawals at present rates obviously will, in time, lead to
complete exhaustion of the supply or to pump lifts which are in excess of the
limit of economic feasibility.

It is said by some that a large number of small reservoirs in the headwaters
of a drainage basin and the maintenance of forests or grassy cover would
increase ground-water recharge and would thus help to solve the problem of
overdraft. The evidence for this view, interestingly enough, is mostly inferential.
The ability of a good vegetative cover to maintain soil tilth, and thus infil-
tration capacity, is very well known. But infiltration into the soil mantle is not
synonymous with infiltration to an aquifer. At each level, soil capacity for
moisture, that is field capacity, must be satisfied before water can move to
greater depth. Nearly all vegetation draws its moisture from this source. Since,
in the hydrologic cycle, an average of three-fourths of precipitated water is
returned to the atmosphere by transpiration and evaporation, it can be seen
that the take of the first claimant, evapo-transpiration, is large. Thus it should
not be assumed a priori that there will be in any individual case a net gain of
water to surface streams, or to aquifer storage, by building surface-storage
reservoirs. There is only one study adequate in depth and extent to give us
qualitative data on such a situation in actual practice: it shows that small res-
ervoirs or stock ponds in the Cheyenne Basin, Wyoming (average: one stock

36

LEOPOLD

pond per square mile) caused a net decrease of streamflow by about thirty
per cent.

With regard to a heavy cover of vegetation's increasing ground-water re-
charge, we may remind ourselves of the well-known fact that selective cutting
of forests increases demonstrably water yield under at least some circumstances.
The increase of water yield comes from decreasing transpiration by cutting
some of the trees.

To summarize, the ecological system — man, land, pump, plow, trees, and
climate — experiences much larger variations in ground-water levels than existed
in the simpler system of land, trees, and cHmate. How much larger and how
important are these variations it is difficult to assess until the situation is
flagrantly out of balance. By that time, the trend is nearly irreversible and
usually continues until the limit of economic feasibility is reached.

Now one connotation of the word ''civiHzed" is awareness of the conse-
quences of one's actions. A civilized nation could, and should in my opinion,
afford the maintenance of certain control areas for the study of natural varia-
tions in physical phenomena, such as ground-water conditions. But the lack of
a datum increases greatly the difficulty of making a thorough diagnosis of
trends and prospects of ground-water conditions in a given area. The lack of
such a datum greatly increases the difficulty of appraising the volumes of
water available, and the rates of recharge, and of understanding the implica-
tion of changes of water table ; further, it makes very difficult the prognosis of
future status of an individual aquifer. These difficulties, I repeat, partly account
for the dearth of adequate appraisals of the water situation in major aquifers
in the country. There are not many aquifers where a complete quantitative
appraisal is available to us, and one of the reasons is that these differences
between natural and man-made fluctuations are so difficult to separate.

Let us take another, and perhaps simpler, example. We ask: are floods in-
creasing owing to man's activities? As usual, it is necessary to begin with a
mutual understanding of some of the hydrologic principles involved. A flood
is a river discharge sufficiently large that it cannot be contained within the
channel so that the water flows overbank. It is a characteristic feature of all
natural river channels that they are constructed by the river just large enough
to contain relatively small amounts of water in a relatively frequent flow. The
bank-full stage of a natural river channel occurs, on the average, about once a
year, regardless of the size of the river. Flows larger than this must naturally
spread over the flood plains (the broad flat areas that adjoin the river channels
in many areas). Thus, with reference just to the characteristics of the rivers
themselves, overbank flow may be normally expected, on the average, as often
as once in two years; much more often, as a matter of fact, than most people
know.

Overbank flows, or floods, cause damage because man builds structures,
grows crops, or otherwise uses flood plain that the river needs at times of great

ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AND THE WATER RESOURCE

37

flow. With the increase in population and industrialization, the fertile and level
flood-plain lands become more intensively used, and thus there is a tendency to
increase the amount of damageable property potentially within the reach of
floods. This is one of the principal reasons for the progressive increase in actual
flood damage in the United States, up to the passage of the so-called Flood
Control Act of 1936. Since the passage of flood-control legislation, about three
and one half billion dollars have been expended on physical flood-control works.
As a result, a large amount of damage has been prevented, damage which would
have occurred in the absence of those flood-control works. Yet, since 1936, the
actual flood damage experienced annually in the United States has not de-
creased, presumably owing to a rate of further encroachment on river flood
plains which exceeds the building of control works.

But again, it is very difficult to determine accurately how much natural, or
strictly climatic, vicissitude accounts for the flood experience on any given
river. Conversely, the hydrologist cannot evaluate the extent to which flood
occurrence, in contrast with flood damage, has been altered by the various direct
and indirect influences of man on the environment.

In water yield, that is total river flow, separating the effects of natural from
man-induced changes ought to be easier, because the seasonal and daily fluc-
tuations can be eliminated by expressing water yield as total flow on, say, a
yearly basis. By so expressing water yield, you remove the largest fluctuations.
Yet even these data are difficult to interpret. Many gauging stations in the
Upper Missouri River Basin, for example, show what appears to be a rather
consistent trend toward lower values of total runoff in the past two or three
decades. Yet some individual stations in the same area do not show the trend,
and over the United States as a whole, there is no distinctive and consistent
trend in the records.

Now since we know that long-term temperature records, glacier recession,
and certain oceanographic and meteorologic elements indicate a general warm-
ing, at least in the northern hemisphere, we might expect an accompanying
trend toward aridity and consequent decreasing runoff from these natural
causes. But, because there is no adequate control which shows such trends
uncomplicated by man's activities, clear-cut conclusions cannot actually be
reached. There is reason to suspect, now, that even our long records of pre-
cipitation and temperature have been affected by influences of man on the
environment.

When the total period of record, of streamflow and other hydrologic ele-
ments, becomes much longer — let us say twice as long as the presently available
sixty-odd years — statistical variance will be better defined. But by that time
man's effects and his pressures on the environment will be even more extensive
and pronounced. It may well never be hydrologically or statistically possible

\ to demonstrate what part of the experienced variations in hydrologic condi-

\^ tions is natural and what part is caused by man.

38

LEOPOLD

Is it important that we know? Well, there is certainly much confusion, in
several fields of activity, resulting from the fact that such questions cannot be
clearly answered. For example, graziers maintain that livestock has little to do
with the widespread gullying of Western valleys, while many others maintain
that grazing is the principal cause.

Because no unused, or nearly unused, area exists which is in all principal
respects similar to the region under discussion, the factors must be analyzed
by roundabout means. Even now, after years of study by many qualified spe-
cialists, there is still much we desire to know.

It is clearly shown by geologists that alluvial valleys were channeled by
gullies several previous times, in late Pleistocene and geologically recent times,
before there could have been any important effect by man. These gullies
eroded the floors of alluvial valleys in response, it is believed, to changes in
rainfall-runoff conditions associated with chmatic variations, but the magnitude
of climatic change required to cause what was observed is essentially unknown.

It seems equally clear that the epicycle of erosion which began in the south-
western states in the nineteenth century must have resulted from a combina-
tion of climatic and man-made effects, such as grazing. The relative importance
of each is still quite unclear. Partly for this reason, it is not possible to forecast
with any certainty what will be the future of the arroyos which we now see in
the valleys of the West. My own studies of this question lead me to believe that
the gullies in Western valleys will not aggrade by deposition in the next several
generations but will gradually tend to stabilize with rounded banks, which will
eventually be covered with vegetation. I for one would be intensely interested
in seeing some area typifying the alluvial valley-gully problem protected
indefinitely from further use, by man or by grazing animals, and in observing
what will happen from this point on in the erosion-sedimentation history. It
would be known, of course, that such an area had already been exposed to
much in the way of man-made changes, but it would be protected indefinitely
from further use.

For long-term observation of the effect of climatic changes on runoff, the
United States Geological Survey is anxious to establish and maintain what we
would call "bench mark" gauging stations, measuring streamflow from areas
which are as free as possible from future man-induced changes. Of the 7,000
gauging stations now maintained in the United States, less than a handful
seem to fit the requirement. Even for those, there is no guarantee that the
drainage basins will remain free of man's influence indefinitely.

The vast national programs of hydrologic measurement are motivated by
the same things that alter the landscape: water storage, flood control, river
regulation, and things like that. But virtually none of these programs is devoted
to finding out what changes in the natural regimen these works are going to
effect. Much goes into an evaluation of a benefit-cost ratio, but no effort goes
into an evaluation of man as an agent of ecologic, and even of geologic, change.

ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AND THE WATER RESOURCE

39

The most powerful tools of statistical inference cannot do what a bench mark
station can do — unravel man from nature in the records.

Many branches of science would benefit from the study of representative
areas maintained, as nearly as possible, in their original condition. The examples
I have given would not actually be set up for the purpose of study; they would
simply be set up for the purpose of comparison. Detailed research on those
areas need not necessarily be done to answer some of the questions posed by
these examples — but much research could be done on such areas. Not only the
hydrologist and botanist but many other specialists might find knowledge there
of great practical and intellectual interest. The Belgians, interestingly enough,
have already recognized this need, and the administrative direction of the great
National Parks in Africa is specifically oriented with this in mind. One of the
fathers of the Belgian Park System in Africa, M. Van Straten, told me that in
one of these untouched areas scientists found a spot where the bacillus causing
tetanus does not occur. Tetanus is an organism so ubiquitous that to discover a
place where it does not exist is indeed a rarity and good luck. Study of its
natural enemies there might eventually provide a hint as to how the disease
might be controlled. But here I am thinking in intellectual rather than economic
terms.

In the field of hydrology, many natural processes can be studied in very
small areas. Nevertheless, even the preservation of small basins typical of some
of the important ecologic and lithologic types could be of significant value for
hydrologic research purposes.

Science is shooting for the moon. Personally, I would be content with much
less. If we have learned enough to reach the moon, one would hope that we had
learned enough to apply some of this great scientific energy to a few small areas
in our own backyard. But we undoubtedly will reach the moon, and start to
alter its hydrologic environment before we have set aside some representative
land museums for hydrologic study here.

The Spartans left us a little sample through inadvertence. Though that
sample leaves much to be desired, it is still better than nothing. Presumably, we
should not have to rely on inadvertence to leave something similar in America,
and it is not yet too late to begin.

DISCUSSION Richard M. Leonard, Discussion Leader

Leonard: I think you can all see that we have had a fascinating account of the real
need for further reference points, bench marks, or data that you can relate the changing
world back to. If we don't get reference points we are unable to really understand some
of these long-range problems that are involved in water — and without water, as we all
know, the human race and most other forms of life would disappear.

Paul Zinke (School of Forestry, University of California) : I would like to ask Dr.
Leopold if the U.S.G.S. currently has a program of maintaining bench mark stations evalu-
ating watershed yield from wilderness areas, or if they have any plans for such a program.

40

LEOPOLD

Leopold: Thanks for asking that question, because I did not make myself clear. We
would like to start out by picking stations now in existence which we think might satisfy
this requirement. We, like most other scientific agencies, are pressed by: "How are you
going to spend your money?" We are certainly going to install a few new ones in the next
few years. I would not say that they necessarily would be in or adjacent to wilderness areas,
but presumably some of them will be maintained by simply naming the ones that are now
running. There will be some new ones, but there will not be very many — not because of
money, but because it is hard to find the kind of area you want to measure, one whose
hydrologic environment really represents what you wish to use as a long-term bench mark
or datum. The point is, you see, that once you choose one you have made a definite commit-
ment to the future, so that it is an administrative and technical problem of considerable
significance that once you so designate one you are going to be stuck with it, and you had
better make your choice well, so that someone two generations hence would have to agree
with you that you had made a good choice.

Leonard: That is a very important point — the continuity of studies relating to the
natural climatic conditions. I think one of the great tragedies is the abandonment of the
Soda Springs snow depth recording station, here in California, after seventy-eight years —
the longest recorded history in North America — in March of last year. I don't know
whether it has been revived again or not, but there is a record of seventy-eight years built
up that was at least temporarily abandoned.

Zinke: I would like to address one more question to Dr. Leopold. In this regard, Tenaya
Creek has been used as a check watershed by the Division of Watershed Management of the
U.S. Forest Service because there was a good record of the past. Recently, the U.S.G.S.
curtailed the taking of records on this creek. Is there any reason for this that you may have
in mind or know of personally ?

Leopold: No, not in regard to any individual station. I would rather not comment
because I would not necessarily know the exact circumstances. I would like to say, however,
that any hydrologic network, to give you the largest amount of information per dollar
expended, should consist of a series of base stations quite different from bench marks, but
relatively long-term stations which are going to be used for correlation with short records
on a variety of other streams. In such a way, you would have what might be called roving
or satellite stations to be run only long enough to establish a statistical correlation with the
longer-range stations. I would like to add, too, a third category of the so-called bench mark
stations, those to which you have an indefinite commitment in the future.

Mrs. Neil Haig (Seattle, Washington) : What value has the miniature dam on the
farm to the water table in the area ?

Leopold: That is a very good question and very difficult to answer; we don't know.
Many people, because they would like to have something they can come to grips with, say:
"Well, this is a good thing." It may be a good thing and it may not be a good thing
at all. It is not clear that in general the small upstream dam will help the local water
table, because it turns out that you are first exposing an area to evaporation. Secondly,
the seepage and the sustained runoff that comes through the discharge pipe, whether
gated or ungated, is going to maintain a better vegetation immediately below the dam,
and so you have increased your evapo -transpiration losses. Then you wonder — even
within the small area of the farm itself — did they gain or did they lose water? You may
build a dam for stock purposes, or for swimming, or for recreation and be perfectly justified
from that standpoint. But let us not say that it is necessarily good for everything, because
for every gain you get you are likely to be sustaining some losses. This is a problem which
in many cases we actually can't solve.

Leonard: You see that this is an extremely complex problem and points up the need
for more and more study and data.

ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AND THE WATER RESOURCE

41

William Yeomans (California Public Outdoor Recreation Plan Committee) : I would
be very interested if Dr. Leopold could point out any instances of natural environment parks
where there is observed any effect from overgrazing of elk or deer — the natural fauna —
which is not necessarily the product of man's entrance into the picture.

Leopold: That again is a very good question. Let me try to answer it this way. On small
experimental watersheds one can show clearly the effect of differing land uses by comparing
an unused control with a watershed which is altered. This use could be for grazing, lumber-
ing, or different tillage methods. But if you have a sample of let's say 1/lOOth of an acre,
or three acres, or even ten acres where this could be clearly demonstrated, how do you
relate that to something of ten square miles or 150 square miles or 1,000 square miles? You
immediately bump into the strictly hydrologic problem that you cannot apply unadjusted the
results from a small watershed to a large one, because for many hydrologic reasons —
channel storage, soil moisture, soil differences, vegetative differences, and many other things
— it becomes complicated. There is a tendency for people to think: "We have proven it on
the Uttle plot, and therefore it must be true on the large watershed." This is the problem:
it is not necessarily true, and so again one of the things that we are missing in hydrologic
investigation is samples of large enough size with such control. We have many areas that
are used extensively, but there is no control against them. After you get to 500 square
miles, who has a 500-square-mile watershed that he would like to dedicate to no use at all,
so that we could compare it with the used watershed adjacent to it ? We are bumping again
into the same problem: no bench mark when you get into the large areas which you have
not previously investigated.

Norman Livermore, Jr. (Pacific Lumber Company, San Francisco) : I believe you said
that selective cutting of forests increases water yield sometimes. I wonder if you can elabo-
rate on that a bit. How selective was the logging, and how much did the stream flow increase ?

Leopold: The hterature was quite clear on that: it was done in several places. I think
the most well known are the forest station at Coweeta and the Fraser experimental area in
Colorado. There is investigation in the Wasatch, and I think the Forest Service publications
on this matter are pretty self-explanatory. The idea, as you can imagine, is that by selective
cutting, usually in the form of thinning, the total of rapid evaporation was decreased which
allowed a certain proportion of that to increase the stream flow from the area.

Zack Stewart (Spencer, New York) : I wonder if you would like to comment on the
reapportionment of vast volumes of water as proposed by the California Water Plan. What
effect will that have on California's ecology and perhaps the hydrologic cycle as operated
here?

Leopold: Well, that really is a question. As a matter of fact, it is a question that would
be very difficult to comment on briefly, partly because it is a large question and partly
because I am certainly not an expert on local CaUfornia conditions. I think, however, that
in trying to make an evaluation of any set of project proposals, many of the hydrologic
problems that I was just speaking of will face any state or any area.

Leonard: That is always one of the complicating problems which point up the need
for a control area. As you move large bodies of water from say the west side of the Rockies
over to the east side (as many projects plan, and as some are actually accomphshing in the
Colorado Big Thompson, etc.) then you do change a lot of situations.

Hans Jenny (Department of Soils, University of California) : I was especially inter-
ested in a comment you made to the point that we have records or evidence that we have a
man-induced climatic change. I assume you mean a cUmatic change on a regional basis.
Would you be kind enough to elaborate on this point ?

Leopold: Yes, I am glad you gave me an opportunity to say something about this. It
consists of two parts. We are not at all sure whether the change in carbon dioxide content
of the atmosphere, presumably man-induced, has actually been at least partially responsible

42

LEOPOLD

for the observed trends in the past several decades. The other thing I was referring to is of a
somewhat different nature. We know now from investigations primarily in Scandinavia
and some other places, that important changes in temperature occur in the vicinity of cities
where the investigations have been made. Inasmuch as the longest temperature records, for
example Hartford's in the United States, are temperature records associated with cities,
then you have the possibility that the temperature records are biased in that they represent
a local temperature change. There are no measures of the temperature changes in the whole
hemisphere.

Jenny: Thank you, but these aspects are important too in many areas. For example,
the Indians claim that the deserts are on the march, and in fact it is true that the neighbor-
ing desert is moving in the direction of New Delhi so many miles a year. The Indian people
think the regional climate has changed as a result of deforestation. Ecologists, however, claim
that land use has changed. The vegetation was cut down, and so the sand bodies started
marching by the wind. Now what sort of evidence could we have to really investigate for
sure that the climate regionally has changed aside from city observation stations?

Leopold: I imagine that the best evidence we have is stratigraphic. I am thinking
of post-Pleistocene changes, such as the epicycle of erosion that occurred during the
drought of 1200 to 1400 A.D. in the Southwest. These are the only kind of records really
available to us. One of the things that we are doing in the Geological Survey's glaciological
program is making the glaciological program a hydrologic tool for trying to discover not
merely the mechanics of the glacier itself, but what kinds of climatic elements are affecting
the glacier. So there should be, presumably there will be, developed a better indication than
we now have of how to use different natural phenomena of glaciers, stratigraphic history,
together with pollen-dendrochronology to help extend even the relatively long records that
exist in places like Europe.

But now speaking about the situation in India, you indicated that the Indians feel
deforestation has actually been one of the causes of change in chmate which they believe
occurred. But the Indians also have the feeling, for example, that small basins and reforesta-
tions in the foothills of the Himalayas would be a solution to their problem. I think actually
that there has not been as much work done in India on geological and stratigraphic evidence
as has been done here. I suspect that they are going to come essentially to the same con-
clusion that we have: you are deaUng with a combination in each local situation, of climatic
and man-made effects, and we so far have not been able to completely unravel it.

Howard Zahniser (Executive Secretary of The Wilderness Society, Washington, D.C.) :
There is now pending in Washington a bill that would declare it to be the policy of Con-
gress to secure the dedication of an adequate system of areas of wilderness to serve the
recreational, scenic, scientific, educational, conservation, and historical needs of the people.
The areas that would be affected by that legislation are in National Parks, National Forest
areas of wilderness. Refuges, and some others. Would you comment on the opportunity of
serving these scientific needs you have spoken of so graphically in areas that would be
established for this multiplicity of purposes ? If you would call this a multiple-use wilder-
ness bill, is it feasible to anticipate that the areas so established for all these purposes could
also serve the scientific needs you were talking about ?

Leopold: Yes, that is one of the reasons I am here. But I am more or less of the same
opinion that Dr. Cain expressed this morning: we haven't got a very good point in arguing
that research is going on in such areas, when the fact is that a very small amount of research
is now proceeding. With regard to the future, this is not a very strong argument, but now
you are asking me from the standpoint of science. Certainly some of the kinds of area I
am speaking of could and should be in the areas that would be protected by the Wilderness
Bill, but I would like to add to that, that with regard to the kinds of hydrologic problems
that I was speaking of the need is even greater. So I am suggesting that over and above

ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AND THE WATER RESOURCE

43

the need for a mountain wilderness there is still a need which I think was mentioned, if
only by implication, by both speakers this morning; it is more than high mountain areas
that we must consider if we are talking about the whole use of science and lands.

Zahniser: May I ask two other questions related to this? First, do you think the
recreational uses we are familiar with in these areas would necessarily interfere with the
establishment of these bench mark stations and other installations for scientific purposes?

Leopold: Yes, that is a good point and one well worth giving consideration to. For
many hydrologic purposes it would be my off-hand opinion that such recreational use (I am
speaking now of trail use, not organized camping areas) would not at all hurt the hydro-
logic environment, but obviously there are some other kinds of studies where even that kind
of use would be somewhat detrimental. But I do think that for hydrologic research, one
could make the statement that we could get along quite well with the modest amount of
use that one would be subjected to in areas that might be chosen. That is, the complete
elimination of use would not be necessary for many hydrologic purposes.

Zahniser: And finally, that being the case, you are a little more optimistic than I
thought you would be about the compatibility between the two. It seems to me that they
have been discussed as compatible, but would it not be a good function for the Council
proposed in the legislation (when it is established) to give some distinctive attention to the
use of these areas for scientific purposes, and shouldn't there start at this conference some
definite thinking along those lines? That is almost a rhetorical question as it sounds, but I
don't mean it that way. We have been talking for a decade at these conferences of these
values, but as it was implied this morning, the actual instigation of some thoughtful program
for seeing that these areas are so used is a challenge we haven't met. It seems to me you have
stimulated it very much.

Leopold: The kinds of problem we have in hydrology, though, were very neatly brought
out in the questions this morning. Are these lands to be managed? Are you going to try to
use controlled burning, for example? What do we mean by management? What should be
the objective? How bad is the risk? If you had a dedicated area that you were using for
bench mark stations, how bad would be the risk of complete fire protection? How difficult
would be the influence of management let's say by controlled fire to try to maintain the
environment over a long period of time ? Those, I believe, are the questions we will be faced
with. How is the land to be managed? Would you be satisfied with land that was com-
pletely protected? That in a way is a form of management.

Leonard: That about sums up our problem. We do have to make that long-range basic
choice: what are we after? Are we after a status quo? Are we after an evolving evolution?
These are the problems to think about.

David Brower (by footnote to a brief report on Dr. Leopold's paper in the Sierra
Club Bulletin and by subsequent letter inviting further discussion) : The discussion of
your paper spoke of increasing water yield through selective cutting. Water yield would
increase still more if all the trees were cut and all other water-transpiring vegetation were
stripped of. The yield of silt and sediment would also increase — astronomically . Data on
the long-range ejects of watershed manipulation are too scant to permit adequate appraisal
of the residts. Unmanipulated watersheds — wilderness — will be essential for purposes of
comparison when such appraisal is sought.

On a recent flight to the Northwest I saw, as I have often seen, the difference between
logged and untouched watersheds, as marked by the color of the streams below them.
I have been watching the bulletins on the various watershed-management projects fairly
regularly, but nowhere have I seen enough evidence of concern for the total land mechanism.
You yourself could make a great contribution on this, considering your position with the

44

LEOPOLD

Geological Survey and your detailed knowledge of your father's philosophy as seen in
Sand County Almanac and Round River.

How can a complementary survey of forest practices be initiated on the general topic,
Where does the silt come from? It seems to me that such a survey needs to do this:

From the air. — After a good storm, find out which forest-area streams are clear, which
muddy, and where the mud comes from. Photograph successive junctions, using color
photography where appropriate. Make obliques and verticals in stereo strips of the water-
shed of mud-carrying streams and clear streams.

On the ground. — Photograph the same areas, with close-ups. Compare virgin forest
with disrupted forest. Study the biota and the soils in their roles as protectors of watershed
and water quality.

Subsequently. — Put together a type map and study the correlations. Find out who
owns the damaged watershed, whether it was logged, and under what supervision. Develop
a yardstick for measuring the cumulative loss over a century, in economic and social terms,
to demonstrate the wwsustained yield if that is what is occurring. Relate the benefit-cost
analysis to the gradient of the slopes disrupted. Analyze the curriculum of the personnel
who made the decisions that produced the muddy waters.

All of us realize that there must be logging, and if it can be done so as to produce a
better water yield, fine. If, however, timber harvesters are subconsciously looking for a
way to rationalize the building of timber-access roads into steep terrain they shouldn't
enter, then that is another matter.

Some further apprehensions, stated briefly, are these:

The Coweeta experiments. — In North Carolina the Forest Service found they could
increase water yield by cutting down everything and letting it lie there. Regeneration was
also cut and left. Transpiration was reduced and more water flowed out of the watershed.
But so far as I can see, they did not measure what was happening to the centuries-old
accumulation of soil, and the vital reservoir it has become through natural processes, when
they interrupt the growing process on top that makes that reservoir. For example, if a
profile of the top twelve inches shows organic material dating back a century or more,
then it seems important that there should be experiments under way to determine what
becomes of this old organic wealth — and the "dark lakes" beneath it — if you maim it and
speed the water downstream. The experiment should be over a long period.

The San Dimas experiments. — In California the Forest Service found they could get
more water if they grew grass instead of trees on the watershed. The grass roots go down
three feet, the tree roots eleven. But what happens if you permanently interrupt, in that
lower eight-foot zone, the simultaneous anchoring and fracturing accomplished by tree
roots? Are we interfering with an important process of soil building or are we opening
the way for sheet erosion that will strip the land down to rock, producing the kind of
scenes we shrink from in the Middle East? Do we not need deeper research planned to
evaluate this hazard?

For controversies that have not erupted yet we need what you helped produce in
the flood-control controversy — a good technical review by skilled people independent of
the governmental agencies affected. Perhaps it is not fair to look to foresters for answers
about the soil mechanism when they are under such great pressure to increase the allowable
annual cut of the timber resource.

Dr. Leopold (replying to some of these questions by letter of April 12, 1960) :

Owing to the fact that vegetation transpires water, total water yield under certain
circumstances can be increased by eliminating part of the vegetation. It could be argued
that a large part of the water transpired from a vegetative area would appear as stream
flow if all of the vegetation were eliminated. Under those circumstances the runoff could
be expected to be extremely high in sediment relative to the vegetated conditions, and the
elimination of vegetation from the watershed would subject the basin to serious erosion
by gullies and rills.

Clear cutting of a vegetated watershed for the purpose of increasing water yield to
the maximum will, in practice, not necessarily yield the largest amount of water, regardless
of the quality of the water so produced. The elimination of a large proportion of the
native vegetative cover will increase the flashiness of runoff. Both the soil and channel

ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AND THE WATER RESOURCE

45

under those circumstances would tend to dry out in rainless periods, so that when runoff
occurred relatively large amounts of water would be lost as infiltration of the channel
and to the stream banks, from which it would be evaporated or transpired. Channel losses
then may be expected to materially increase in a flashy stream as compared with one
having sustained flow.

For this reason, by no means all of the water which is saved from transpiration by
the native vegetation will actually be available downstream for capture and beneficial use.
Furthermore, channels will tend to be unstable under these conditions and subject to
aggradation or degradation, increasing the difficulty of managing both sediment and water.

As a consequence it is completely unrealistic to imagine that the maximum water yield
will be achieved by the elimination of all or most of the native vegetation on a watershed.
The esthetic losses would of course be manifold.

An alternative solution would be offered by selective cutting in a forested area for
the purpose of increasing stream flow. Experiments have shown that tree thinning under
certain circumstances will result in modest increases of water yield.

It can be expected, however, that erosion losses from the basin, and therefore sedi-
ment movement in the channels, will probably increase faster by far than will the water
yield. It has been shown by many types of experiments and field observations that a given
change in vegetative density results in a geometric increase in sediment movement relative
to the effect on total water yield.

In actual practice, therefore, the costs or losses due to the increased sediment yield
and the degradation of the esthetic value of a watershed may overbalance the benefits due
to increases in water yield beyond even modest amounts of selective cutting of the vegeta-
tive cover.

In semiarid areas there is the possibihty of increasing water yield somewhat by a
change of vegetative type from, let us say, woodland to grass. The conditions under which
this change would actually result in an increase of water yield downstream are at present
problematical. Presumably such an approach would be more effective in deep soils than
in shallow, because in deep soils tree vegetation can be presumed to be depleting a thicker
soil zone of moisture by transpiration than would a grass cover.

On the other hand, it has been shown that many grasses can develop deep and highly
ramified root systems where the soil materials are thick. Furthermore, many different
vegetative types have experienced a serious encroachment of brush in the past half century,
presumably as a result of the decrease of fires, the increase of grazing, and possibly also
as a result of climatic variations. This experience suggests that it may be quite impossible
to maintain a grass association indefinitely on an area which under natural conditions
has been supporting woodland.

The ecological succession in other words may preclude a permanent conversion from
woodland to grass under certain circumstances. Certainly at the present time too little is
known about these general relations to justify large-scale operations aimed at increasing
water yield by changes in vegetation. So varied are the possible adverse effects, and so
limited the demonstrations of water-yield increases resulting from substitution of vegeta-
tion, that it would be extremely hazardous to begin such operations on a large scale until
the limited research now under way, and much broader research programs, have been
prosecuted and brought to completion.

Sincerely yours,

Luna B. Leopold

ROBERT RAUSCH

The Outlook for
Conservation in Alaska

Robert Rausch received the degree of Doctor of Veterinary
Medicine from Ohio State University, and his Ph.D. in para-
sitology from the University of Wisconsin. He has also studied
at Michigan State University. He is now associated with the
Arctic Health Research Center, United States Department of
Health, Education and Welfare, and is chief of the Zoonotic
Disease Section.

The destruction of irreplaceable Alaskan wilderness by spe-
cial-interest groups is a fearsome possibility. Time remains
for preservation of the astonishingly small amount of truly
wild land remaining, but time passes rapidly. National Monu-
ments are most vulnerable to exploitation, while their poten-
tial value as recreational areas is indicated by vastly increasing
utilization of Mount McKinley National Park. Dr. Rausch
proposes the establishment of state parks. He wisely adds that
public education as to the value of conserving natural re-
sources, while needed everywhere, would be especially appro-
priate now in Alaska. His paper provides a most informative
survey of existing wilderness preserves and those currently
proposed.

'ONSERVATiON in the broadest sense includes not only wise economic use of

resources but also the perpetuation of natural areas with all their com-
ponents, areas which may be utilized repeatedly by man and still left unde-
pleted. The utilization of natural areas for scientific purposes is one of the most
fruitful, as well as the least harmful, of the kinds of repeated use. In the past,
Alaska has provided opportunities for basic research in many disciplines, largely
because most of its area was in a primitive condition.

It is difficult to predict the effect of statehood on Alaskan resources, but it
appears that it can do httle more than accelerate the changes already in prog-
ress. Alaska is subject to the same pressures being felt in other parts of the
world, not the least of which is a rapidly growing population. There is an ever-
increasing demand for unrestricted development of the natural resources in
order to promote further population growth and an industrial economy.

Although the development of Alaska is progressing at a comparatively slow
rate, it is already evident that exploitation of some of the natural resources has
been excessive and without much regard for the concept of sustained high yield.

[46]

THE OUTLOOK FOR CONSERVATION IN ALASKA

47

One of the best examples of this is the seriously depleted salmon runs; another
is the rapid disappearance, during the last decade, of undisturbed wilderness
areas. I should like to review briefly some of the factors, such as fires, agricul-
ture, development of mineral resources, and others which are bringing about
these changes.

One of the most important causes for major vegetational alterations is fire,
and to some extent it must be regarded as a natural phenomenon although in
recent years many fires have been accidentally caused by man. The occurrence
of fires and their ecological effects in Alaska have been reviewed by H. J. Lutz,
in a publication of the U.S. Forest Service. Annual losses are very great; detailed
statistics have been published by Lutz, and it suffices to say that the average
area burned annually during a IS -year period beginning in 1940 was about one
and a tenth million acres. Much damage can be expected in the future, since
outbreaks are not often detected soon enough to permit rapid control.

Although there is great popular demand for settlement of new lands in
Alaska, the agricultural potential appears to be much more restricted than was
formerly believed. Hugh Johnson, agricultural economist with the U. S. Depart-
ment of Agriculture, in a critical survey published in the 1958 Yearbook of
Agriculture, states that a maximum of two to three million acres is physically
suitable for cultivation, and as much as eight million additional acres could be
used as pasture or rangeland. The maximum total area comprises about 17,200
square miles, or three per cent of the area of the State. In 1957, there were
20,000 acres of cropland in Alaska, while idle cropland and acres on which
crops had failed made up an additional 2,000 acres.

With a sixty per cent increase since 1949, the present population of Alaska
is about 21 1,000. According to the most conservative predictions made thus far,
a population increase of about one hundred per cent is to be expected during
the next decade. Irrespective of the validity of the estimate, most of the increase
will undoubtedly be seen in the subarctic regions of southern and south-central
Alaska, where conditions are most favorable for agricultural and industrial
expansion.

New homesteads are continually being estabHshed, but relatively few have
yet become productive. Johnson, in 1955, made an investigation of agricultural
settlement on the Kenai Peninsula. Homesteading had been going on there for
a period of forty years, but he found that fifty-nine per cent of all entered or
patented land on the Peninsula was unoccupied and abandoned as of July,
1955. Another thirty-one per cent was used only as places of residence for
persons not engaged in farming. Only one and three-teijths per cent of the occu-
pied land was cropland, and nearly half of this had been cleared since 1950.
Only fourteen per cent of all the income reported by homesteaders in 1955 came
from the sales of farm products. In the Homer community alone, sixty per cent
of all entries from 1915 to 1945 had been canceled, relinquished, or closed by
decision. The situation is similar in the Tanana and Matanuska Valleys.

48

RAUSCH

The high cost of clearing land, the long period of time before realization
of any income, and insufficient demand for the most easily produced crops all
contribute to the failure of homesteads. Few people today are willing to live as
subsistence farmers, but it appears that little more can be expected during the
first years of homesteading. In a paper presented at the Ninth Alaskan Science
Conference, in 1958, Johnson pointed out that Alaska is not destined to be a
major agricultural region, and that sufficient good land is either patented or
available to meet the potential demand for farm products for years to come.

Fishing is still the most important industry in Alaska. The total value of
fisheries products was about seventy-eight million dollars in 1954, and seventy
million in 1955. Efforts are being made toward broader utilization of the
fisheries' resources, and the outlook is generally good. Crabs, shrimps and other
groups are all increasing in importance.

There has been a constant decline in the numbers of salmon, and the future
of the salmon fishery depends upon successful rehabiUtation of this resource.
The highly efficient salmon traps have finally been abolished, according to the
latest available information ; this action ostensibly has great conservation value,
but this probably won't be the case in practice, for the present attitude is to
substitute other methods for the traps so that the total take, unless somehow
regulated, will be about the same. There is much popular resistance in Alaska
to the establishment of control measures designed to restore the salmon in order
to ensure a sustained high yield. This is perhaps understandable, since in some
areas the economic losses would be nearly disastrous, at least temporarily. Just
before I left, the word came that the Bristol Bay area has just been closed to
commercial fishing, but it is not at all certain that will not be changed.

Lately, there has been less tendency to blame predators for the results of
overfishing, although I think it is still the practice to try to control seals in
southeast Alaska by means of dynamite, and it has been learned that many
"Alaskan" salmon are being taken by Japanese fishermen on the high seas. Few
people but the biologists seem willing to admit that there are at present too
many fishermen and too few fish.

Alaska's potential for hydroelectric power is considerable, and it is generally
believed that industry would be attracted if cheap power were available. How-
ever, the resultant dams for hydroelectric purposes would also destroy some
valuable salmon runs. As an example of this conflict of values, a dam at Wood
Canyon, on the Copper River, would produce more than a million kilowatts.
At the same time, the Copper River is one of the important salmon streams.
During the 10-year period from 1940 to 1949, the annual value of the salmon
pack from the combined Copper River and Bering River drainages averaged
more than one and a third million dollars. Elsewhere, such as in the Kenai Lake
area, a series of small dams is now being built. Each of these causes a negligible
loss, but the total attrition of all these dams to the fish resources is quite
important. However, each dam has been justified by the evaluation of its

THE OUTLOOK FOR CONSERVATION IN ALASKA

49

separate effect, which produces an erroneous concept of the effects of all, and
this in the end will be the significant factor.

Construction of hydroelectric facilities in Alaska in the near future seems
unlikely. The Harvey Aluminum Company, which had been granted a permit
to investigate the power potential of the Copper River, has relinquished all
claims. Considerable publicity has been given the possibility of establishing a
hydroelectric development at Rampart, on the Yukon River, but positive action
seems far in the future. Since other sources of power may be practicable within
a few years, it is hoped that hydroelectric projects in Alaska will not be neces-
sary. Large quantities of coal are now available locally but are not being used
to any great extent.

Lumbering has already superseded mining as the second most important
resource industry, although operations have been reduced by adverse market
conditions. The utilization of forest resources is limited mainly to the coastal
regions of southern and southeastern Alaska, where the Forest Service has
awarded contracts for pulp and plywood operation. Only a small portion of the
allotted timber is being used at the present time. When the resources of south-
eastern Alaska have been fully committed, it is possible that the forests of
interior Alaska may be drawn upon as a source of pulp. At the present time,
several small sawmills in the interior are producing lumber for local consump-
tion, but large-scale operations are not expected in the foreseeable future.

With the exception of oil explorations, mining activity is decreasing, mainly
because of unfavorable markets. Some of the larger oil companies have been
investing heavily in exploration and prospecting programs in several areas. The
greatest activity has taken place on the Kenai Peninsula, where three wells have
been completed and two are in progress. One of these wells produced a maximum
of 800 barrels per day. After having drilled a well 14,000 feet deep at a cost
of about $500 per foot, one of the companies has discontinued operations on
the upper Alaskan Peninsula. So far, oil operations do not seem to conflict seri-
ously with conservation interests; the companies have been cooperative and
have impounded any oil that might contaminate streams or lakes.

In January, Senator Bartlett introduced a bill providing for the abolish-
ment of Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4 (which lies across the Arctic Slope in
northern Alaska) and granting jurisdiction over the area to the Secretary of
the Interior, with the plan that resources here could be privately developed.
The bill was referred to the Committee on Armed Services. In this case, opening
this reserve could lead to serious damage to an important natural area.

Defense activities have been one of the most important factors responsible
for changes in many areas that formerly were relatively undisturbed. The con-
struction of the Distant Early Warning system along the Arctic Coast has left
no distance greater than 50 miles without some type of installation. Sites for
other purposes have been established throughout the State, usually in hitherto
remote and practically undisturbed areas. These activities have led also to the

so

RAUSCH

building of numerous landing fields which allow access to the surrounding
country.

As the population of Alaska has increased, the demands for outdoor
recreation have increased correspondingly. Many people who emigrate to Alaska
are motivated in part by an interest in hunting and fishing; others develop
these interests in the absence of opportunities for recreation of other types. A
high proportion of military personnel participate in outdoor activities.

As a result of the population growth, areas readily accessible by roads from
the major population centers are becoming inadequate both in quantity and
quality to meet the demands for outdoor recreation. On the Kenai Peninsula,
for example, lakes and streams once noted for excellent fishing have been
overfished, with the result that there is much competition for space in the best
remaining areas. Lakes that were seldom visited five years ago are now sur-
rounded by cabins and their surfaces swarm with motorboats. During the big-
game season, areas such as the Matanuska Valley and the country along the
Denali Highway are so crowded as to make hunting unpleasant as well as
somewhat unsafe.

The popular demand for better recreational opportunities has been one of
the main causes for greatly increased use of small airplanes. There are at the
present time about 1400 privately owned airplanes in Alaska, and as of Decem-
ber 31, 1957, there were 2,417 active pilots. As of April 1, 1958, there were 161
public airports. It is estimated that ten per cent of all float-equipped planes
registered in the United States are based at Lake Hood, just outside Anchor-
age. Many of the small airplanes operate commercially to transport hunters
and fishermen to otherwise inaccessible areas. Such services were formerly
provided mainly by a few professional guides with long experience and good
reputation, but others are participating more and more in these activities.
Many of the latter operate only during the big-game season, when the demand
for such transportation is greatest.

The small airplane is probably the greatest single factor contributing to the
changes taking place in the Alaskan wilderness. No area containing a lake or
gravel bar large enough to permit a landing is overlooked, and no region is too
distant. Some more hardy individuals even hike in to regions where game is
abundant in order to clear a place large enough to permit the landing of a small
plane. The increased use of small airplanes has led to an active competition
among the guides and certainly has greatly intensified the hunting pressure on
those species of animals least able to withstand it.

Roads are still few in Alaska, but the Seward, Taylor, and Denali High-
ways have, within the last years, opened great areas of previously uninter-
rupted wilderness. Among projects for the future, roads from Anchorage to
McGrath and from Fairbanks to Nome have been given priority. It is generally
true that people do not walk far from the highways, even during the hunting
seasons. However, various kinds of tracked vehicles from roadside headquarters

South Sandy Cove, Mount Fairweather in distance, Glacier Bay National Monument.

Rock veins, Glacier Bay National Monument.

Forest, Glacier Bay National Monument.

Ancient stump, Interglacial Forest, Glacier Bay National Monument.

NORTHEAST ARCTIC

The Last Great Wilderness

The setting aside of a part of the original Arctic
wilderness would be one additional long and sig-
nificant step toward further understanding and
use of the Northland^ s biological wealth; it
would preserve one of the most valuable conti-
nental wildlife breeding areas — one of the great
scenic and historic regions of North America

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LOWELL SUMNER

Only on the Firth River do special climatic conditions permit forest
trees to extend to the Arctic coast. . . . The remote and little known
Brooks Range resembles the Rocky Mountains in majesty and scale.

The adjacent lake wilderness of Old Crow is considered one of the
great game regions of the continent. . . . The broad Firth River Val-
ley, here shown at the junction of Mancha Creek (foreground) is
a highway for game today, and probably once served for man.

The largest caribou bands remaining in Alaska inhabit the vast
Arctic plains. . . . Like the buffalo of 100 years ago, the great caribou
bands have made ''roads" through the country.

Rivers on the south side of the Brooks Range afford typical moose
habitat of the Yukon drainage and here the animals have not been
disturbed. . . . Over hundreds of square miles the open slopes are
interlaced with game trails.

This native village of Old Crow, like the historic trading post of
Fort Yukon, constitutes one of the gateways to the Arctic wilderness
area. ... A typical Arctic river winding to the polar sea.

Cave area on the Firth. The geographic location, gentle topography,
and unusually mild climatic conditions lead to the belief that the
archeological potentialities of the area are exceptionally rich and
significant. . . . Within this region are hundreds of lakes where
moose, bears, wolverines, waterfowl, and fish live undisturbed.

Magnificent Katmai

FROM THE AIR By LOWELL SUMNER

(Above) Cape Kubugakli, southern boundary corner of the monument. The
lagoons are havens for waterfowl and huge king crabs. Game trails are every-
where in evidence . . . (Below) Low Katmai Valley, and the broad bay, are
still clogged with ash and pumice from the eruption. The forest has not yet
reappeared. This view looks out over Shelikof Strait to distant Kodiak Island.

Dakavak Bay was protected from the eruptions by ridges. In its friendly valley
we saw the first of many Alaska brown bears. ... At Geographic Harbor's upper
end there is a fresh-water lake. The enclosing walls are so steep it is almost
incredible that they could be densely clothed with alders.

These low, glaciated promontories guard the entrance to Geographic Harbor,
but there are channels deep enough for large vessels to enter. . . . Around Kukak
Bay, spires of rock are favorite sites for the great stick nests of American
eagles. Accustomed to supremacy in the air, they watched us, Hke this one
whose white head is visible in the nest, but did not fly away.

In Kukak Bay three Alaska brown bears floundered and slid in their haste to
cHmb the steep, loose gravel. We counted ten from the air in about an hour.
.... Missak Bay's long beaches, grassy slopes and dense alder jungles have
remained undisturbed, in the possession of the bears.

Inside the narrow entrance to Geographic Harbor is a spacious anchorage. Not
snow but pale yellow ash from the eruption makes this variegated pattern with
the dark green vegetation. . . . Each of Kukak Bay's three valleys is a separate,
unexplored wilderness. Running almost at sea level, the left one almost con-
nects with Kinak Bay through a low divide.

Back of Hallo Bay this wilderness of cottonwood groves, ponds, swamps, jun-
gles of alder and willow, and low grassy ridges is a summering ground for water-
fowl and shore birds; a year-round home for beaver, mink, foxes, occasional
wolverines, and the ever-present bears. ... On rolling, sheltered benches near
Kukak Bay, where groves of spruce and birch alternate with open grassy places,
a bear can doze undisturbed in the shelter of these rocky banks.

Hallo Glacier, coming down from the icefields of Mount Denison (7,600 feet)
and Kukak Volcano. ... Up the coast from Hallo Bay, long, straight beaches
lead to the tiny clam-digging settlement of Kaguyak.

An unexplored, partly wooded valley, dotted with occasional ponds, penetrates
far inland from Hallo Bay, around and almost behind the DeviFs Desk. . . .
Kaguyak, a collection of about six shacks, is occupied during the summer
months. Driftwood for hres lies everywhere along the coast. The razor clams
dug here at Kaguyak at low tide are eight to ten inches long.

In the Kaguyak region is an almost unknown crater, approximately two miles
across, and brimming with water. Photo by A. C. Kuehl. . . . The rock-bound
peninsulas and offshore islets of the Cape Douglas section of the monument are
like a magnification of the Oregon and Washington coast.

Devil's Desk region, looking southeast from the
Douglas River valley over the narrow neck of the
monument toward distant Kodiak Island across
Shehkof Strait. . . . Brooks Falls is known for the
fly fishing in its vicinity.

Beautiful Brooks Lake (foreground) is only a half
mile from Lake Naknek (background), with which
it is connected by the broad, swift-flowing Brooks
River, famous for its great fish and for the beauty
of its falls. . . . Among groves of cottonwoods at
the river's mouth is Brooks River Camp, present
headquarters for Katmai National Monument.

Ever since the eruption of the Katmai region in 1912, clouds of steam and sul-
phurous gases have billowed steadily from Martin Volcano's cavernous throat.
. . . Exploded Mount Katmai's jagged-rimmed bowl is more than two miles
across. Contrasting with the dark rock of its towering inner walls is this mile-
long lake of unbelievable jade green. Photo by Adolph Murie.

Inside Mount Katmai's crater the horseshoe-shaped island that Griggs once
saw has been covered by the rising waters, and new glaciers have softened many
of the rugged contours. . . . Beyond desolate Katmai Pass (center) and the
flank of cloud-draped Knife Peak Hes the desert Valley of Ten Thousand
Smokes (far left).

(1) Spruce woodland on stream flowing into Naknek Lake; (2) camp on
Naknek shore; (3) on old "trail" (overgrown with four-foot grass) to Valley of
Ten Thousand Smokes; (4) fording Ukak River — by A. C. Kuehl. (5) A lake
trout and two rainbows, Lake Coville — by George L. CoUins. (6) Salmon
leaping Brooks Falls — by Northern Consohdated Airlines.

Novarupta Volcano, Valley
of Ten Thousand Smokes
— by Northern Consolidat-
ed Airlines.

This lonely collection of ancient, half-flattened log structures (barely showing
in the clearing) is all that remains of Savonoski, abandoned in terror by the
natives at the outset of the eruption. . . . Fisherman's view of the Brooks River,
downstream from the falls.

THE OUTLOOK FOR CONSERVATION IN ALASKA

51

are being used with increasing frequency to travel overland for hunting
purposes.

Wilderness values in Alaska are being impaired in other ways, often quite
unnecessarily. Anyone familiar with the wet tundra knows that the passing of
a single vehicle during the warmer months makes a scar that remains for years.
Great areas along the Arctic Coast have unfortunately been defaced in this
manner.

A few of the Federal agencies make it a practice to discard empty steel
drums and other indestructible debris along transport routes in the Arctic. In
fact, much of the Arctic Slope in the Naval Petroleum Reserve is well on its
way to becoming a gigantic dump.

Since 1949, 1 have spent much time in the central part of the Brooks Range,
and have often camped with the Eskimos along the shores of a lake situated in
a broad valley. In the spring of 1956, I was much disturbed to find that the
most interesting area had been used as a gasoline dump by one of the Federal
agencies concerned with topographic surveys. Large numbers of gasoline drums
had been dropped from a cargo plane for use by ground personnel, and of course
the drums were left when the work was completed. Here was a situation where
a few irresponsible white men had done more in a day to disfigure the Wilder-
ness than the Eskimos had been able to do in many generations.

It is indeed well that we have some special reservations, though all too few,
where regulations ensure the preservation of the country and the wildlife in a
natural state. I should like to review briefly the status of some of these areas,
which fall into three categories — National Parks and Monuments, National
Wildlife Refuges, and National Forests, the latter two being multiple-use areas
of great importance to a variety of interests.

NATIONAL PARKS AND MONUMENTS

Three areas under the control of the National Park Service have great value
as wilderness areas and are becoming increasingly important for recreation.

Mount McKinley National Park (area: 3,030 square miles). Situated in the
Alaska Range, this Park has spectacular mountains and glaciers and is the only
area of interior wilderness that has been set aside for preservation. It is the only
easily accessible place in Alaska where tourists can expect to see most of the
species of large animals at close range.

Previously accessible by rail or plane only, the completion of the Denali
Highway in the fall of 1957 made it possible to drive to the Park. In 1956, the
Park was visited by about 6,000 people. In 1957, when the road was first
opened, there were about 11,000. There were 26,000 people in 1958, and ever
increasing crowds can be expected in the future.

Katmai National Monument (area: 4,214 square miles). Established to
preserve the area affected by the volcanic eruption of 1912, it contains spec-
tacular wilderness and abundant wildlife.

52

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In a release last February to the Associated Press, Senator Bartlett advo-
cated a reduction in the size of Katmai National Monument. He considers the
area to be excessively large and wants to eliminate land which he defines as "not
up to Monument standards." Senator Bartlett's view was strongly supported
in an editorial in Alaska's largest newspaper, the Anchorage Times, which
pointed out that the region was inaccessible and rarely visited by Alaskans.

There is no evidence that the Monument contains valuable minerals, and
certainly this land is not needed for homesteading or other agricultural pursuits.

Glacier Bay National Monument (area: 3,554 square miles) . This is a region
of spectacular mountains and glaciers, with abundant wildlife. The Monument
preserves an area of coastal forest in all stages of post-glacial development.
Although not now accessible by highway, it can easily be reached by boat or
plane from cities in southeastern Alaska.

NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGES

There are fifteen National Wildlife Refuges in Alaska at the present time.
Largest is the Aleutian Islands Refuge (area: 4,250 square miles). Established
in 1913 to protect sea otters and other wildlife, the Refuge includes all of the
Aleutian Islands except Umnak, Unalaska, Akun, Akutan, and Tigalda. Of the
islands in the Refuge, Atka has Aleut villages; an active airfield is found on
Shemya; Adak has a large naval base. Several of the islands have deserted
military installations that are rapidly deteriorating at the present time.

Unimak, the largest island and first at the end of the Peninsula, has a con-
tinental-type fauna. During the time fur farming was widely practiced, arctic
foxes were introduced on several of the islands, and they still remain in most
cases. Rats also have been introduced, and they have become feral. Ten cari-
bou were placed on Adak Island in 1958, so there would be hunting for the
benefit of Navy personnel. The executive order by which the Refuge was estab-
lished provides for military use of the islands whenever considered necessary.

A proposal to withdraw all tidelands and adjoining areas of water extending
three miles beyond low tide line in the Aleutian Islands Refuge, to permit more
effective management of sea otter, was pubhshed in the Federal Register of
October 23, 1958. However, Senator Bartlett considers the tidelands to be
state property and has urged that this order be withdrawn.

Bering Sea Refuge consists of Hall and St. Matthew islands and Pinnacle
Rock, with a total area of 64 square miles. This Refuge was created in 1909 for
the protection of sea birds. These are mountainous islands with a maritime
chmate and arctic-type flora. Two species of indigenous land mammals are
present.

Reindeer were introduced in 1942 for the use of military personnel stationed
on St. Matthew during the war. I think twenty-four animals were originally
introduced, and in 1954 I estimated the population to be 600; a census made in
1957 by Fish and Wildlife Service personnel disclosed about 1200 animals. The

THE OUTLOOK FOR CONSERVATION IN ALASKA

S3

rapid increase of these reindeer will have serious effects on the vegetation, but
they are being left so that observations may be continued. I am strongly in
favor of removing the reindeer. These islands are very rarely visited and will
retain their original character unless the reindeer cause irreparable damage to
the vegetation.

Kodiak Island Refuge, with an area of 3,046 square miles, was estabhshed in
1941 for the protection of brown bear. The entire population of a unique form
of brown bear is restricted to Kodiak Island and the neighboring islands of
Afognak and Shuyak which lie to the north. The Refuge is important to migra-
tory waterfowl. Sitka black-tailed deer are abundant, mountain goats have
recently been introduced along with several species of smaller mammals, and
there is some evidence now that the elk introduced on Afognak Island are cross-
ing over to Kodiak.

A few small installations connected with fisheries research operate within
the Refuge, and some of the guides maintain hunting cabins, but these detract
little from the wilderness value of the Refuge. Recent boundary changes placed
a mile-wide strip around the Refuge under control of the Fish and Wildlife
Service, thus forestalling inappropriate use by private interests.

Much of the land outside the Refuge is occupied by cattle ranchers, who
lease public land for a negligible fee. This industry is handicapped by inade-
quate winter range and by lack of a market for the unfinished beef produced.
It is quite evident, from a purely monetary standpoint, that Kodiak Island can
best produce bears.

Pribilof Islands Refuge, consisting of 78 square miles, was established in
1910 for the protection of the breeding grounds and management of fur seals.
The two main islands, St. Paul and St. George, comprise the breeding grounds
of a fur seal herd numbering about one and one-half million animals. There are
also great colonies of sea birds, and about three species of smaller mammals, as
well as colonies of Steller's sea lion.

The Refuge is managed by the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and no
change in its status is anticipated.

Nunivak Island Refuge contains 1,733 square miles that were set aside in
1929 for the protection of muskoxen.

The mountainous island now supports a herd of about 140 muskoxen,
which are the descendants of 34 animals introduced from Greenland in 1930.
Also present is a large herd of reindeer now being managed by the Federal
Government and probably soon to be placed under the control of the Eskimos,
of whom there are about 300 inhabiting the island. Serious damage to the range
resulted earlier from the numbers of reindeer which were at one time excessive.
Waterfowl and large colonies of cliff-nesting sea birds are numerous.

Bogoslof Island Refuge, six-tenths of a square mile, was established in 1909
and is one of the few places where Steller's sea lion is protected. Sea birds are
numerous here.

54

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Simeonof Island Refuge of 16 square miles, an island in the Shumagin
Group, was set aside in 1958 to protect sea otter which are beginning to be
numerous in this area. The island itself will be leased for grazing.

Kenai Moose Range consists of 2,894 square miles established in 1941. The
range includes one of the most intensively used recreation areas in Alaska,
since it is easily reached by highway from Anchorage. The northern half of the
refuge, comprising about 1790 square miles, has been opened for oil exploration.
Three wells have been drilled and two are in progress. An effort is being made
to consolidate the installations so as to retain the undisturbed areas in as large
tracts as possible. The personnel of the oil companies have shown a cooperative
attitude and have expressed the intention of interfering as little as possible
with the wildlife resources.

The major nesting grounds of the trumpeter swan in Alaska are included
within the area open to exploration. Fish and Wildlife personnel observed about
twenty nests in 1958 and found no evidence that any had been disturbed by
activities connected with the oil development.

Since the spruce forest is the climax vegetation here, management of the
refuge for moose productivity requires the development of winter range. It is
planned to restrict habitat modification to areas already disturbed by the
explorations for oil or by roads, or to areas of maximum public use. In 1947, a
fire burned about 290,000 acres of the Refuge, and the following replacement
of spruce by willow, aspen, and birch greatly improved the habitat for moose.

The southern half of the range, about 1 100 square miles, will be maintained
as a natural area. This includes the upper moose range, the sheep range, and is
an area of spectacular mountain scenery.

Besides the Wildlife Refuges I have mentioned, several small reserves have
been established to protect sea birds or waterfowl. These are Chamisso Island,
Forrester Island, Hazen Bay, Hazy Islands, St. Lazaria Island, Semidi and
Tuxedni Islands. All of these are quite remote and rarely visited.

NATIONAL FORESTS

There are two National Forests in Alaska; Chugach National Forest has an
area of 7,502 square miles and includes Afognak and Shuyak Islands which
lie north of Kodiak, the eastern portion of the Kenai Peninsula, and also the
Prince William Sound region with all of the islands of the Prince William Sound
Archipelago.

The portion of the Forest on the Kenai Peninsula is traversed by the Seward
Highway and the upper Sterling Highway; it is near the major population
center of Anchorage and consequently is an important recreation area. The
proposed Copper River Highway will pass through the National Forest to
Cordova which is a small town on Prince William Sound.

Tongass National Forest has an area of 25,072 square miles and includes
most of the mainland of southeastern Alaska as well as the islands of the

THE OUTLOOK FOR CONSERVATION IN ALASKA

55

Alexander Archipelago. Several towns lie within the forest, including some large
Indian Villages.

PROPOSED REFUGES

In addition to the aforementioned reservations, the Department of the
Interior has proposed the creation of three new wildlife refuges.

The Kuskokwim Refuge would contain 2,924 square miles of wet tundra
which has great importance as a breeding ground for waterfowl. No manage-
ment is proposed here, and no detrimental use of the area is foreseen. This region
is uninhabited, although some hunting and trapping are done here by the Eski-
mos. The establishment of this refuge has received considerable opposition and
almost no public support.

The Izembec Refuge, also for waterfowl, would contain 680 square miles. A
small military reservation is in the area and it is bordered on the south by an
active airfield. No physical development of the area is planned.

The proposed Arctic Wildlife Range, with an area of 10,000 square miles,
would encompass portions of the Arctic Coastal Plain and the highest peaks of
the Brooks Range, a region of rugged mountains, lakes, and tundra, and would
extend into the boreal forest zone of the south slope of the Range. Here, in
the Romanzov Mountains, on Mounts Chamberlin and Michelson, are found
the only glaciers in northern Alaska. The fauna of the area is remarkably
abundant, and the species of arctic plants are well represented.

The reestablishment of the muskox, which has been extinct as an indige-
nous mammal in Alaska for more than 70 years, is planned. To quote Ross L.
Leffler, Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior, *'The Arctic
Wildlife Range should be administered for the protection of wildlife and wilder-
ness recreation values, and scientific studies in designated research areas would
be encouraged to promote the maintenance of undisturbed ecological and wil-
derness conditions." Hunting and trapping would not be restricted in this area,
nor would there be any restriction of mineral exploration, development, or
removal. Any such developments would have to be limited to the areas of proven
mineral claims, and this of course precludes many objections that would other-
wise arise.

I should like to emphasize that the United States does not have a single
arctic area set aside for preservation. The future scientific and cultural value of
such an area is self-evident, and it would be an incalculable loss if establishment
of this reservation is prevented by relatively few people concerned with the
possibility of immediate economic gain. However, the Alaskan State Legis-
lature on March 14 passed a resolution against the establishment of the Arctic
Wildlife Range. With the exception of the Tanana Valley Sportsmen's Asso-
ciation, which expressed support for the Range, little public support has been
manifested, but many individuals who have expressed no opinion publicly also
favor its creation.

56

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The three proposed refuges would add a total of 13,725 square miles to the
established reservations. Many of these reservations have already provided
opportunities for important basic and applied research in biology and other
fields. Such areas will have much greater importance when few suitable unpro-
tected regions remain.

I should like to mention briefly the status of certain species of wildlife in
Alaska, based largely upon information from personnel of the Fish and Wildlife
Service.

The last four winters have been remarkably mild, with the result that there
has been good survival of moose and caribou. The caribou herd in the Nelchina
area, about 200 miles northeast of Anchorage, numbers at least 45,000 animals.
Since the annual kill never exceeds 4000 animals, the size of the herd is rapidly
increasing. As pointed out by Leopold and Darling in 1953, there is a continu-
ing danger that the winter range will be depleted. The herd is already moving
much farther to the west during the winter months, and many animals are now
found well into the Talkeetna Mountains which lie northeast of Anchorage.
The possibility exists that a large portion of the herd may move into the Mount
McKinley area and for all practical purposes become unavailable to hunters.
The numbers of the Steese Highway herd in eastern Alaska have decreased
because many animals have remained in northern Canada. The herds on the
Arctic Slope are increasing and gradually invading regions from which they
have been absent in recent years.

Moose are quite abundant south of the Alaska Range, where both repro-
duction rate and survival rate have been high. Moose appear to be extending
their range in all directions — for the first time last spring several were killed
even in the vicinity of Point Barrow which is certainly far from their usual
habitat. In most cases, wandering animals are killed before a population can
be established in new areas.

Elk on Afognak Island have increased from only 8 in 1929 (when they were
introduced) to a herd of 800 animals; 111 were killed in 1958 by a total of
345 hunters.

Sitka deer, goats, and sheep seem generally to be maintaining their numbers.
The Sitka deer are becoming abundant in some areas, such as on Kodiak Island.

There has been some indication that brown bears have decreased on the
upper Alaska Peninsula during the last two to three years. The population
compares favorably, however, with that of the brown bears on Kodiak Island,
as shown by observations in 1958 on sex and age composition. The illegal killing
of bears, especially by fishermen, is a serious problem, since this is done com-
monly wherever bears are vulnerable. Most of the cattlemen on Kodiak attempt
to kill every bear they see, without determining whether or not the animals are
cattle killers.

Hunting of brown bears by airplane in early spring is now largely pre-
vented by slight adjustments in the time of the open season. Some changes in

THE OUTLOOK FOR CONSERVATION IN ALASKA

57

open season are also contemplated on Kodiak Island in order to reduce the
kill of female bears.

Despite the bounty on wolverines, there has been apparently no significant
decrease in their numbers. Some remedial legislation is needed to stop the killing
of these animals from planes.

Wolves are intensively hunted by means of airplanes. The Nelchina area
has finally been closed to wolf killing, and personnel of the Predator Control
Division of the Fish and Wildlife Service have been investigating the move-
ments and other habits of the single pack still present. This pack included ten
animals until the recent kill of three near the boundary of the closed area. It is
now proposed to enlarge the refuge, so as to afford the remaining animals more
adequate protection. I believe that approximately 200 wolves were killed in
this area over the preceding years.

Predator control is being continued, though on a somewhat reduced scale.
Nothing is being done on the Arctic Slope, but this advantage is offset by the
amount of bounty hunting by private individuals using small planes. Small
planes from as far away as Anchorage engage in hunting wolves in the Arctic,
and many animals are killed annually in this way.

The almost complete lack of information on the bionomics of polar bears
makes any statement as to their status purely speculative. It has never been
established whether the same individual animals are hunted throughout the
circumpolar regions w^henever they approach inhabited lands. The take of
polar bears in Alaska has increased annually during the last few years. Almost
all hunting is accomplished by the use of planes; some based in Arctic Coast
villages and others from as far away as Anchorage work out of villages such as
Nome, Kotzebue, and Point Hope. Since the hunts take place over international
waters, sometimes as far as 200 miles from land, regulations are very difficult
to establish and enforce.

Walrus probably need additional protection. The annual kill appears to be
excessively large, and hunting techniques and utilization are grossly inefficient.
Better control over the hunting activities of the Eskimos would be desirable.
Sport hunting of walrus has been permitted during the last year or two, but
the kill is much too small to have any significance. The Department of the
Interior has planned to investigate the possibilities of an international agree-
ment which might lead to better management of both polar bears and walrus.

During the last few years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Terri-
torial Department of Fish and Game have had joint responsibility for the wild-
life resources, although the Territorial organization had little authority. This
arrangement led to some unusual situations; as an example, the wolverine is a
fur-bearing animal according to Federal law, but a bounty was placed on
wolverines by the Territory. Consequently, killing a wolverine out of season for
the bounty was a punishable offense, whereas a bounty was paid when the
animals were legally taken as fur animals during the open season.

58

RAUSCH

The State will probably gain control over wildlife resources in about Janu-
ary, 1960, but before this is realized, it must be demonstrated to the satisfaction
of the Secretary of the Interior that adequate provision has been made for the
administration, management, and conservation of these resources in the broad
national interest. This wise requirement should do much to ensure a carefully
prepared program.

The bill which would create the Alaska Department of Fish and Game
apparently is now awaiting the acting governor's signature, and I have not
read the final version. However, it was based upon a model bill drawn up by
the International Association of Game, Fish, and Conservation Commissioners,
with certain changes adapting it to Alaskan conditions. In the latest form of
the bill, the proposal for a Fish and Game Commission has apparently been
deleted.

Although the administrative organization is somewhat indefinite, the new
department is expected to have five divisions which will be concerned with game,
sport fish, commercial fish, biological research, and enforcement. The State will
be divided into at least three major management areas.

During the last year, the Territorial organization has attempted to recruit
well-trained men, all of whom will continue on in the State's Department. A
small number of experienced biologists will transfer from the Fish and Wild-
life Service ; most of these had been supported by Pitman-Robertson funds in
the past. The Game Division plans to hire twenty biologists during the first year
and expects to have a staff of forty biologists within three years.

On July 1, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game will become eligible
for Federal matching funds under the provisions for Federal Aid. A maximum
of about $850,000 will be available for game, and about $250,000 for sport fish;
but since it is improbable that Alaska can match all of the Federal Aid money
available, the Game Division expects a maximum of about $400,000 during the
first year. A bill also has been introduced to provide licensing of hunting and
fishing, with a suggested schedule of fees and the revenue anticipated, which is
expected to amount to about $569,000, or about sixty-five per cent more than
license collections in the fiscal year 1958. The expected revenue will probably
be retained within the Department of Fish and Game.

The Division of Biological Research will be concerned mainly with basic
investigations and consequently will not be eligible for Federal Aid money. It
will be supported initially by appropriations, but I shall not attempt to predict
how adequate such funds might be. Predator control will fall into this Division,
as now planned. The Department does not expect to support a general predator
control program but intends to initiate some investigations of predator-prey
relationships. The State organization also will specify when, where, and how the
Fish and Wildlife Service predator-control personnel will operate.

A very tight budget may assist toward eventual ehmination of the outmoded
bounty system. Just recently, the Legislature appropriated $107,500 of a pro-

mm

Wildlife and Alaska

Alaska's scenery is incomparable, a continent's highest, iciest, wildest.
Yet it can seem almost cheerless and sterile, as Mount McKinley's massif
is, even though softened by a foreground of grass and trees. Add wildlife
to the scene and something happens — something very vital.

We don't have to add it. It is there. The great bears and fighting fish,
the moose, sheep, and caribou still know the long northern days and
nights, still have an unquestioned right to be in their wilderness world,
to live and die there.

Man can change all this, but need not. He may do it by mistake if he
does not consider what is there, and the meaning of it.

photographs by Warren Steenbergh, Charles J. Ott, and Herb and Lois Crisler

legends by Lowell Sumner

The long-tailed jaeger, cousin of the gulls, is a bold, hawk-like hunter. . . .Through the simple
virtue of rapid multiplication, the red-backed mouse and his cousins, the lemmings and meadow
mice, easily hold their own against the North's inteUigentsia — fox, coyote, lynx, wolverine. . . .
The horned owl, large as a rooster and with the claws of an eagle, is a courageous, mighty
hunter. Game is not appreciably diminished by this owl when food and shelter are adequate;
otherwise mortality is high — equally high from other causes if all the owls are removed.

V

The coyote must live by wits and skill. In summer things go very well following the appear-
ance of a vast new generation of mice, rabbits, ground squirrels, and other creatures young and
dumb, but by winter the cream of the summer food crop has been skimmed off, and some
competitors like the wolf are more powerful than he. His wonderful wild music gives the touch
of perfection to a campfire evening. ... An inquisitive beaver observes human behavior.

The willow ptarmigan turns snow white in winter to elude the fox, lynx, and other hard-pressed
enemies. The spring molt brings to this ground-nesting bird a brown dress to blend with the
tundra and the willow thickets. . . . The parka or ground squirrel is a principal food of the
coyote, wolf, wolverine, and grizzly. For nine months of the year he hibernates safe in frozen
ground, and his summer's rocky homesites also make hard digging. Although no strategist of
escape, he is alert and quick; above all he is prolific. . . . Northern phalarope. The female is
larger and brighter than the male and leaves the care of the eggs to her spouse.

In Alaska, caribou in primeval numbers now survive only in the remote Arctic,
which is too wet to burn and has not yet been substantially invaded by man.
Here the Kchen crop, the wandering caribou hordes, and the wolves still main-
tain their original natural balance. Caribou often stand nose down on snow-
banks in summer because the cold air deters the hordes of flies and mosquitoes.

Although the wolf is the swiftest and most
powerful of the northern hunters, he too
must depend for survival upon sagacity and
teamwork. All but the youngest caribous, if
in health, can run faster; Dall sheep can
elude him among the crags ; moose can stand
him off unless hampered by deep snow. The

myth that the wolf is an arch villain, danger-
ous even to man, slowly gives way to the
modern concept that this animal is an im-
portant natural tool for controlHng the num-
bers of game animals in remote northern
regions: wolf numbers can be allowed to
increase when the game animals increase, so

The Wolf

photographs by

Herb and Lois Crisler

as to forestall destructive over-use of the
natural range; should the game animals de-
crease, wolves then can be reduced in pro-
portion. Significantly, the greatest abund-
ance of wolves under natural conditions is
precisely in those areas where game animals,
especially caribou, also are most abundant

and flourishing. The home hfe of the wolf
is zestful and soHcitous. Mutual affection
prevails among family members, and this
strong doghke affection also is shown toward
human beings if young animals are tamed
at an early stage, something the Crislers
greatly enjoyed doing.

S ^ ^ • .S 'Z! ^
O ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

The Arctic weasel holds down the population of creatures too small or too elu-
sive for the larger predators. His agiHty and elongated shape allow him to pene-
trate the winter retreats of mice and pikas, which during the long winter months
are safe from most other enemies. . . . Little chief hare and rock rabbit are other
names for the pika or cony, a Httle gray guinea-pig-hke inhabitant of the rock
shdes. Even the powerful grizzly seldom can dig the rock rabbit from his limit-
less fortress of crevices and crannies. Hibernation also is unnecessary, for the
pika stocks his underground rock chambers with a winter supply of herbs and
grasses.

The wolverine s survival depends on extraordinary endurance against cold and fatigue,
dogged perseverance, and enormous strength for an animal no bigger than a yearling black
bear. He will camp near a carcass and gorge at intervals until even the hide and most of the
bones have been eaten. Of a single wolf he probably has no fear, but against sudden attack
by several he must be alert to have an escape crevice among rocks or down timber, or a tree
to cHmb. This wolverine, temporarily a captive, was tamed into eating from the hands of
Mr. and Mrs. Herb Crisler. . . . The porcupine's quills are not an absolute protection. The
quick red fox sometimes flips him over and attacks the soft underparts. The wolverine,
wolf and lynx occasionally get him. at the price of a face full of quills.

The grizzly's great strength and powerful claws are employed chiefly in digging. When he
can find them, he digs up ground squirrels, marmots, and on rare occasions even young
foxes. But his average daily fare is less ambitious — mice dug from their shallow burrows,
berries in season, but especially roots and grass. In fact, the visitor's principal impression
of the grizzly is Hkely to be of a peaceful plodding figure grazing on the tundra slopes like
a cow or, as Alaskan's say, "hke an old sow."

The snowshoe hare's
brown summer coat
matches his surround-
ings as well as the
winter one. Disease epi-
demics reduce the pop-
ulations every few
years. Then their natu-
ral enemies, particular-
ly the lynx, die off too,
from malnutrition.

Marmots often push and wrestle in play, and the young climb on their mothers" backs. Their
lives seem easier than most. For nine months, they sleep deep in the frozen, rocky ground
while lynxes, wolves, and their relatives must prowl without rest, and often starv'e. And in
summer it is easy for a marmot to fatten on new grasses, succulent leaves, flowers, and seeds.
But even a marmot must be alert lest he be cut off from his rocky burrow by the crafty strategy
of wolf, coyote, lynx, or fox. or by an eagle swooping low over the brow of the slope.

Photographs by Warren Steenbergh: McKinley, fox, jaeger, mouse, owl, lynx, flying squirrel,
beaver, parka, phalarope, caribou on grass, young foxes, golden eyes, grizzly, moose, marmots,
and the trail- weary bear.

Photographs by Charles J. Ott: Hare, coyote, ptarmigan, caribou on snow, Dall sheep, weasel,
cony, porcupine, showshoe hare.

By Herb and Lois Crisler: The wolves and the wolverine.

THE OUTLOOK FOR CONSERVATION IN ALASKA

59

posed $143,000 to bring unpaid bounty claims up to date. It should not be too
difficult for a good many people to realize that such funds could be much more
effectively utilized.

It appears that the Enforcement Division will suffer from inadequate funds,
and this may be one of the major weaknesses of the new organization. Much
will also depend upon whether important positions are filled on the basis of
qualifications or by political expediency.

The outlook for the establishment of state parks appears promising. The
Bureau of Land Management has received $100,000 annually for the creation
and maintenance of roadside campgrounds, and this money now will go to the
state. About fifty exist and forty-two more are proposed. Three 5000-acre tracts
have recently been set aside for state parks; these include part of the Lake
George area, with the right-of-way from the Glenn Highway, an area along
Eagle River near Anchorage, and the Worthington Glacier area on the Richard-
son Highway near Valdez. The State has the authority, over a twenty-five-year
period, to select about 103 million acres from the public domain. Some of this
land probably will be used for the establishment of recreational facilities. In
addition, two special grants of 400,000 acres each, one of which involves Na-
tional Forest land, have been made to the State for the purpose of community
enlargement.

In the report of the National Resources Committee for December, 1937,
Robert Marshall made the following statement: "Alaska is unique among all
recreational areas belonging to the United States because Alaska is yet largely
a wilderness. In the name of a balanced use of American resources, let's keep
Alaska largely a wilderness!" Yet twenty years later very little of Alaska is a
wilderness in the true sense of the word, and very few inviolable reservations
have been established.

As a comparison, I should like to point out that the State of California, with
an area of 158,693 square miles, has 37,771 square miles of reservations if one
includes only National Parks and Monuments, National Forests, and State
Parks. These reservations make up twenty-three and eight-tenths per cent of
the area of the State. Alaska is three and six-tenths times as large as California,
but has only one and four-tenths as much area set aside at the present time.
Moreover, Alaska has a population of only 2 1 1 ,000 as compared with about
13,000,000 in California.

Fortunately for California, some of its earlier citizens had the foresight to
set aside the natural areas which today are so highly valued. Many Alaskans
feel that we should wait until the need is more evident before additional wilder-
ness is preserved, not realizing that when everyone is convinced that such action
is necessary, the opportunity will have been lost.

Unfortunately, many Alaskans are not well enough acquainted with the
natural features of the State to realize how rapidly changes are taking place.
Few people have the opportunity to travel in the remote regions and also many

60

RAUSCH

are not able to distinguish between seriously disturbed and natural wilderness,
as long as all is green. That it is sometimes difficult to secure adequate popular
support for proposed withdrawals of lands for conservation purposes is there-
fore not remarkable, particularly when one considers the adverse publicity such
proposals so often receive in the Alaskan press. In view of this, it is encourag-
ing that the proposed Arctic Wildlife Range, for example, has received the
public support that it has in Alaska. Much of the credit for this goes to Olaus
Murie and others who have been able to define the values involved in a strik-
ingly understandable way. Nature conservation has enjoyed few advocates in
Alaska, as compared with the many spokesmen for those who anticipate mone-
tary gain through exploitation of natural resources. Since monetary values are
so often the basis for action, let us hope that there will be an increasing aware-
ness that the future economy of the State will benefit greatly from the tourists
and others who are attracted by the recreational opportunities Alaska affords.

Alaska is now in a critical stage of its economic development. The desire
and need for expansion in all phases of its economy conflict strongly with the
aesthetic and scientific values to be gained by the provident institution of
wilderness reserves inviolate to exploitation by the contemporary few, and
which will retain their values unchanged for the enlightenment and enjoyment
of ensuing generations. In conclusion I should like to emphasize a few points
which seem particularly to require attention of conservationists:

1. Additional support is needed for the Arctic Wildlife Range and the Kus-
kokwim and Izembec Refuges.

2. It will be necessary to guard against possible demands of special interest
groups who may desire access to certain reservations to the detriment of the
national interest. The National Monuments are most vulnerable. It would be
highly desirable to make National Parks of both Katmai and Glacier Bay
National Monuments. The potential value of these Monuments as recreation
areas can be visualized when one considers the increasing utilization of Mount
McKinley National Park. Only 6000 people visited the Park in 1956; 10,600
in 1957; 25,900 in 1958. More are expected yearly.

3. The establishment by the new State of state parks.

4. Legislation must be encouraged to protect such species as polar bear,
walrus, wolves, and others, which may not be able to withstand the effects of
increased hunting or destruction of habitat.

5. Education in our public schools as to the values of conservation of
natural resources is needed everywhere, but it would be especially helpful and
appropriate now in Alaska, where the incompatibilities of development and
conservation have been greatly emphasized.

Time still remains for the preservation of a few small fragments of primitive
Alaska, but it is rapidly running out. If we do not persist more diligently in
our efforts, assets of inestimable value will be irrevocably lost.

THE OUTLOOK FOR CONSERVATION IN ALASKA

61

DISCUSSION Richard M. Leonard, Discussion Leader

Leonard: There is one paradox that has always struck me as applicable to Alaska. We
have lost part of our civilization in Greece, in Persia, in Spain, in India, and so often the
people have thought it was God's handiwork, or the devil's, or somebody's other than their
own. It occurred over a long enough period of time so that they blamed other causes.
Paradoxically, in America we have destroyed our resources so rapidly that we have been
able to see that it is our own causes; cause and effect are close enough to be able to discern.
Now in Alaska, as Dr. Rausch has pointed out, you can see that process accelerated again.
The problem we have before us is how to temper that and how to apply the lessons we have
learned in the rest of the United States — and in the Near East, in Spain, in Egypt, in India,
and elsewhere — to the relatively new country of Alaska.

RoscoE Poland (San Diego) : Perhaps I have misunderstood, but did you say that in
order to protect the salmon in some localities they resorted to dynamiting seals?

Dr. Rausch: That is right. In southeastern Alaska, where the channels are suited to that
type of operation, it has been the practice to use dynamite in the deeper water when seals
are passing through. In that way large numbers are killed.

Poland: Who does this?

Rausch: I believe the former Territorial authorities were doing that. Whether the
State personnel will continue I do not know.

Leonard: Do you have information, or does anyone from the Bureau of Land Man
agement know exactly what is the present status of the Arctic Wildlife Range? You men-
tioned that it needs support, and I recognize that. What legal steps are still to be taken to
make it a more permanent actuality ?

Rausch: I have not heard the latest information about that.

Leonard: Is there anyone from the Bureau of Land Management here who could give
us information on that?

Howard Zahniser (Executive Secretary of the Wilderness Society, Washington, D. C.) :
Legislation is being prepared for introduction in Congress to give Congressional sanction to
the establishment of the area. That has been expected for some time, but has not been intro-
duced. In the meantime, there is a prevailing uncertainty. With regard to it, the best course
would be recommendations to the Secretary of the Interior or to the House of Representa-
tives or Senators.

Leonard: I have always thought it was wise to support the Secretary with legislation,
but it has always been my impression that the Secretary has not yet made the full legal
proclamations that are available to him under law. Is that correct?

Zahniser: That is true.

Leonard: The Secretary still needs urging on the part of conservationists to firm this up.

Zahniser: At the time of the first announcement of the Arctic Wildlife Range, assur-
ance was given by the Department of the Interior that if legislation were not obtained, the
Secretary would take those final steps. But for various reasons, legislation was not even
introduced until the Eighty-fifth Congress, and then it was expected to be introduced in the
Eighty-sixth but hasn't as yet been received there. That is about as much as I think it is
discreet to say here — to convey the impression that the Secretary might be urged to lend
his support to obtain legislation or take other action, and that representatives in the Senate
and the House, both of whom we have touched, should be informed about the importance
of it. I had not heard until this very excellent paper about the action of the Legislature in
Alaska. The almost inevitable tendency of that would be to add to the difficulties in obtaining
legislation in Congress, now that the Senate has on the Committee that would handle the
matter representation from Alaska with that kind of background.

Leonard: We are fortunate that we have in the Alaskan Legislature at least one con-

62

RAUSCH

servationist, Grant Pearson, the former Superintendent of Mount McKinley National Park
for approximately ten years. Grant is vigorously working for conservation, but that is only
one voice out of a great many. In a new area like that they do need a lot of support, and
fortunately we had a meeting of a small group of young folks from Alaska who want to
form an Alaska conservation organization. They recognize as we do the need for having
these views brought out to the Legislature by Alaskans, because for foreigners from Cah-
fomia, Washington, or anywhere else to try to tell Alaskans how to manage their natural
resource affairs would probably be not very tasteful. So if any of you who have friends in
Alaska can help towards formation of such an organization it would be helpful.

Zahniser: I might add a reminder that the importance of the legislation, as the Secre-
tary and others have seen it, is in this fact: at present, our Secretary could withdraw the
area as far as the minerals are concerned. He could prohibit them or he could continue
them, but he could not continue them in a modified way, subject to regulations. The Con-
gress would have the authority to provide the kind of limited program they have in mind,
so that if the Secretary depended on himself he could only prohibit, and that seems to be
an impolitic thing to do.

Olaus Murie: I might say that when we were up there to look over that area, we met
with many people throughout Alaska. As Dr. Rausch said, the Tanana Valley Sports-
men's Association was one hundred per cent with us and also two of the gun clubs near
Fairbanks were with us. I always feel that we have to call on the women to help us out, and
they really did this time.

I want to say too that as far as that Arctic Wildlife Range is concerned, certain Canadian
officials are now very much interested to see what we are going to do on our side, and they
have in mind making a similar area on the Canadian side. This Arctic Wildlife Range goes
right up to the Canadian boundary, and there is a wonderful caribou migration through
there. This area, big as it is, does not contain that herd ; it comes from the west and crosses
this area and goes into Canada, or part of it at least, for the winter. And so the Canadians are
thinking of setting up a similar area on their side of the boundary, and I hope that we have
the wisdom as a people to set this area aside and show the other nation that we mean busi-
ness. We will then encourage them to do likewise. They are waiting now to see what we will
do on our side, and so many nations around the world are in the same fix as we are. Some
of the conservationists throughout the world are trying to set these areas aside, and no
matter where it happens, whether it is in Turkey, Scandinavia, New Zealand, or Alaska, it
all helps the general program if anyone makes a move in the right direction and encourages
someone else to do likewise. That is the case with the Arctic Wildlife Range.

Leonard: The Quetico-Superior area back in Minnesota and Ontario is an excellent
example of the cooperation between Canada and the United States that Olaus was speaking
about. There again the Canadian Government has set aside nearly four million acres of
roadless area to be dedicated to wilderness values along with the almost equally large area
in the Superior National Forest through the roadless area set up by the United States Forest
Service on the American side.

Paul Zinke (School of Forestry, University of CaHfornia) : I would like to ask Dr.
Rausch if in this regard there is any plan to increase the National Forest area in the interior
of Alaska, particularly in the Tanana River forests, and possibly to take advantage of the
National Forest Wilderness System.

Rausch: Just before I came down, I talked to some of the National Forest personnel
in Anchorage, and they did not indicate that there would be any increase at all, but they did
assume that they would lose little if any of the areas they now hold.

William Yeomans (California Public Outdoor Recreation Plan Committee) : This
matter of preserving inland lakes from air travel confuses me, as I understand the Quetico-
Superior area is now protected by an air barrier. Yet in Alaska, and I have been there a few

THE OUTLOOK FOR CONSERVATION IN ALASKA

63

months myself, this is the only means of reaching these lakes. I would like to know how
Dr. Rausch feels there can be a resolution of this conflict, since this is the means of accessi-
bility and yet it can destroy the very quality which you seek to preserve.

Rausch: I think there is probably no very satisfactory solution to that. As you say, it is
the only way people can travel in the more remote areas, and perhaps it could only be regu-
lated in areas that are completely closed. Of course there would be a great deal of objection if
there were any attempt to do that.

Pauline Dyer: I would like to ask Dr. Rausch if he is acquainted with the present
status of the proposed Tracy Arm-Ford's Terror Wilderness Area in the Tongass National
Forest. I understand there were hearings two years ago. Do you know where that is and if
the Forest Service has any plans for creating wilderness areas on the lands within their
jurisdiction?

Rausch: I know where the area is, but according to the latest information I have, there
is no particular plan to set aside any of the area there.

Starker Leopold: I want to ask Dr. Rausch about the status of range studies in
central and northern Alaska, range studies that is for caribou and reindeer. At the time that
Dr. Darling and I were up there eight years ago, it seemed to me that there was a desperate
need for understanding the range requirements of these two animals and for comparing the
ranges which appeared to us to be over-exploited by the domestic reindeer, with the wilder-
ness ranges which were lightly grazed by the caribou. How far have those range studies
progressed ?

Rausch: The Fish and Wildlife Service personnel with Dr. Herbert Hansen carried on
some rather extensive studies in the Nelchina area; I believe it was the summer before
last. But I think that will not be continued, because the Fish and Wildlife Service personnel
will no longer have Pitman-Robertson funds available for this work after July 1, 1959. The
results of that work I do not think have been published.

Charlotte Mauk (Director, Sierra Club) : Ansel Adams, in discussing such confer-
ences as this said: "Yes, they are very fine, but you are just talking to yourselves. What are
you going to do about telling other people?" And that has been troubling me for a good
many years. As Dr. Rausch was talking, he brought up a problem that we all have recognized
and formulated many times. He was talking about the power dam which would interfere
with a great deal of the fish life, which has been individually justified, but which still adds
up to a considerable damage. Now perhaps we can find ways to convince others outside
through the people who learn at these conferences how serious the problem is. Let us reverse
this business of justifying small individual parcels of invasion. Big business is developing a
sort of pocket morality or dollar ethics. They find that they can take a small part of their
income and apply it to public good of one kind or another to improve their public relations
and ultimately their business. Can we find ways of persuading the people who would exploit
what ought to be unchanged that they can justify the exclusion from their operation of small
portions here and there of caribou range — or whatever it may be, down to the surroundings
of a small pond on which you will find natural studies worthwhile — can they be persuaded
that out of the two operations they may for public benefit justify small exclusions, those
small exclusions adding up eventually to something that would be significant to the people
who are trying to preserve a natural world?

Leonard: That is being done to a certain extent by some of the larger timber-owning
companies in their program of public shooting and park areas, but it is really a fine suggestion
to be used by industry all throughout the nation.

IAN McTAGGERT COWAN

Science and the Wilderness

Ian McTaggert Cowan is a man of many provocative inter-
ests and many successful activities. His eminence as an ecolo-
gist was earned by important studies in the Canadian Rockies
involving big game animals and their relationship to such
predators as wolves. Presently, his experiments with big game
animals are producing much valuable information about nu-
trition; by means of an artificial high protein diet, he has suc-
ceeded in developing certain species of deer to twice their
normal size.

The Canadian Research Council profits from Dr. Cowan's
membership, and public education has been advanced by his
nationally popular television series on natural history. He has
also served as President of the Wildlife Society. Originally a
Scotsman, Dr. Cowan was trained at the University of Cali-
fornia, and is chairman of the Zoology Department at the Uni-
versity of British Columbia.

Exploiting his own fascinating experiences and some fine
color slides. Dr. Cowan develops his theme: the wilderness
scientist is concerned with the ecological environment; wilder-
ness areas must be large enough to provide massed opportuni-
ties for the study of natural life. Often we fail to appreciate
these opportunities as they present themselves; often we fail
to make legislators understand that complete wilderness units
are needed. Dr. Cowan illustrates the devastation of wild ani-
mals which results from destroying the necessary natural units.
Canadian big game provides an exciting and often amusing
focus for these ideas.

I don't believe in preaching salvation to the saved, so I am not going to
launch into a long diatribe on the tremendous values of the wilderness. We
know what they are. All of us here share the common dedication to preserve
intact areas of this continent large enough to encompass perpetually examples
of the priceless and peculiar ecological entities that are, in fact. North America.
They must be large enough to provide the diverse opportunities that the very
complex human organism needs if it is to live out its life in the fullness and
richness of spirit; they must be large enough also to guarantee the survival
of the other large creatures with whom we share this continent.

The National Parks, of course, are in the forefront of our interest, and they
themselves, I feel, must now be preserved from overdevelopment as assiduously

[64]

SCIENCE AND THE WILDERNESS

65

as they must be protected from neglect. But it is more than this that we strive
for in this organization and in our associated groups — it is revolution in the
patterns of thought on this continent that we seek, for we on this continent are
a very young people. It is only a few years since we landed on either coast of
North America and began to hack our way off the beaches into what looked
then like a limitless wilderness. We have been nurtured throughout these years
on pioneer ideals. We have been taught to glory in the relentless vanquishing of
the wilderness by man. I think we can quite safely say that the symbol of our
generation is the bulldozer. To our sorrow and concern, it has slowly dawned
on us over the last quarter century that the end is in sight. In our militant enthu-
siasm to throw back the wilderness and open up this continent for man, we have
been so far successful that we are about to destroy a part of us that is as indis-
pensable as it is irreplaceable.

To many of us, the wilderness truly unaltered by human interference, the
wilderness with its wealth of life rolling across it in great surges, ebbing and
flowing with the seasons and with the years, is inseparable from our innermost
beings. No matter what our calling, be we scientists or laymen in any line of
business, I am sure that many of us — in fact all of us — can join in echoing the
words of one of the great thinkers of our time. Mahatma Gandhi said: "I love
music and all other art, but I do not attach such value to them as is generally
done. I cannot, for example, recognize the values of those arts which require
great technical knowledge for their understanding. When I gaze at the star-
strewn heavens and at the infinite beauty which confronts my eyes, they mean
more to me than all human art can give me. That does not mean that I ignore
the other values, but personally, in comparison with the infinite beauty of
nature, I feel their unreality too intensely. Life is greater than all art." And it is
life, in all its forms on this continent that you and I are interested in.

I find in the wilderness scientist, the scientist who has responded to his
calling into the wilderness, the same, or even a greater, feeling of kinship with
the environment than was expressed by Gandhi himself. And it is as a scientist
that I have come to you this evening, as one concerned for many years with
unravelling the mysteries surrounding the biological forces at work in our eco-
logical systems. My major interests have centered on the large mammals — the
groups that have suffered more than all others from our alteration of the face
of the continent. For some years now, despite the vast uninhabited reaches of
the continent, very few first rate studies of the larger creatures have been prose-
cuted in them.

We have Murie's studies of the elk and coyote in the Yellowstone, Dewey
Soper's work on the wood bison in Alberta and in the Northwest territories,
Newman's paper on the Roosevelt elk, and Murie's classic and significant
account of the wolves in Mount McKinley. These are almost all the best of
them, although there are others of more than passing significance. But the con-
tribution of these few to our understanding has been very great.

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COWAN

In general, I have been surprised at how few people have appreciated the
unique research opportunities presented by our existing preserved areas. Too
much of our wildlife research today is ad hoc and superficial. Too much of our
choice of research topics is conditioned by the easy availability of state and
Pitman-Robertson funds for management problems. Too frequently have we
set a brilliant young mind on to a cow path instead of steering it on to the high
trails that lead into the wilderness behind us. To take a brilliant young student
with a straight A average and put him to doing some plebeian research task is
a wicked waste of a good mind.

To give substance to my comments, I would like to abandon formality for
some minutes and to reminisce with you over some of my past research experi-
ences in Canadian wilderness areas. I would show you some scenes which I hope
will excite your imaginations, as they have mine, and point in the direction that
I think our wilderness research should advance.

I began my studies when little was known of the structure and behavior
of wildlife populations, and most of my inquiries were in this direction. Regard-
less of their present status, they were not old stuff at the time they were dis-
covered, though I don't claim too many first discoveries. The work I am going
to report, the reminiscences I am going to pass on, took place largely in the
Rocky Mountain Parks of Canada. This is a unique area of 7,000 square miles,
made up of four great National Parks with contiguous boundaries. It spreads
from shore to shore of this great Rocky Mountain rampart — from the semi-
arid benchlands of western Alberta over into the great promised land of British
Columbia, across the other side of the hill where the dense spruce forests and
the great mountains of snow sweep up to the high peaks. I have just a few shdes
to introduce you to the general features of the environment. We will skip over
these quite lightly, because all of you are acquainted with mountains. Many of
you may see old friends in the form of mountains that are shown in these
pictures.

[Mount Vanguard] *

Mount Vanguard, near Thompson Pass, is in the central axis of the Rocky
Mountains.

[Panther River ranges]

Farther east, as we get out of the main masses and into the eastern foothills,
we get a lot of magnificent limestone country with steep slides and spreading
grasslands that are the chosen home of the bighorn sheep, and are also invaded
from the higher parts by the mountain goat.
[Panther River ranges]

Returning to the main masses, we have Crowfoot Glacier and one of the
magnificent lakes that is not too far from the Banff-Jasper highway; I believe
it is Hector Lake.

* Slide titles in brackets.

SCIENCE AND THE WILDERNESS

67

[Crowfoot Glacier, Banff National Park]

And this will introduce immediately one of the first problems one tackles
in studying the wilderness, and in trying to interpret the forces acting in wil-
derness wildlife to those who are entering it for the first time — particularly the
legislators who find it very difficult when you try to explain that the National
Park is not properly designed in the first place and should have included far
more winter range.

The majority of the forested area you see there will support nothing but
red-backed mice and marten, and very few people see those and enthuse over
them when they are in a National Park. There is a little piece of greenery in
the middle of the picture which is the summer range of a few elk and moose.
[Tonquin Valley]

This is a country of extremes. This photograph was taken on the fourth of
September. The day before was a magnificent, clear, sunny day, but this was
the first of the heavy snowfalls that covered up this Rocky Mountain play-
ground. That hill in the background is the lower ledge of the Rampart Range,
which some of you know. It has been used as a kindergarten by the Alpine
Club of Canada for many years. This area again is not much used by wildlife;
it is magnificent wilderness that supports wild creatures only in the summer time.
[Ashnola Valley]

This is a country of tremendous contrasts, and one of the values that I see
more and more in the wilderness — particularly in the reasonably accessible
wilderness areas offered by our greater Parks — is its tremendous educational
value. I was delighted to hear considerable treatment this morning of the inter-
pretive forces that should be brought to bear on our National Park and wilder-
ness areas. I feel these are extremely important. The great contrast you see here
strikes the student who has not before been in the wilderness with an amazing
impact he will never forget. The influence of slope and exposure is uncovered.

On our left we have a south and west facing slope; on the far side of the
picture we have a north and east facing slope; they have precisely the same
precipitation. But one of them is covered in forests of jack pine and spruce,
virtually nothing that an animal can feed on; and the other is covered with
grassland and provides winter range for two or three hundred bighorns, assorted
deer, and even a few stray elk. This sort of thing comes with the graphic impact
that will never be forgotten by the student or by anybody who has seen it and
had it pointed out to him as his first example. In the northern mountain areas
particularly, we are confronted with the wilderness of spruce; and although an
eminent ecologist once referred to this as the ''Spruce-Moose Biome," he was
absolutely wrong. Moose don't eat spruce. In fact, nothing yet has been invented
that eats spruce but budworms, a few sawflies, and assorted insects of this sort.
Any animal that has the capacity to develop into a spruce-eating ungulate has
the world as its oyster: there is an unbroken sea of spruce from Alaska to
Labrador waiting for someone to eat it.

68

COWAN

[Athabasca Valley, April]

This is an area where you can see very strongly illustrated the penalties of
overpopulation. To those of you who have worked on range and game problems,
the story here is graphically and vividly told. A beautiful clean-swept valley
floor and nothing within reach that anything can eat. The branches have been
trimmed off the aspen trees as high as a bull elk can reach on his hind legs, and
they have even stripped off some of the bark. The willow trees are dead. The
grass has been clipped more neatly than you could do yours on a Sunday after-
noon. As I say, there is nothing left there to eat, and yet it still looks quite neat
and tidy — in fact, I have heard visitors to the Park comment on how neat and
tidy the rangers keep the valley floor of the Athabasca River.
[Athabasca Valley, Devona]

Some people can learn very quickly to read the story in the wilderness
environment. You see clumps of high skirted aspens, again eaten as far back as
a bull elk can reach on his hind legs — which is about nine feet when he is
enthusiastic. You will notice a dead willow clump; you will notice a few stubs.
These stubs are the result of a very effective combined operation. This was a
team composed of beavers and elk: the beavers cut them down, the elk ate them
off, and by the time they were finished there was just nothing left. The bark the
elk hadn't eaten off the trees that the beavers cut down, the beavers chopped up
and took for making dams. The only young trees showing there are spruce. This
points once again to the ever present hazard posed by the march of the conifer
on to these grassland and park land areas. Many of these areas are fire types
and if you permanently preserve them from fire, as you can do along a highway
or close to a highway, sooner or later you will have the visible areas of our
National Parks solid unbroken blanket of spruce and jack pine with nothing in
them for anything to eat.
[Willoiv ptarmigan]

All through the park areas, there are multitudes of smaller creatures to be
studied; many of them are virtually unknown, if we want to refer to critical
scientific studies. The willow ptarmigan reaches its southern limits in Jasper
National Park at the precise point at which this cocked willow ptarmigan is
sitting. Limits are fascinating things, and for practically no animal in North
America can we describe the limits and how and why they act. These are some
of the things that can be solved by long continued studies in the wilderness
areas where the creatures are not disturbed.
[Richardson's grouse]

This Richardson's grouse was photographed in full hoot by the simple
technique of walking only when he had his eyes shut in ecstasy, glorying in
the noises he was making. This reminded me of North America's advertising.
It sounds far better to the people who are writing it than to those who are
listening. The Richardson's grouse is widely distributed all through the Rocky
Mountain chain, from your own Rocky Mountain areas right through to the

SCIENCE AND THE WILDERNESS

69

Yukon and parts of Alaska. Here again, though there have been three excellent
studies on this bird, we still have a great deal to find out.
[Hoary marmot]

The whistling marmot offers some extremely interesting challenges to
research, not the least of which are presented by the two isolated southern
races looking at each other across the Straits of Juan de Fuca, one of them
in the Olympic Peninsula and the other one isolated on Vancouver Island. How
did they get there? How are they changed from their congeners on the adjoining
mainland, separated from them now by several hundred miles of uninhabited
and uninhabitable territory and sharing alike a common uniform color?
[Porcupine]

There is an excellent study by Walter P. Taylor on the porcupine. But it
is the only one that has been done in North America on the ecology of the
porcupine, an important forest wilderness species.
[Pika]

The pika, or little chief hare, is abundant in its many races, and one of the
species that we now know was separated by the great ice age of North America.
It is now reinvading the territory of British Columbia from the north and from
the south — separated still by the Skeena River and the Peace River gap, one
of the major biological breaks in the faunistics of North America.
[Beaver]

The beaver, well known to all residents of this continent, is very incom-
pletely understood despite four or five quite excellent studies made in the
eastern United States. In mountainous areas, the biology of the beaver is
completely different, and we have to be quite careful I think in interpreting
from one area to another. A most interesting example of this was in connection
with a study of muskrats I was one time making in the Mackenzie River delta.
There is nobody here who doesn't know something about the morals of musk-
rats: they don't have any. They have as many wives as opportunity offers them
and as can be persuaded to cooperate. This is not the case in the Arctic. We
found by long continued studies in the Arctic that muskrats there were monog-
amous. This offers some speculative possibilities that I won't enlarge on here.
[Mule deer buck]

We come now to our larger game animals. The mule deer reaches its north-
ernmost limits in British Columbia and penetrates just north of the northern
boundary of Alberta. From there it extends south into western Mexico; it
extends practically throughout the length of the State of California. Through-
out this area, it has specialized into a number of different strains which I will
not enumerate, but in the northern part of its area its range becomes spotty.
We hear a great deal about animals competing with one another. In point of
fact, however, when you look through all the wildlife literature, it is very dif-
ficult to point to studies where there was actual realistic competition going on.

70

COWAN

But you can find it in these northern wilderness areas, between the groups of
big game animals that inhabit these mountains. The mountains were inhabited
up to 1927 by moose, mule deer, caribou, sheep, and goats. These animals com-
pete for practically nothing! They can live on the same area, using different
parts of it, feeding on different food plants, and getting along very nicely. Then
some overenthusiastic park individual brought two carloads of elk from Yellow-
stone Park, dumped one of them on the valley floor at Banff and the other one
on the valley floor at Jasper; the fat was in the fire. Because the elk is a rugged,
individualistic, highly social animal that competes with everything in its area,
there has been nothing but trouble since then in these Parks. The mule deer,
as the one nearest its range limits, has been the first to suffer. We found, for
instance, that the mule deer was reacting very differently to the stresses of
winter climate and winter competition than were the other large animals on
the range. In one very severe winter, the mule deer lost all their fawns, so they
came out in the spring with no young added to the herd whatsoever. The elk
lost eighty per cent of their young; the moose lost practically none of theirs;
the sheep lost about fifty to sixty per cent of theirs. These are completely dif-
ferent reactions to the same climatic circumstances. What was interesting to
me was that the carry forward of this experience was completely different in
the four different species I have named. The carry-forward in the mule deer
took two years to wear down; that is, the fact that the does had been subjected
to extreme privations in one winter not only killed off the fawns of one year
but interfered with the birth rate of the next. This was not true in any of the
other species, which seems to me to point up some of the biological disadvan-
tages that can be impinging themselves on species as they near the limits of
their range.

[ Young mule deer in snow]

In the middle of winter, in those areas where competition with elk is impor-
tant, the mule deer face a rather devastating situation. Some areas have been
heavily overgrazed by elk. There is only one point in which competition does
not take place. Elk, in our part of the world, do not eat bear berries {Arcto-
staphylos uva-ursi), whereas mule deer will. But in order to get them, they
have to dig down through the snow. The effort expended in getting these nutri-
ents is not sufficiently compensated for. And you have a gradually deteriorating
population — ^practically nothing but spike-antlered bucks and all the other
signs that are now the classics of overpopulated areas.
[Asknola and browsed Douglas firs]

The signs are quite easy to read in the spring; mule deer fawns are found
dead when the snow melts. On a hill behind, however, 147 head of bighorn sheep
passed the winter without a loss, pointing up again the very interesting circum-
stance of specific food needs or specific food requirements. We don't under-
stand what this involves, but we can see it, or the results of it, quite easily in
our wilderness studies.

SCIENCE AND THE WILDERNESS

71

We found that the opportunities offered by the wilderness areas were
extremely important to our studies. That is, you could get close enough to the
animals to be working with individuals, and this I want to emphasize as we go
on. On these spring ranges, it was interesting to find animals that could
scarcely move, that would totter ahead for a few feet and then drop to
the ground. When you examined them, their bones had been so decalcified
that some skull specimens weighed exactly half of what the skull of a nor-
mal mule deer would weigh, as a result of the devastating competition engen-
dered by a large elk population which had been in contact with these mule
deer herds.

[Elk cow and calf in river]

One of the characteristic habits of the elk in the North (I don't know
whether they possess it in the South) is that of taking to the water when they
are pursued by any large carnivore, be it a grizzly bear or a wolf. They take
their young with them to protect them from attack, a practice frequently just
as devastating as leaving them on the bank, because the elk will let these little
fellows stand in the water so long that they become chilled, are unable to come
out, or if they do come out they die from shock.

Grizzly bears in this area characteristically prey on large game. Another
interesting point that came to our attention was the very great difference in the
behavior of the bears in Jasper as opposed to Banff Park. There is no explana-
tion I know of, except that the carnivores educate their young. In Jasper Park,
virtually all the grizzly bears, and we learned to know many of them by their
color, kill big game regularly. In that area there are records of several attacks
on people. In Banff Park we have no record of grizzlies killing big game, and so
far as I remember there are no records of attacks on men.

In our intensive studies of elk, we found up to ninety per cent pregnancy
of the cows in mid-winter; fifty per cent live births pointed to a very large loss
during the late spring and during the birth season. Later, only eighteen cows
out of every hundred had calf yearlings at their heels, whereas ninety out of
every hundred had started out to produce a calf. This gives you some idea of
the tremendous depressive forces that are being brought to bear on animals in
this type of environment.

Another one of the extremely interesting things we were able to do there
was to study the relative proportions of the sexes in populations that had not
been disturbed by hunting. We found, for instance, that in these completely
undisturbed populations only twenty-eight per cent of the herd consisted of
bull elk, that the bull moose outnumbered the cows, that with bighorn sheep the
situation was about fifty-fifty, as it was with goats, and that the caribou had
about the same proportions as the elk. Mule deer proportions were somewhat
indefinite, as the herds were small and the statistics unreliable. So this seems to
point to some rather interesting things. The sheep and the goat are promiscuous
creatures in their reproduction. The caribou and elk are polygamous herders,

72

COWAN

or harem builders, and the moose behaves much hke our deer. It seems, as far
as we can determine at this point, that in the promiscuous creatures the males
have a better chance of winter survival than in the polygamous harem builders.
There may be a lesson in this; interpret it as you will.
[Cow elk]

Disease was one of the most important destructive forces on elk. This jaw
of a very old elk cow shows the ravages of actinomycosis, or lump jaw, one of
the commonest diseases in the elk. Another was hydatid disease, which was
being carried by the wolves of the region.
[Elk tracks on frozen lakes]

Aggregations of tracks around small circular areas show competition be-
tween elk and muskrats. The muskrats were literally eaten out of house and
home, as the elk cleaned up the muskrat houses, and the result was almost a
complete freezeout on these particular ponds, almost eliminating the muskrats.
[Moose calf]

The calf moose has a very hazardous early life, particularly in this area
where the river courses are steep cut, the banks high, and the rivers swift in
the spring at the time of birth. We found that drowning was probably the
most frequent cause of death to the new-born young of moose. The cows would
swim across the river, expecting their calves to follow them up the steep cut
banks on the other side, and the poor little devils just couldn't. We watched a
number of these tragedies and could not help but feel sjmipathy for the little
fellow as the cow walked off into the woods without a backward glance, as if
to say: "Well, if you can't make that you are not very much of a moose
anyway!"
[Moose bull at lick]

Many of the animals in this area patronize the mineral licks. The moose
patronize wet ones, the sheep, goats, and to a degree, the elk patronize the dry
licks in the same region. Don't ask me why, as the analysis of the licks is the
same. The caribou will be found in either wet licks or dry. Moose patronize
these licks more assiduously than any others; in fact they rapidly reach the
state frequently attained in beer parlors very late in the evening, a state of what
I call hydrostatic equilibrium. I don't need to enlarge on that to the assembled
company, nor on the results in the lick.
[Senile cow moose]

Here is an ancient cow that has seen better days. She has lost her figure, is a
bit sway-backed, a little long in the face. She has a scar of battle that she prob-
ably got from the slashing hoofs of another cow. She does not have a calf with
her which may or may not be significant. As far as we can determine, and I
think this is brought out by all other studies that have been made on this con-
tinent, large game animals practically never outlive their breeding years. If
they are sterile, it is not due to old age.

SCIENCE AND THE WILDERNESS

73

[Bull in Alexandra River]

The next slide shows a picture of an old bull feeding in the marshland areas
they characteristically patronize in the summer time. An interesting oppor-
tunity in Banff Park is the result of a mutant pepper-and-salt colored bull moose
that now has two or three young cows showing the result of his genes. These
animals are now marked, we can follow them, and no one will shoot them.
[Goat on Athabasca]

The goats we found to be living on the edge of survival. This didn't seem
to be a matter of competition with anything else, nor did it seem to be a matter
of predation. So far as we could discover in this area, the goats were competing
strictly with the rigors of their environment, and the survival of young was
very low.

[Bighorn on Devona winter range]

This photograph was taken on the second of January. That time of year is
breeding season, and this picture shows a mixed group of bighorns. I have
always had the greatest respect for any animal who gets interested in any other
animal when it is thirty degrees below zero and a howling wind is blowing out
of the west. But that is what the bighorn chooses to do every year, and the
results are very satisfactory. The facilities offered by this great park area per-
mitted me to get close enough to determine the sex and age of 3,500 different
sheep in two years. This offered opportunities that just cannot be equalled
anywhere else, and they are the sort of opportunity that should be capitalized
upon more thoroughly by our research biologists.
[Bighorn ram]

In the early spring when the range is pretty badly grazed off, the rams are
still with the ewes, but almost any day they will separate out and go to their
completely separate summer ranges. The land is sometimes forty miles away
from the winter ranges on rolling uplands, where they are feeding most of the
summer on the dwarf willows that are the dominant vegetation on these alpine
meadows. The ewes choose rugged west-facing slopes, where there are little
grassy ledges close to easy escape terrain. They demonstrate the completely
different reaction of the two sexes to the problems presented by the ever-present
coyotes.

[Two rams — March]

I am sure most of you cannot see these in enough detail to recognize that the
one in front is in the prime of his condition, while the one at the back is very
thin and has had a tough time during the winter. I am reminded of a trip I was
on once with Jimmy Simpson. On this day we had worked up to some 150 big-
horn rams and worked away from each group without disturbing it. Later in
the day, as the sun was getting low, we came over a little slope, and there in
front of us were two bighorn rams. They were about twenty feet away and
lying down with their noses into the wind and their backs towards us. One of

74

COWAN

them had a tremendous horn on one side and a broken one on the other. I have
seen this many times, and have been forced to wonder about the nature of a
blow that could sever the horn of one of these creatures. Jimmy looked at me
and a twinkle came into his eye. He said: "Let's see how close we can get to
those things." So we started to sneak down closer and closer to them; the wind
was brisk and the turf was soft. Finally, we were standing not five feet from
the sheep and looking down at them. Jimmy, with a glint in his eye, jumped
on the back of one of these rams and grabbed him around the neck. Now this
old ram, the one with the broken horn, had had a tough winter. And, though
this was late August, he hadn't yet shed the winter's fur. So in two great jumps
Jimmy Simpson was left pitched on the greensward, completely swathed in
sheep hair and looking very sheepish indeed. The ram ran about fifty paces and
stopped to look back, as if to say: "What the dickens was that!" Jimmy and I
had just finished celebrating his sixty-seventh birthday.
[Old ram lying down]

This is one old fellow that I knew for four consecutive years. He was one
of a band of twelve, none of which suffered any losses during that time. But this
fellow had very bad arthritis in the left front foot, and on the fourth spring he
showed up with a very severely abcessed condition of the jaw. He had a bad
cough, which indicated to me that he was infected with lung worm, so I put him
out of his misery. The lung worm, the foot rot (at least he didn't have that),
the actinomycotic infection of the jaw and particularly pasteurellosis are the
four main scourges of bighorn sheep in the Rocky Mountains. Pasteurellosis,
particularly at the northern limit of the range, just chopped whole herds off.
One herd I worked with were 160 head when I left them in October. In Novem-
ber word came to me they were dying, and within the following month we picked
up 120 dead ones and the next spring I picked up twenty-five more that had
been buried by the snow. That herd was cut back from 160 to about twenty
in a matter of six weeks owing to a devastating outbreak of pasteurellosis. The
same thing happened in the small group of research animals that I maintain at
the University campus. Bighorns are completely incapable of withstanding
pasteurellosis.
[Bighorn ram in summer]

This old fellow was so fond of salt that he took to coming around our tent
quite regularly. One of the most amusing experiences I have had in the Rockies
with sheep was my first contact with them. We were fifty miles back from the
main auto road in Banff, up Stony Creek. We saw a band of bighorn on the
summit. It was early spring and we decided to start the work by a good stalk,
see how close we could get to them, and get their age and sex before we dis-
turbed them. So we sneaked and sneaked for nearly an hour and got right up to
timberline. The animals were lying on the rocky promontory above us, and
we were able to examine most of them. Then with the job done and no other
sheep around we stood up to start back down the hill. Immediately upon seeing

SCIENCE AND THE WILDERNESS

75

US the sheep got up out of their beds, ranged in a row on the top of the promon-
tory, and came dashing down the hill towards us as fast as they could. They
came right up to us, licked our hands, licked our boots, and we picked ticks off
with our hands. On examination, some of the animals revealed that they had
spent the summer at Lake Minnewanka Auto Camp. They hadn't seen anybody
since October, and boy, were they glad to see us.
[Timber wolf cub]

This is the scourge of the wilderness, the timber wolf. This miserable little
fellow is chained up with a chain that would hold a grizzly bear. It happened
that the hobble chain off my horse was the only thing I had. I got him off a Park
warden, who in an outburst of enthusiasm had dug out a wolf den; wolves
were supposed to be protected in the Park at that time. He had killed two of
the pups, had brought this one back alive for some reason unknown to me,
and the fourth pup was a much better digger than the warden and was still
going. I took the pup from the warden, put a tag in its ear, carried it back six
miles on my way back and released it somewhere close to the den. Everybody
thought I was crazy, because the scalp smuggled out of the Park was worth
twenty-five dollars. This fellow lived for five years. He found his mother ap-
parently, or at least survived for five years, because I got the tag back twenty-
five miles away from where I placed it. It was shot by a trapper just outside
of the Park.

Another wolf we tagged was taken 150 miles away three years later. These
wolves in the Rockies were moving quite considerable distances. In fact, one
of the most interesting studies I was able to make in the Park was made under
very different circumstances from that memorable study made by the Muries in
Mount McKinley National Park. Although I studied wolves for three years, I
saw them only once, but I was able to find out a very great deal about them
by some ingenious techniques that are offered to you by the pack organization
of wolves and by the different distribution of colors in the pack, so that you
can identify the different packs. Also, all the wardens in this area were inter-
connected by telephones, so that the wardens were seeing the wolves when I
wasn't, and we could follow the packs from place to place, chart their ranges,
camp on their trails, determine the number of animals they were killing per
day, per month, etc., and really learn a great deal about them.

The time we saw the wolves was quite entertaining. I was watching this as I
would watch a side show. I was on top of a small mountain, or big hill, watching
my assistant working on an adjacent hill. Finally, right opposite him, five wolves
came out on a ridge and sat down to have a look at him. He was in behind a
big boulder, sitting down having a snack. The wolves howled, and Jim howled
back and poked his head up over the rock. Two of the wolves detached them-
selves from the group; one of them started to worm its way down the slope
towards Jim, creeping from boulder to boulder, flat on its belly the way you
sometimes see a dog sneaking. The other one simply evaporated. Now I could

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see the other one, but Jim couldn't. It was coming up behind him. But as the
wolf in front got closer and closer, Jim got the feeling of creepiness in the back
of his neck I think, because he started glancing over his shoulder. I was watch-
ing all this with field glasses from above, and he started to get extremely
nervous. Finally, his nervousness broke to the point where he took a shot at
the wolf that was sitting like a big dog with his tongue hanging out, looking at
the boulder twenty-five yards away. Jim missed it absolutely clean. He told me
afterwards that his hands were shaking so much that he could not have hit the
broad side of a barn door.

The wolf situation there was intensely interesting. There were approxi-
mately thirty-five wolves in the area when I entered it, and when I left it five
years later after having killed none, there were still about thirty-five wolves.
The old idea that animals go on breeding with the greatest of enthusiasm just
doesn't work out. There are all kinds of forces that impinge themselves on
such large and relatively safe predators as wolves and grizzly bears. (I marvel
that nobody yet has tackled the study of the grizzly bear,* because there is
an abundance of opportunities for study in the wilderness areas. It would take
somebody with courage, some ingenuity, some tenacity, but it is one of the
most fascinating studies still to be made. You would have to be a good hiker.
I followed a grizzly bear once for thirty-six miles, and he was still going when I
quit. But there are very excellent opportunities.) Following wolves as we were,
we found they were killing about one large game animal per month per wolf.
Now in a population density of game such as was present in the Park at that
time, by the time the winter was over and the new lot of young were being born
to the game animals, there were still about 350 head of game per wolf. Of course
under these circumstances, the wolf couldn't make the slightest impression upon
them, and the wolves were a completely inconsequential part of the environment.

One of the interesting things one learns about predators when he is living in
a country where he can watch them and watch the game animals they are
preying on, is that the game animals tend to disregard them. Just ten days
ago, I was standing on the wharf at Cape San Lucas (Baja California) looking
down on a great shoal of Sergeant Major fish. Scattered through the shoal
were barracuda — ^which live on Sergeant Major fish. There was a little ring of
respect around each barracuda, a respect that was about three feet wide, but
apart from that the fish were completely neglecting the barracudas. Yet as I
watched, the barracuda would dart forward six inches and seize one of the fish
and eat it. I have seen the same thing in the Rocky Mountains. I have seen a
great black timber wolf lope through a band of feeding bighorn. The bighorn
would get up from their beds and watch him as he went through, but they are
attuned to reading intention by position and action and they knew that the
animal wasn't hungry. I have looked down on caribou herds from the air and

* Studies of grizzlies that promise fascinating results are being conducted in Yellowstone
by Drs. John and Frank Craighead — aided by a tranquillizer (for the bears). — Ed.

SCIENCE AND THE WILDERNESS

11

seen twenty or thirty caribou trotting along the trail followed by four or five
wolves, followed by twenty or thirty caribou, then a couple more wolves, all
going in the same direction and all perfectly peaceful, until the wolves got
hungry. Then they would eat, and then the caribou would go on neglecting
them again.

Also you learn that the individual with courage, and luck, usually survives
even a wolf attack. I remember following the tracks of three or four wolves
down the Athabasca River, above the canyon. They were chasing a cow elk.
She had gone to bay in one of the little promontories of the canyon, put her
back out towards the edge of the canyon, put her head down, and you could
just see the tracks in the snow and imagine what had happened. The cow had
come to bay. Her ears were back, her hair was up, and her foot was raised.
The wolves would not attack. They left her and went on to find something that
would not face them. On a similar occasion I followed three wolves, a mother
and two cubs, as they jumped a big bull moose. He just lumbered up to the
nearest Douglas fir tree, put his back against it and his head down, and they
quit him right there. They weren't going to face anything like that, but within
300 yards they killed a yearling elk that ran away. These large very efficient
carnivores can kill anything they can catch — anything that will run away
from them. I have known them to go two weeks without making a kill, although
the area was full of moose and caribou. But there was four feet of snow on the
ground, and under those circumstances the wolf has no chance in the world of
catching anything to eat. After two weeks of trying they forsook that area
and went down the Smoky River to areas of lower snowfall.
[Hydatid disease in mule deer]

This is a photograph of the lungs of a blacktail deer, showing hydatid
disease infection and cysts. There were twelve cysts in that lung. This is one
of the most prevalent parasites in northern British Columbia and one of the
reasons why we have been controlling wolves there, even where the damage
they are doing is inconsequential. There is little use being made of the game
in these areas that are still untouched in the north central part of our province.
The wolves were distributing this parasite, which was in turn entering the
Indian sled dogs, when they ate the offal of the moose, and then infecting the
children and the adults of the Indian population of the central part of the
province. We were getting a rather high infestation rate, and in man this is a
serious disease because man is long-lived.
[Two bears]

Finally, here is the cleanup squad which is so very important in the ecology
of the wilderness areas: the black bear. Obviously, neither of these is black, but
their mother was. Black bears come in as many colors as human beings, and
the white one here is a honey blonde, an albino. It had pink eyes and light
claws, etc. The bears are very sensitive to certain environmental circumstances
we don't yet understand. We have had very serious food conditions for bears

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in some years, when there was a complete berry crop failure in the Rockies.
These are the years when you have trouble in the villages, and in which appar-
ently many of the bears die during hibernation, or shortly after hibernation.
But there is considerable thinning out of the bears during years of very poor
crops or complete berry crop failure. Then a couple of years after that you are
apt to find very large htters. In one year we had three litters of four in the black
bears of this Park area. That was two years after a berry crop failure. These
are observations that are largely unsupported as yet, because the studies have
not been prosecuted to the point where they mean anything. But it is these
observations that start you on the route to examining things that may lead to
truths of some importance.

As I mentioned earlier, the major part of the studies we have already com-
pleted concern themselves with forces that build, confine, or destroy popula-
tions. There is still a great deal to be learned in these areas, the areas of popu-
lation study, but I have been increasingly impressed with the need to study
the individual. This is as true when we study them in the lab as when we study
them in the wild, because the population is constructed of individuals. Not until
we understand the individual will we understand what is happening to the
population. We have learned a great deal by applying statistics and actuarial
methods and techniques to the study of wild game, but we have also hidden a
great deal. We have applied our statistics in the wrong places. We are con-
vinced now that it is better not to apply the statistics until the final denominator
on the individual is reached.

Here, even more than with population studies, the dedicated wilderness
areas are essential to the progress of research and to the solution of the prob-
lems that face us, because only here can you mark your individual with reason-
able assurance that the interference of man is not going to remove it before
you learn very much from it. It is highly important, therefore, that this aspect
of wilderness be considered in detail, as existing reserve areas are reviewed and
as additional ones are established, as they will certainly be in the northern
parts of this continent, and as they are being at the moment in the Yukon, in
the Mackenzie Arctic, and in the eastern Arctic of Canada. The wilderness
contributes to science not only unique opportunities for research but the con-
stant revitalizing stimulus of contact with the mysterious. And lest I be called
unscientific in suggesting that the mysterious is worthy, may I end my talk to
you with a quotation from no less a person than Albert Einstein?

The most beautiful thing that one can experience is the mysterious. It is the basis of
all true art and true science. He to whom this reaction is a stranger, who can no longer
pause, wrapped in awe, is as good as dead, for his eyes are closed.

RAYMOND B. COWLES

Population Pressure
and Natural Resources

A prominent ecologist, Dr. Cowles recently returned to
South Africa, the land of his birth, to observe ecological phe-
nomena, including the impact of man on the African wilder-
ness. His findings have been published in the unique book
Zulu Journal, by the University of California Press.

World population pressures are dramatically likened to
skin cancer: the cancerous multiplication of human beings
threatens wild animal life, the forest, and even the very soil
upon which man himself depends. This progressive disease
cannot be arrested by palliative measures; the immediate estab-
lishment of wildlife preserves and wilderness areas, while by
no means to be abandoned, will not in itself guarantee con-
servation. To save the biotic world — including man — we must
emulate the physician, who in treating cancer seeks to control
random and excessive multiplication of cells.

BEHIND EVERYTHING that I am going to say is the Malthusian principle: the
principle, expressed 150 or 200 years ago, that man has the capacity to out-
grow his resources by continued multiplication until some limiting factor stops
reproduction, and he comes into equilibrium with his environment. Malthus
painted a very gloomy picture, which fortunately did not come true, and it has
been customary to discredit Malthus's views because his timing was wrong. But
there are a great many people today who are looking with considerable concern
at the inroads on our resources, including, of course, inroads on our wilderness
areas and sanctuaries.

These people fear, and with good reason, that we may realize the Mal-
thusian principle by destroying and exhausting our resources and thus disen-
abling ourselves to realize the standard of living which has been the objective
of our country, and the world, since time began. I am more optimistic; we may
still have time to develop maximum efficiency in the utilization of our resources
toward the greatest good for a reasonable number. If we have time to learn the
lesson, then of course our worries are needless. But there is the danger that we
will not look far enough ahead to allow ourselves the time and the opportunity
to avoid some obvious pitfalls.

Many demographers and some economists, for example, have been crying
"wolf" about our petroleum supply. Ever since I can remember, petroleum has
been about to run out. Presently, petroleum in its available form is in sufficient

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supply to last for about fifteen years of peak production. Then it will rapidly
fall off. I think, with respect to petroleum, that we may have some latitude;
but we must be very careful, because ninety-five per cent of our agriculture,
our food supply, depends upon power supplied by petroleum.

Because of the well-known population explosion our natural resources are
dwindling as measured on a per capita basis. However large a given resource
may be, double the population and the per capita share is automatically halved.
For resources that are in limited supply, halving them makes them wholly
unequal to the demand. For finite resources, such as oil, ores, and coal, this
doubling effect will get us to the bottom of the barrel in a proportionately short
time. Time, during which we can discover and substitute other things (the
hydrogen reaction as a source of energy, for instance) may be so shortened that
substitutes cannot be made available — if they exist. The longer we delay the
recognition of this fact, the longer it will be before we bring our own ecology
into the same sort of balance that we insist upon in nature and in farming.

This is just one of the things that concern these people and which give rise
to the Paley Report on resource depletion and the need for stock piling. Ours
has gone from a nation exporting raw materials to one into which we import
ever greater quantities. We have expended our own resources to obtain wealth
from the world around — with which we exploit our country.

Yesterday, we heard a recital of some of the dangers that beset wilderness
areas, wildlife resources, and resources for scientific study. I might just run
over them. The East Coast of the United States is now subdivided from the
Canadian boundary south — from the middle of Maine clear through to the tip
of the Florida peninsula. This long line of once "unlimited" coast is now com-
pletely occupied. Our marine littoral in Southern California has virtually dis-
appeared. We heard how the coral reefs have been stripped. We heard that the
salt marshes on our Southern Cahfornia coast have virtually disappeared. All
of these things have not been used up — in a sense — but our population has
increased to the point where it is using all these resources currently. There isn't
room enough for the people who would like to live on the beach to get to the
beach and own property there. As our numbers increase, so will the pressure
on this resource. We cannot destroy a shoreline or a waterside habitat — we
cannot destroy the actual length and breadth of it — but we can use it and
deprive others of its use, which means that the pressure of competition for
this limited resource rises. This will be true of all our resources.

Last summer, on a hot week end in Los Angeles, everyone went to the beach.
The lifeguards made a census of the number of people who were on the beach
on that day. The census was published (you know Los Angeles, everything big-
ger and better) ; this was fine: a big crowd. But I took the trouble to figure
the mileage from the Mexican boundary to the Ventura County line and sub-
tracted Camp Pendleton, the Marine Base, from this and came up with the
fact that the people who were on the beach that one day, had they spread out

POPULATION PRESSURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

81

evenly between the Mexican boundary and the Ventura County line, would
have had only two and one-half linear feet of beach apiece. Now if we double
our population as we hope to (in fact, our ambitious Chamber of Commerce in
Los Angeles would like to quadruple our population for some reason) this will
reduce the linear space on the beaches, and on all waterside resorts, until we
will have standing room and nothing more.

This indicates the subtle corrosion of our standard of Hving: less and less
pleasure, fewer and fewer of the amenities of life, as we get more and more
crowded. Someone is always jostling our elbows. On the freeway, it might be
more than a jostled elbow. We cannot keep ahead of the race for more and more
people, with the greater and greater resources they require. In fact, changing
Malthus a bit, I would say that today probably our greatest immediate danger
is that we will grow too fast to be able to keep up with our own growth, just as
with the highways: one is barely finished, and it is so overcrowded that another
must be begun. This is a Hmitless, endless, process. And we, as organisms, have
the capacity to continue reproducing in this fashion — and there is no known
antidote to this continual reproduction — until we will resemble China, India,
and other such countries. Already, I personally feel, the amenities of life are
dwindling away rather rapidly because of overcrowding. Even in the Sierra,
and in other remote places, it is not infrequent that you may have to stand
beside a trail for half an hour, waiting for a crowd of travelers to pass. I know
of one instance where a man waited for an hour and a half for one group of
Sierra Club members to pass him on the trail. They are the best of all people,
but too many people at one time in one place rather detract from the feeling that
an area is a wilderness.

Well, these things are implicit in the minds of all. I wanted to go over them
briefly, because I am taking the vignette approach to what I have to say today ;
these little excerpts by themselves may appear isolated, but they will intertwine
and give meaning, I hope, when I reach the end of the presentation. I should
also say that when I lecture on resources to my class at UCLA, I devote not
less than seven fifty-minute lectures to the material I am trying to cover here
in less than fifty minutes. You see, I will have to use this sketchy vignette type
of approach and allow you and your knowledge to integrate these things into a
coherent whole.

Every time I travel up and down our coast or eastward to the Atlantic, I
am amazed anew at the still limitless expanses of unoccupied lands, and I won-
der once again at the foresight of those who have already worked to set aside our
National Parks and our wilderness areas. I feel much the same when I fly over
Africa and view its unused wild lands, and again I feel the resources of the
world are limitless and that our space troubles are interplanetary rather than
global. Yet, when we look closer at this picture and see the square miles of
closely bordering farmlands wherever farming is possible, and when the coun-
try's good acreage is given over either to farming, or to residences, or to tier on

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tier of apartment houses, streets, highways, and airports, I think we obtain a
glimpse into the future. Most of our citizens, especially the younger ones, have no
concept of the rate at which wild lands — or all lands — are being utihzed today.
Just recently I commented to a medical friend of mine that if his fraternity
continued to encourage reproduction and so successfully to reduce the death
rate, we would soon be in trouble for lack of food. His reaction was angry —
and personal — and he asked if I had ever seen our unending supply of farm-
lands stretching eastward from the mountains of Southern Cahfornia to the
plains of Kansas. When I protested that lack of water might prevent the use of
these lands for farming, he repHed that when we needed water we would get it.
That intervening land, in case some of you haven't been over it, is the Southern
California, Arizona, and Utah desert — clear over the Rockies and eastward
until you reach genuine agricultural country, where rainfall is greater than
fifteen inches per year.

The widespread lack of perception of our inroads against nature comes
from such thinking as that of the medic ; but it is even more largely a result of
the fact that the environmental changes during a year, or even several years,
are like the evidence of human decay: almost imperceptible to those who have
never left their aging friends. Change is creeping, but it is remorseless, and since
man in numbers is the cause of these changes in our wildlife and our lands, and
since he will apparently increase his numbers to maximum levels, the rate of
his occupation and use of resources will increase correspondingly or at a greater
rate.

For instance, this Conference would never have been thought of one hun-
dred years ago. At that time, nobody could ever have dreamed that there
would be a shortage of wildlife, lands, and forests.

It was from widely spaced visits to Africa that I learned to see the clues
to an alarming future, in which man's needs and his numbers will increasingly
jeopardize the wilderness and himself. From this came, first, a glance back at
the United States, then a searching study to see if there could be a parallel
between our country and what I had seen in advanced stages in the native
reserves, where Malthus's predictions are coming true. What I saw as I looked
over my shoulder, so to speak, from the land of natives to the United States and
our wealth here, was a sort of specter, because there was the example of how
things might go wrong with the United States unless we use our scientific
knowledge.

Because of the comparatively long intervals between my visits to the wild
lands of Natal and Zululand, the cumulative changes became starkly apparent.
But if in one man's lifetime, the wildlife of an area as large and diversified
as the Union of South Africa can suffer such contraction as it has, what of the
changes in our children's and our grandchildren's lifetimes? I can only say
that because the damage has resulted from growing numbers of human beings,
and because they will undoubtedly increase by total numbers amounting to two

POPULATION PRESSURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

83

or four times the increase through my lifetime, my children, in the broad sense,
or certainly their children, may be forced to destroy out of their needs and
popular demand, many of the things that we here hope to preserve during these
days of setting aside and protecting the wilderness. Several decades ago South
Africa found it necessary to develop game laws, forestry laws, and even laws
against picking wildflowers — this in a remote African continent, which we
think of as underpopulated and so spacious. Laws to prevent the picking of
wildflowers! That seemed to me to be the epitome of the changes that have
occurred in that continent in so short a time. These are all due to rising pres-
sure on resources which threatens preservation of nature.

It seems incredible that the Dark Continent, that remote and richly en-
dowed part of the globe, could be giving us lessons on the needs and difficulties
of preserving nature and a unique fauna. To the inexperienced on that continent,
there may appear to be no danger. To the old timer, the signs are everywhere,
but they are most notable in the Union of South Africa. In fact. South Africa
is a field station ideally arranged for the study of human ecology and on a
more comprehensible scale than in our country, which is so large and complex.
It also has the additional value of providing us with an experiment on compe-
tition between nearly identical subspecies of an organism for their survival.
This is the Black versus the White. Unfortunately, the purely human emotional
overtones are there. Competition has led to fear, distrust, and hatred. I am fairly
certain that the inevitable biological solution is war between the subspecies
and survival of the more desirable of the two — survival in the broad sense.
Certainly the danger hangs ominously over the entire country. Here again, I
would like to interpolate a comment: the war that is being fought there now
might not be properly called a cold war because it is a war of the cradle. Con-
sciously the 'Whites," unconsciously the "Blacks" and the mixtures, are having
a race to see who outpopulates the other; and this in a country which is pre-
carious, as you will see, with respect to natural resources. It is war by the
cradle. Cold war, hot war? Probably hot war!

I am convinced that preservation of South Africa's wildlife and wilderness
areas, at any time beyond the next generation, can continue only so long as
there is White domination. The revolt may come within a decade, or within a
few decades, and the Whites can maintain their domination only so long as they
can provide a tolerable living standard for the Blacks. There is insufficient time
in which to indoctrinate and to educate the Blacks so that they will look at the
fauna and flora as valuable resources, in terms of esthetics and science, rather
than in terms of meat. The African name for wild animal is ny-ah-ma; that is
also the word for meat. They speak of their wildlife as meat rather than, as we
do, of the various species. How long a time we have depends upon a number of
factors, but in terms of continued population growth, it will almost certainly
be less than another generation. (I'm speaking of South Africa here.) Our
children may, and our grandchildren almost certainly will, read of the disap-

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pearance of most of the wildlife in the southeastern part of the African con-
tinent. It is very difficult to conceive of a hard-pressed people, with a history
of warfare and hunting behind them, submitting peacefully to the continued
regimentation and domination by Whites, while they themselves are suffering
actual protein want, and a protein want that is becoming ever more acute.

Over many successive bad years, the drought years, maize and wheat even
now must be imported into South Africa. This importation is made possible only
because of the country's enormous mineral wealth and its rapidly increasing
manufacturing activities. But is it wise to rely solely upon the mining industry
to supply food, imported from abroad, to a turbulent people who are already
on the verge of starvation, and who are becoming serfs to industry, in a sense?

Apparently the Union of South Africa feels no concern as to the possibility
of continually feeding its people by this means. This is because of the country's
vast metallurgical resources, its cheap labor, and its moderate amount of coal.
But unfortunately, with an enormous store of fissionable material, it expects
to supplement the domestic food shortages of inadequate local production by
trading the products of its industries for surplus foods from "elsewhere." I
asked the officials who are planning to put all their faith on export of raw
materials and industrial products where this surplus existed elsewhere. They
said, "All over the world." I asked them, "Could you be more specific?" and
they said, "Yes, the United States will supply it in exchange for our products."
They are thinking of eventually exporting cars to this country. They must
succeed in this plan to support their people ; the plan simply must not fail, for
if the government fails to feed its people by this means, only the government
will be blamed, and government, to black people, means the Whites.

As part of these precarious plans, we in the United States come into the
picture. At the present time we are the only country in the world that produces
massive surpluses, and some of our farmers look forward to only a decade
hence, when we will consume all that we can produce. But what then of South
Africa and all the other industrializing nations? For that matter, from where
(other than Canada) will we get basic foods when we have subnormal crop
years, as we do recurrently? That is, when we are eating all of our surpluses
each year, and then we run into bad years, from where will we get our surpluses?

When we consume all our produce in the good years, and when our popu-
lation will presumably double in fifty to sixty years (this is the latest demo-
graphic figure), what will be our descendants' attitude toward wild lands that
are capable of producing food here in our back yard?

Please withhold judgment, while I go through some material that is rather
hard to swallow, but which I hope to make more palatable later.

There are many puzzling questions as to the probable success of industrial-
ization for feeding a steadily rising population in any land or nation. So far,
however, it is not our problem (or so it is said) except that backward people,
impoverished people, or wealthier people with a steadily diminishing supply

POPULATION PRESSURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

85

of food (or steadily rising food prices due to lack of surpluses) are apt to become
restive. This is particularly acute to us today, because we are having to win
the friendship of the so-called backward people, or the underdeveloped coun-
tries, throughout the world. (There was an article this morning in the news-
papers about the necessity of our supplying them with capital, food, and the
means to a livelihood. This, I think, is of great concern to us.) I am thinking
of Asia and Africa, mainly — when I say that people are becoming restive — and
of Latin America. I think it is entirely reasonable to ask questions, even for
the United States with its great wilderness areas, because our annual population
increase is already four and one-half millions per year. That was our last year's
crop of children — four and one-half millions. Unless we know how to hold our
wilderness areas against the rising needs of an increasing abundance of human-
ity there does not appear to be much point in establishing them, since they
are ultimately to be ravaged by would-be exploiters supported by a self-inter-
ested and unappreciative, or unwise, public.

We are accustomed to thinking of our wilderness areas and wildlife preserves
in terms of "all time"; in fact, the words ''in perpetuity" have been frequently
used in these meetings. This idea is frequently associated with their establish-
ment— always, I think, with the establishment of wilderness areas.

When speaking in this manner, I presume that by "in perpetuity" we mean
not less than three generations beyond the present one. Because of the unpre-
dictable effects of population explosions, both here and throughout the world
(and the world's annual new crop of some forty-eight million more mouths to
feed) we cannot logically expect sentiments regarding wilderness areas to
remain forever precisely as ours. If future pressures for resources can change,
then we must look forward to and plan for long-term strategies that will pro-
long and make them "perpetual," if that is possible.

For example, if now and then we fail to keep inviolate our present wilder-
ness areas at our present population, can we expect them to be enjoyed by our
great-grandchildren? There are already successful inroads into wilderness areas
and into our wildlife resources; if we can't prevent them now, what will the
condition be when the pressures for these resources — even if only for space —
are much greater than at the prseent time? It seems to me that we should be
forced to reexamine the basic premise of our problems, to see wherein we might
be overlooking the effects of numbers multiplied by time. I think there is a
simple answer, but that we will use it I doubt. If you don't agree with what I
have said already about my perturbation over diminishing supplies and areas
with rising populations, then your doubt of the statements is the reason for my
belief that we may well fail to take the necessary steps in time to preserve
our lands.

This month the United Nations demographers have stated that the world's
population has passed the three billion mark. At this rate, the next generation
will exceed six billion and the subsequent one twelve billion. You see, this is not

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a static thing. We don't come to a level and then maintain that level. We are
always increasing the population.

At present reproductive rates and death rates — if these two hold as they are
— this means that before our great-grandchildren grow up, each year's crop of
children (and they are already a surplus for more than fifty per cent of the
world) would be sufficient to more than replace the entire present population
of the United States, which is approximately 170 million, every year. If this
goes on for three more generations, then every year the surplus children of the
world would entirely repopulate the United States, up to its present level.

Although the establishment of wilderness areas and all other types of wild-
life preserves, and the consequent running battles to retain them, are now an
obvious necessity, I am afraid that over the next few decades we will discover
that this type of activity, alone and by itself, cannot withstand the coming
flash-flood of humanity and the pressures that accompany it, and that we will
find it difficult to preserve for our greatgrandchildren the benefits that we
envision for them. We, the United States (and the rest of the world), are
threatened by an ecological sickness that resembles not a static condition of
organic ill health but a progressive illness. Palliative measures cannot arrest
such a disease ; only the treatment of the underlying causes can do so.

Although the analogy of skin cancer has been used by others in order to
picture our ecological ills, the analogy so vividly illustrates the prospects for
preserving the wilderness that it should be expounded again and again.

To explain: little more than a hundred years ago the reasons for this con-
ference would have been unimaginable. To use the cancer analogy, at that time
the living world's innate defenses against a threatening imbalance of self-
reproducing units (that is, human beings) had been at work in the form of
viruses, bacteria, and starvation to curb the growth of population. These forces
worked automatically, and nature was ruthlessly successful in preventing the
development of a pathological condition — that is, overpopulation — on the
world's biotic surface. However, collectively these cells (or human beings)
have become relatively free from the balancing forces of death and at an acceler-
ating rate they have increasingly multiplied and invaded hitherto uninvolved
tissues (that is, areas of the world), especially those remaining healthy (such
as wilderness areas). If cancer cells go unchecked in their multiplication, they
will kill the body that supports them. If man reproduces unchecked, what con-
sequences will there be to the remaining small bits of uninfected land, the
islands, the wilderness areas, the sanctuaries, the parks, and so on? Orange
groves are disappearing from Los Angeles County and from adjacent counties.
What remain are just little patches and they are only temporary. The cancer
is even now spreading below the surface of the Earth in the form of mining
and other extraction industries so vital to survival of the human biota. What
will happen to the host itself, to our entire biosphere? The human population
has virtually enveloped all the good earth. We have a layer of humanity, or of

POPULATION PRESSURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

87

human activities, that now covers all the globe excepting the poles — the Arctic,
the Antarctic, and the mountaintops. And even there, wandering cells are
penetrating, drifting, and looking for more resources.

I need not pursue this analogy of growth and the spreading metastases of
skin cancer. We can see the analogy in the multiplying human beings, and we
see its effects when we fly over our land and when we view the communities
that are strung along our highways. Personally, I think that Southern Cali-
fornia offers a particularly apt example of the spread of these metastasizing
units along the vascular network of our highways, setting up ever new colonies.
These new colonies are followed by the discovery of new pathways to ever
more favorable and more beautiful areas. We already see an unending multi-
plying and remultiplying effect, until man virtually will have destroyed the life-
giving layer on which agriculture and his own welfare depend.

There is no innate self-hmiting factor discernible, and apparently, once it
gets beyond control, the only cure for either genuine skin cancer or its analogy
is the death of the host as well as of the causative cells. Is it possible that the
analogy can be carried forward to prophesy the inevitable conclusion for man
as a spreading and metastasizing agent? Long before death overtakes the
victim of cancer from the wild, uncontrolled, and irrational multiplication of
lethal cells, this type of illness becomes increasingly apparent through a suc^
cession of mounting symptoms, at first minor, but uncomfortable. Only through
the early recognition of these symptoms, and drastic treatment, can there be
hope for preventing ultimate death of the whole organism.

Here we end the use of this vivid analogy; it is an ugly one, which I hope
may help to clarify and portray the effects of uncontrolled human multiphcation.

On a more optimistic note, I believe that new developments — tracer element
research in agriculture, radiation and mutation, economical large-scale process-
ing of oil sands and shales, and use of atomic energy for metal mining — may
combine to again postpone for at least a short time the food and shelter predic-
tions of Malthus. But this new hope should provide no assurance to proponents
of wilderness areas or sanctuaries for wildlife. We will become even more
densely populated if we can extend the use of these finite materials for a time,
and then our plight will become even more desperate.

I think too many of us are prone to believe that man can forever solve the
problem of his subsistence, irrespective of his numbers, and that somehow
preservation of wildlife areas and wilderness can be continued hand in hand
with this increase, without at the same time making any effort to achieve the
ecologically necessary balance between human populations and the amounts
of living space and resources. My own opinion is that it cannot be done, and
that what we are seeing is a premonitory, incipient expression of the Malthusian
principle that is causing stresses in preservation of the wildlife resources and so
on at the present time. Our grandparents could never have envisioned our
present dilemmas with respect to wildlife and the wild lands.

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COWLES

Evidence for this assertion can be found in several kinds of human reactions.
A seemingly trivial local example is the steadily rising cost of waterfront prop-
erty, wherever it may be: beaches, streams, or lakefronts. The amount of hnear
footage is still the same as it ever was, but the pressure is increasing immeas-
urably. The capacity to overwhelm beauty in nature is innate in excessive
numbers of any animal, and man is no exception to this rule. We are ecologically
out of balance with our world already.

The demand for invasion of wilderness-sanctuary areas for water storage
and power dams, oil rights, iron ore, irrigation, forests, farm lands, and so on
is now but a gentle movement in comparison to what it will be with our predicted
population of even forty years hence (which presumably will be two times our
present one, or 340 million, to be fed with these resources that we have). I
suspect that nothing having potentiality for satisfying the necessities, in the
broad sense, can even briefly survive this kind of developing hunger.

It is not difficult to multiply examples: you have the pressures for lake
fronts, stream sides, beach frontage, mountain property, anywhere there is
beauty. These resources are as ample as they ever were, but not in terms of our
present population size. You see, underlying everything is our population size,
again and again. This is the basic factor. It isn't that we have used up or con-
sumed some of these things, but that we have simply outgrown them in terms of
numbers relative to available areas.

With continually mounting populations, by their sheer numbers, the
pressure for property and the prices for natural scenic property anywhere can
be expected to parallel the developments in waterfront property. As I see it,
the stages that accompany population-density growth will take approximately
the following insidious steps: First, we see the need for wilderness areas; for
their beauty, their peace, their scientific value. We restrict the wilderness areas
to foot travel or to horse travelers, but their numbers will increase along the
trails until one is never out of sight or sound of others. Then there will be more
trails added in order to dilute the density of the hikers on the trails ; and we will
probably have pack burros and horses increasingly to get to more remote areas
and allow people to escape to the very thing for which wildlife and wilderness
areas were established — solitude. So we will crowd, then develop more trails in
more and more remote areas. Following this, there will be pressure for access
roads — for fire protection, chiefly, or for those that don't have the hardihood
to do it on their own feet or on horseback to traverse and merely see unspoiled
nature. Then there will be requests for fixed campsites to localize the damage
from an excess of people in the area. Then there will be demands for other
campsites within the area so that more people can linger and enjoy the wilder-
ness. A store, then stores, to supply food for more campers. I think most of you
follow me; this is supposed to be a prediction, but I've seen it happening
already. These stores will spread through the area to supply more food for
more campers. Then we will see demands rising for the establishment of inns.

POPULATION PRESSURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

89

as they will be called, but they will be hotels, and then more of these inns or
hotels, in order to supply comfort for the people who are not rugged enough to
take the wilderness by themselves. Then there will be demand for amusements
associated with these inns and resting places to beguile the people who are bored
during the hours of evening and night when they can't see anything. This will
be repeated and there will be an insidious multiplication of these types of ac-
commodations to take care of ever more people. And there will be more roads
to give more fire protection, more accommodations, and to dilute the harmful
effects of local pressures we will have a spreading web of roads, until there is no
genuine wilderness left. Then there will be frank conversion of these accommo-
dations to resort use. Ultimately — because we no longer have a wilderness —
subdivision could logically follow. Who cares beyond that?

If it is doubted that increasing populations will demand almost precisely
these steps and in the order given above, we may merely look around at our most
popular National Parks and witness these stages of this evolution, and the
struggles, as those who wish amusements enter the Parks. The same situation
prevails around the world, for human nature is much the same everywhere. I
was amazed to run into traffic jams en route to the Kruger National Park,
where you see wild elephants and lions, and to encounter insufficient accommo-
dations for tourists. They are going to build more camps. And that's in the
heart of the Dark Continent!

Finally, with the population of the United States now increasing at some-
what less than four and one-half milHon per year (and with the rate increasing
with each crop) pressure cannot remain constant. Simply to allow each of these
new persons one acre of space and solitude for a simultaneous summer holiday
would already require the addition of 7,031 square miles of park or wilderness
each year, just to accommodate our annual new crop of potential visitors. So
all I could think of yesterday, when we were hearing of the resources of Alaska,
was that we will have to go to Alaska to get these 7,031 additional square
miles per year of land set aside for wilderness areas and parks.

I do not beHeve that any wilderness or nature park can proffer much hope
for long-range success, unless plans for its perpetuation include in equal (and
probably in even larger) measure successful campaigns for population limita-
tion. It seems to me that it is folly to ignore the human ecology. In the study of
that of other animals, in our plans for saving the primeval wilderness, or even
for saving many fragments in the form of National or State Parks, we cannot
succeed unless we can stem the multiplication of our population within the
very near future. There is already grave doubt as to how long, even with the
population stabilized at present levels, we can persist without destroying our
resources and our security. If we are to save the patient — the biotic world
including man — our only hope would appear to be emulation of the physicians
and learning how to stop the multiplication of these randomly, wildly, multi-
plying cells.

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COWLES

DISCUSSION Starker Leopold, Discussion Leader

Leopold: I think we can see that protecting wilderness is only one facet of this much
larger problem of protecting the ecological security of the human race. I may say that there
are probably few people who have been more favorably situated to observe the ills — or hor-
rors, if you will — of overpopulation than Professor Cowles, who has divided his Ufe between
South Africa and Southern CaUfornia. Certainly Dr. Cowles has brought this difficult
problem to our attention in a way that makes it hard to ignore.

Before opening the problem to general discussion, I would like to amplify one or two
of the ideas just a little. As a biologist, I don't believe that any population can go on
increasing indefinitely. Therefore, I would envision the end product of increasing human
populations in a different way than Professor Cowles. Understand that I am basically a
complete believer in the Malthusian concept of population. Now what will happen to the
human race if we do not control population growth?

I think the sequence will be as follows. As we use up resources, the technologists will
jfind substitutes for us, or so we are told. In finding substitutes for cheap resources, prices
go up: the cost of supplying power, the cost of supplying any other resource that we need,
will rise. As costs rise, living standards will drop. I think that this may be a slow steady
process of attrition in living standards rather than a complete explosion and collapse of the
sort that Dr. Cowles has indicated, and I may say that he has some excellent company,
William Vogt and others, who can envision as a terminal process a major catastrophe.
Nevertheless, I am almost more worried by the slow and gradual attrition in living stand-
ards toward a state where life for the human race may not be worth living.

In this process, however, I do not agree with Professor Cowles's point that the dedi-
cated recreation areas are necessarily going to be gobbled up by the necessity for providing
physical resources on which to live. I think, rather, that this is a matter of establishing
locally in each population a tradition of maintaining parks, wilderness, and wildlife areas.
And, as evidence of this, I would point to the fact that the greatest cities of the world have
parks. In the middle of New York is Central Park. The value of that land is perfectly astro-
nomical as real estate, yet the idea of turning Central Park into real estate would be abhor-
rent to everyone in New York. However low living standards might fall, I don't think that
that is the way it will happen. There are other examples: in Japan, and in many other
areas that are overpopulated in relation to their resource levels, parks (and in the case of
Britain, even wilderness areas) are now being established and developed. They are not being
absorbed to meet physical requirements. Therefore, these are details on which I am taking
issue with Professor Cowles. I am envisioning a slightly different terminal process to the
overpopulation problem. But, unless it is solved, it will most certainly lead to distasteful end
results in terms of living standards and individual happiness.

Richard Leonard (Berkeley) : I agree thoroughly with Starker. In fact, I was going to
say much the same thing. I am completely convinced of the validity of the Malthusian law of
population growth, and I agree that it is a tragic problem that we definitely should pay
more attention to as conservationists. I do think, however, that if I felt that the wilderness
were going to disappear in a few generations, I would not be willing to expend the really
immense amount of effort that is necessary to save it, merely as a delaying action. I think
one of the greatest encouragements is the action of the people of New York State. In 1890,
they wrote into their Constitution that their forest lands should remain "forever wild."
There have been many attempts since then to try to break that down. In 1953 the Wilderness
Council met in the Adirondacks because of the coming vote on that problem. And, through
the leadership of George Marshall, Zahniser, and many other people in the New York area,
the vote was three to one, in spite of tremendous population pressure, to keep that land
"forever wild." This illustrates a tendency, as Starker has indicated, that the wilderness

POPULATION PRESSURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

91

becomes more and more precious as there is less and less of it. The battles will become
increasingly severe, and we may lose considerable portions here and there. But some of the
finest of it is going to be kept just because of the fact that wilderness is a part of the standard
of living that we are desperately going to try to maintain — at least, as Professor Cowles
says, until we are overwhelmed by our own inability to think the thing out in time. It is the
thinking ahead that we have to work out, so that we won't have to make this tragic choice
at the end.

Professor Stanley Cain: Professor Cowles did not say that we would lose our wilder-
ness areas and our National Parks as boundaries on the land. What he said was that we
would lose it as wilderness. It would be occupied progressively by a lot of things which
destroy it, in effect, as wilderness. Central Park and Golden Gate Park are municipal
examples: they are filled with academies of science, academies of art, skating rinks, and
what have you.

James Roof (University of California, School of Forestry): I am interested in the
overcrowding of Southern California. Working there as a field survey crew member, I saw a
great deal of wilderness and very few people. The usage is small and concentrated at certain
waterfronts and other kinds of area and does not seem to be so devastating.

Professor Cowles: That is perfectly true. But I have been in Southern California
since 1916 and have fished most of the streams and wandered through most of the mountains
and the change is peripheral. It is working in, up all the streams, up all the occupiable places.
Here is where the density is increasing. This is imperceptible to a person who hasn't lived
there and perceived the changes slowly taking place. In South Africa, when I spoke of my
concern, the residents said: "Nonsense! Look at all the wild areas we have." That was true
enough, but I have seen the subtraction in my Ufetime of thousands and thousands of square
miles which have been denuded. It takes time, a long interval of time, to appreciate these
changes. It is like aging in a person — you don't see it unless you've been around a long time.
I like the optimistic view, but I just cannot go along with it.

John DeWitt (University of CaUfornia) : I think it is of paramount importance that
we recognize now the danger of continued population growth throughout the world, and I
would like to support Dr. Cowles's view very strongly. Wilderness merely indicates a greater
pressure on our whole natural-resource base ; the economies of this nation and of the world
are at stake, as is our standard of living for the future. This is something we must all
recognize now, and we must take action soon to face this, if we are to survive as a species,
and if we are to have the kind of world in which we want to live.

There is another point, though, that has not been made here, that I think is extremely
important: freedom cannot exist generally in the world unless you have a resource base
that relatively allows expansion of population. As soon as limiting factors take over, as soon
as the population is limited, freedom is limited — freedom of the individual. We are seeing
it today in America ; it is coming very fast. We don't have the freedom that our ancestors
had. There isn't the free land. Little by little, institutions are encroaching on our individual
liberty to the extent that it will not be at all the same in another one hundred years as it is
now — and this even in a democracy. This is related closely to our resources — much more
closely than any of us realize. Many of the causes of war, also, are related to this.

Starker Leopold: I agree with most of that, but let me debate one point. I don't
think that an economy has to be expanding to be healthy. As embarrassing examples, I point
to Switzerland and Sweden, two countries that have stabilized populations and whose living
standards are high and whose degree of freedom, I think, is certainly as great as ours — free-
dom of the individual. So that as expansion can no longer proceed, we needn't be hopeless
about the living standards of freedom of individuals. This is to me one of the heartening
things: that there are places in the world where population is balanced and living standards
are held at a high level. Likewise, I found heartening the fact that the American public is

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COWLES

highly sensitized, apparently, to slight shifts in economic conditions; the rate of birth, in
the recent recession, dropped very sharply — not enough to change the over-all statistical
trend greatly, but there was a marked drop in the number of children conceived during that
short period. In other words, as lowering living standards, meaning lowered economic con-
ditions, begin to come to bear on an educated and advanced populace such as ours, there
will be an automatic tendency toward balance. This I find heartening, though it may not be
enough.

Professor Cowles: With regard to that, we saw it in 1929 and 1930, which many of
you don't remember — this drop in the birth rate, due to changing economic conditions.
However, we must remember the people who are born just before such a recession; they
are doomed to live out seventy years and must adjust to whatever changes may come about
— and they remain consumers throughout that additional seventy years. When I spoke today,
I was thinking in terms of what happened in my one lifetime (which isn't yet seventy years
long) and with a much lower population. I am very much concerned about what will happen
in the next sixty years (my age) with almost twice as large a population. When I came to
this country first I think there were ninety million or 110 million only, and the changes I
have seen have come from that small population to this one. Now what if we double to 370
million? This is the thing that perturbs me, and I'd like to say one more thing in rebuttal to
you, or at least in answer. I am very glad to hear optimistic reports, and I like objections to
my pessimism, I assure you. But I think we can gain more, possibly, by not being over-
optimistic, and I am afraid of the rate of increase — not the sum total necessarily — but that
the rate will exceed our capacity to adjust to the rate of increase and to find new techniques.
And any break in a complex economic system such as ours — take the withdrawal of petrol-
eum for instance, which will some time occur — if we haven't had time to make the necessary
discoveries, technical developments, implementation of a program, with its rapidly burgeon-
ing number of people, then this one little thing could trigger off a catastrophic drop, rather
than a gradual one, as you predict and I wish — of course, I wish that neither of these, either
gradual or catastrophic changes will take place.

Fraser Darling: We've got the idea that Professor Cowles is a pessimist. I'm another.
But we are faced with a problem nevertheless, and what are we going to do ? We have got
to think out ways of tackling this problem, and I would like to just take up with Dick
Leonard what he said, in effect: 'Tf I thought this was going to be the end — three or four
generations hence — I couldn't go on." Presumably, he is an optimist. Well now, I think we
have got to get rid of every illusion we ever had, including that of the expanding economy,
which I think is the greatest continuous illusion that we could possibly have. We mustn't
think in terms, really, of the ends. The great thing is our behavior towards those ends, and
I think perhaps we need our greatest courage to drop our illusions. Perhaps we cannot do
any good at all until we become completely de-illusioned. At least I believe so. The end is
there, but we don't really work for the end — we work for what we think is right towards
that end, even if we do end up in disaster. Perhaps, as I say, that needs a greater courage.

Now, what I think has not been brought out by the discussion, or Professor Cowles, is
that we are thinking in terms of civilized nations moving towards the concept of wilderness
protection. But Professor Cowles has been speaking of Africa, where I imagine the ratio is
about ten to one of wncivilized people. And when you are trying to keep wilderness in the
face of an enormous number of uncivilized people, it isn't the attitudes of mind that we
have developed which count. One must remember that the greatest check to population
growth in our world is a rising standard of living. I know you say also that a slight drop in
the standard of living also checks population, but nevertheless the general trend is that with
a rising standard of living the birth rate goes down. Well now, here are Africa and Asia,
with very low standards of living, and wherever a low standard remains the population will
increase inordinately — and especially as we go in at one end (and, I think, the wrong end)

POPULATION PRESSURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

93

and help that increase in population. But if we do try to tackle this problem, it seems to me
that education is the only possible means by which to raise the standard of living and lower
the birth rate. In a place like Africa we touch on education; the idea is spreading. In Ghana
education has gone quite a long way (much farther than in any place else in Africa) . But
what are we doing? Educating men and not women. Now the position of women in Africa
is generally low indeed. I don't believe that any nation can become civilized while keeping
their womenfolk in a low position in society. If we go on educating men in Africa, while their
wives remain at jungle level, it means that all those children are being reared at jungle level,
because it's the women's standard of living — their notion of life — which really counts in the
early education of children. Until you can bring the womenfolk of Africa and Asia along
at the same speed as you educate the men, you cannot hope for any different attitudes. We
start from scratch with every generation. This seems a long way from wilderness, but I am
sure it's a very important part of it.

Edgar Wayburn (Director, Sierra Club) : Professor Darling's remarks have caused me
to switch what I was going to say. I think he makes a tremendous mistake in saying that
the birth rate always drops with an increase in the standard of living. If this is the case,
what has happened to the United States ? As we have achieved what is generally conceived to
be one of the highest standards of living, we have increased our reproductive capacity (as
well as our ability to keep people alive) a tremendous amount, and our population is doing
the very thing that Professor Cowles has been talking about.

As a conservationist of sorts and physician for a longer time, I would like to take issue
with Professor Cowles on the position of the physicians. I agree that they are perhaps the
personification of all that is presently wrong with what we are doing, in that they have
allowed us to increase more rapidly and to keep our presently existing people alive. I
would ask the biologist: "what are we going to do about it?" We have now reached the
position where we are in the extremely enviable position of having the highest standard of
living, of being able to do more with our available time than we ever were before — of putting
ourselves in such a state that we need to do something with more available time in order to
survive comfortably — and now reaching that position, we don't know what to do about it,
as you have so ably pointed out. How, then, do we start as of now?

Professor Cowles: Well, the matter of wise guidance of leisure time is, I think, a
psychologist's problem rather than a biologist's, so I'll have to beg off on answering that
question. With respect to physicians as the epitome of all that is evil in our society, this may
be true until you get sick. Then the shoe is on the other foot. As to what they might do, I
think here they could be emissaries of balanced population. They are surely as intelligent as
farmers — and the uneducated farmer knows that he cannot keep more than so many head of
stock per acre. A physician could point this out with respect to humanity. Then, as to what
we can do about this, the matter of birth control is a rather touchy thing. It is too technical
— what devices we have now — too technical for the most ignorant people to apply, and this
would include foreign countries. And yet there are techniques that have not been exploited or
mentioned on which some research is needed, and birth control could be an easy and simple
thing, usable by ignorant people, provided they had the will to do so. But this again is a
psychologist's or sociologist's problem, not a biologist's. The mechanics are here, the devices.

I would like to take a minute or two if I might, Mr. Chairman, for a curious thing that
has been boiling around in my mind for some time — three years. This is the economics that
might be applied in limiting populations. I have thought of all the possible things that might
be done, and have come to the conclusion that none of them are feasible unless we can
appeal to the crass financial motive — the motive which does tend to limit births when the
economic conditions get hard. We give bonuses for having children. I don't see why we
shouldn't give bonuses for not having them. One seems as logical as the other in terms of
our dilemma. Could this be economically feasible? I inquired as to cost of education through

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COWLES

high school: roughly $5,000 in the State of California. Then every child that isn't born
would save us $5,000. Some sort of award for not having children could be given just as
logically as exemptions; allow a person to take his choice. I assure you that although it
seems funny to us, if you give it thought you will find, in view of the economics of the
situation (the new schools, new streets, new resources) that a bonus for not having children
is fully as logical as exemptions for having them. It would be financially a self-liquidating
proposition. I suggest that you look into the economics of it, and I think you will be sur-
prised at the conclusions you will reach. I have worked at this from several different angles,
and it seems to me economically feasible and desirable. Just to make one suggestion, if a
bonus of say $600 (equal to the exemption) were given for not having children (this would
have to be given only to the women) we would save the cost of education for the child not
born, and we could thus repay the bonus. Best of all, it would act on a eugenic basis. The
reward would be most effective in the poorest and least educated and least forward-thinking
part of our population: those that are usually dependent, those that require social security
and unemployment compensation (the least employable usually have the biggest families)
would benefit the most. We could dispense with some of these awards, and let the burden
of financing the family fall on the bonus for not having a child.

Starker Leopold: According to Bill Vogt, who is with the Planned Parenthood Foun-
dation, this very idea of differential taxation is being considered in Japan and India — that
is, increasing the taxes upon a family as the number of children goes up rather than decreas-
ing them as we do. This, of course, is no substitute for education — for a people as a whole
wanting to limit their numbers — there are many steps that have to precede that. But this is
one of the techniques that is already being explored.

And before I call on anyone else, Ed Wayburn raised a question that must be answered.
The birth rate in the United States, Ed, has been going steadily downward for some time ;
but the death rate has been going steadily downward even faster, and the so-called demo-
graphic gap between a dropping birth rate and a dropping mortality rate, is accounting for
the present increase. Both are falling; it's simply a differential between the two.

Edgar Wayburn: I have discussed this with the Secretary to the Minister of Health in
India, and he proudly informs me that the annual increment of population in India is now
dropping from five to one milhon per year, through the efforts of the Government, and he
believes that India will shortly surpass Japan as the most enlightened nation in this regard.

FRANK FRASER DARLING

Wilderness, Science, and
Human Ecology

Dr. Darling is a most eminent ecologist, and the author of
many handsomely illustrated books on this and related sub-
jects. Much of his work was carried on in his native Scotland,
where he studied reindeer and human ecology in the High-
lands, birds and seals on the western coast and coastal islands.
Recently he has done research in Africa, devoting himself to
wildlife conservation in relation to land use and in relation to
the nutrition of the African people. He has also affiliated him-
self with the Conservation Foundation.

Every ecological community has a unique complex of energy
conversion cycles; these are the "physiology" of the com-
munity. When man changes the environment, he disturbs the
workings of this communal "organism"; energy conversion
cycles are broken and their courses changed, particularly those
which vitalize the soil — that upon which all else depends. Wil-
derness communities have the greatest physiological complex-
ity or "health" their regions can provide. Man's machinations
destroy a delicate balance by simplifying these natural dy-
namics. Therefore, Dr. Darling argues, research into the un-
damaged conversion cycles of pristine areas is an urgent
necessity. The following paper is a verbatim transcript.

THE VERY TITLE of thls paper may give a smile to the skeptic: it may imply
that human ecology is not a science, and admittedly it is one of those new
band wagons. Some people say: "What exactly is human ecology, that isn't
covered by social anthropology, epidemiology (in its widest sense), sociology,
or certain interpretations of geography?" I think we can be content to say that
human ecology is largely an attitude of mind and a way of approach to certain
problems of man's physical and organic environments. C. C. Adams (the vet-
eran American ecologist) said well over a generation ago that ecology deals
with process, and I think that statement still needs emphasis when one is dealing
with human cultures and their environments; cross-sectional interpretations,
however detailed and accurate, are not good enough. I have, therefore, hazarded
as definitive of human ecology that part of the science which deals with the
reciprocal inter-relations of man with his animate habitat, of the influence of
the habitat as a whole on social structure and behavior, and of the social system
on the animate habitat. (I shall mention again the influence of the social system
on the animate habitat,)

[95]

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DARLING

I do not wish to dwell on those aspects of the human need for wilderness
which have been expressed so often and so eloquently by many contributors to
previous Sierra Club conferences. We can assume that those mystical awaken-
ings of the human spirit which moved the young Wordsworth are welling up the
stronger in an age of increasing stress. He gave us that wonderful line: "On
the solid ground of nature builds the mind that rests for aye." We are trying
in this conference to answer with firmer discipline the question of why wilder-
ness has such great scientific importance. I come from a country where true
wilderness is hard to find, if you would define wilderness as country carrying
its natural vegetation and the associated fauna, unaffected by the activities of
man beyond his hunting-food gathering stage of development. If man is com-
pletely absent, all the better; nevertheless, the necessarily small populations
of primitive hunting-food gathering man can be accepted as part of the indige-
nous fauna.

It has fallen to my particular lot to show what degraded, devastated habitats
are those beautiful hills, moors, and glens of the Scottish Highlands: islands
where the human population of large areas may be as low as two to the square
mile. You would scarcely imagine that in Great Britain, where the average is
about 680 to the square mile, but you have a big empty country in the High-
lands, where you can drive for some hours without meeting any other car or
seeing a house. These hills look wild, and no one can doubt the bare bones of
physical grandeur, but they are not wilderness. They have been combed
through and through by man's animals, particularly the sheep, and fires have
been a deliberate part of management. The only true wilderness there is to be
found on some mountain tops, where fire cannot get and the sheep but rarely, or
on sea cliffs. My work has been to find out how the deterioration occurred and of
what it consisted, and at the end, after seeing deterioration where many people
see only remarkable beauty, I needed to get out for a while, and either enjoy a
beautiful English countryside, where man has developed harmoniously with his
environment in change, or find somewhere a true wilderness. In that search, I
came to North America ten years ago and have come several times since, and I
have been several times deep into what is still a primitive Africa. Wilderness,
by my own severe definition, was still hard to find, and there was a good deal
of heartache — wandering around through the logged lands of northern Wiscon-
son, the overgrazed lands of the Southwestern ranges, the overburnt sub-Arctic
areas of Alaska, the fire-distorted plateau of Africa — that large central land
mass — and even on the wild bare hills of the remote Nyika Plateau in northern
Rhodesia, where the glorious high-mountain forest is reduced to a few patches
of less than 100 acres. The joy was in finding the beauty of a "hammock," in
southern Georgia and northern Florida — quite untouched, a beautiful saucer,
var3dng from oak and pine on the outer edges, to cypress in the middle. I
remember penetrating through to the middle of that hammock and seeing an
egret fly up into the top of the trees, which seemed an expression by that ham-

WILDERNESS, SCIENCE, AND HUMAN ECOLOGY

97

mock that it was pristine. I walked through Muir's "country of light," your
Sierra. I was also fortunate to get into the goose-breeding grounds of the Yukon-
Kuskokwim delta and into the Brooks Range in Alaska. In these places, I did
find true wilderness.

At such places one cannot help stopping for contemplation. That is what you
go for. I could not comprehend, but at least I was able to apprehend, that these
wilderness areas represented the states of greatest organic complexity which
those environments could provide. Such states were relatively simple in the
tundra or the High Sierra, but the eco-system of a hammock, or an untouched
piece of African high forest, is extremely complex. I don't know whether any
of you have read Paul Richards's book on the tropical rain forests, or the bio-
logical review in which he starts off by saying that within the rain forest there
are over 3,000 species of woody plants exceeding twenty centimeters in diam-
eter of trunk or stem. It is terrific — the complexity in this very old life form,
unlimited by cold or by lack of water. It is one of those plant systems that we
are only on the fringe of — we don't understand their full complexity as yet.

The value of wilderness to science, put baldly — very baldly, and not at all
sentimentally — is the provision of study areas of pristine conditions. (I am
sticking now to science: what we know, not what we think and dream.) Any
eco-system represents a complex of conversion cycles, of energy flow. The
elucidation of these means an understanding of what I would call the "physi-
ology of community," which we urgently need for the proper planning of land
use in a world of shrinking acreage and growing human populations. If deter-
mination of these conversion cycles in true wilderness conditions is possible,
we can assess what may be called the voltage and amperage of different habitat
types and eco-systems. Thereafter, investigation of changed conditions caused
by human interference or usage could be compared, and we should have some
notion of biologic efficiency. The fact that a changed habitat may canalize
more energy through the human species, although the actual energy flow of the
system was reduced, would be no good reason for saying the change repre-
sented greater efficiency.

Just let me give you an example here of the effects of wild lands grazing.
You had it through the Sierra — we have had it for many years through the
Highlands of Scotland, the southern Uplands of Scotland, and the Pennine
Chain of England. There is no doubt that this changed land use, from rather
poor forest, has canalized more protein through the human gut than the normal
land production of that area. But it has been done at the cost of deterioration.
We have to consider this from the beginning when we tackle wfld lands. Take
a place like the west Highlands of Scotland, where you've got sour land, sour
soil, high rainfall, and steep slopes. Well your very good countr3niian Albrecht,
at Missouri, would ask straightway: "What is the chemical answer there?" It
is cellulose production — water, moderate temperature, high rainfall, steep
slopes, with very poor calcium relations — the answer is cellulose production

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DARLING

through photosynthesis. What has happened there? The trees have gone — you
put on sheep and you ask for protein in the form of meat and in the form of
wool. Well any chemist — or, as Macaulay would say, any schoolboy — will tell
you that to synthesize protein properly you must have a solid calcium-phos-
phate balance. You cannot build protein efficiently without that. Yet we have
taken the protein off, in the case of the Scottish Highlands, for 150 years. Now
that has been done at the cost of deterioration. As I say, although we have
canalized more energy through the human gut, we have not arrived at a greater
efficiency of biologic turnover in that kind of country. These are the sorts of
problems of land use one must always be trying to solve.

We may take it for granted, I think, that wilderness areas represent natural
mixtures of chmax and successional states; ecologically, the energy flow and
the conversion cycles are relatively constant. To what extent deliberate human
change in former natural conditions results in decreased, increased, or sus-
tained energy flow, it is important to discover. Agricultural systems on good
land mean the injection of capital, skill, and hard work: what were climax
states have been set back to an early stage of succession, the crops being in-
trinsically those of early stages. I mean if you fell forests, or you plow prairie,
and you grow wheat or maize in that place, you are setting back succession to
the early stages and growing annual crops instead of the deeply differentiated
and perennial plants which are characteristic of later stages of succession. Only
very good land will withstand such traumatic treatment for long periods, and
good land, as far as we know, will go on indefinitely — or as long as you continue
to put in capital, skill, and hard work. When that is done, the energy flow is
very high indeed, much higher than that of the previous wilderness state. The
introduction of the clover crop and the establishment of rotation farming on
enclosed land in 18th Century England is an excellent example of sustained
increased energy flow from a simpler eco-system than that of the climax oak
forest.

Comparatively few regions of the earth will take this sort of treatment, and
very few do receive adequate capital and skill. Certain areas, among which
have been the California Sierra, are subjected to wealth-gathering by pastoral-
ism. This is wild land pastoralism and not the kind you put any work or capital
into. You gather wealth with the mouths of sheep — one man can put out a
thousand mouths and manage those thousand mouths — and they are tremend-
ous wealth-gathering organisms. They can pull that wealth in, and this is done
without conducting any capital works or applying any skill other than to
extract the maximum of wealth from the wild lands. Some of these places have
suffered irremediably, and how far such areas as the Emigrant Basin and the
foothills of the Sierra have suffered, I do not know. Apparently you did decimate
the bighorn sheep without actually shooting it out. Doubtless the herbage com-
plex was damaged in some way, for the practice of grazing with closely bunched
exotic animals such as sheep depletes the vegetational complex.

WILDERNESS, SCIENCE, AND HUMAN ECOLOGY

99

This is a point where the complexity of wilderness should be more fully
understood. What is the complete herbage complex? Have you got a full list
from the Sierra, with not only the Hst of the things present, but the associations
and proportional incidences? If you have, you are lucky, because few geo-
graphical areas are so provided. Plants do stay where they grow, for the most
part, and though some are tiny and inconspicuous, they yield their presence
to the enquiring eye. The animals of any habitat community may be harder to
find. There are not only those of considerable size moving above ground but
the hosts of invertebrate species below. The Danish ecologist, Bornebusch, has
stated that the bio-mass of animals above ground is equalled by that of the
animals below ground — a very arresting thought! Each of the many species
represented is doing a job of conversion of matter in a closely-niched organiza-
tion. Practices such as logging, firing, overgrazing, and impaction of the soil
from treading lead to loss of species from the habitat and therefore to breaks
in the conversion cycles, in short, to a lowering of voltage and amperage.

I think I can give you an example here. An American botanist, a very old
gentleman indeed, was talking to me about the pristine quality of certain
Eastern woods in the United States. He said that he doubted whether there
were any, but that if he were to study the possible stage of any of these woods,
from the pristine to the completely ruined, he thought he would study the
Myriapoda, the millipedes. That was extremely interdisciplinary for a botanist
to say — that if he wanted to judge a botanical situation, he would go over to
the animal group, the Myriapoda, to find out the stage at which that forest was.
His view was that these animals were extremely sensitive to change in the
environment, and very strikingly, about three years ago, a member of the staff
of the Nature Conservatory in Britain (Ovington, who is at present in this
country, and also Overgaard Nielson, a Dane, who was working at Oxford)
discovered that the pill millipede, in these Eastern woodlands and at home too,
was an absolutely essential species for the conversion of detritus from brachy-
podium grass into soil. Well, if you log and remove the woodland, even if you
re-grow it afterwards, you lose your pill millipede — ^^it is extremely sensitive.
Once that creature is gone, the conversion cycle is interfered with immediately.
It is just one example linking up with this remark of the old gentleman I spoke
about. This change from the complex to the simpler by human interference is
the opposite trend to Lotka's (a mathematical ecologist) axiom that the col-
lective activities and effects of organisms indicate a direction of organic evolu-
tion toward maximal energy intake from the sun and maximum outgo of free
energy by dissipative processes in living and in decaying dead organisms. The
advance towards the complexity of the climax state shows a directional ten-
dency toward a higher metabolic rate for the whole eco-system. Energy flow
is maximized in that way.

Imagine the effect on the complete and integrated utilization of a habitat in
Africa, where there may be thirty species of hoofed animals present. Man

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DARLING

comes into this state, and he eliminates these and replaces them with three
exotics: cattle, sheep, and goats. The result is progressive deterioration of
habitats which are unfitted to sustain such activity. Think of those thirty-
ungulates, from the elephant at the top down to a hare-size antelope at the
bottom. Each of those species is competing in a minimal fashion with all other
species, because after all in evolution the whole trend of each species is to
differentiate itself shghtly from other species to make a smaller demand, a
demand which is different from any other species', on the resources available.
In Africa, you have this extremely rich fauna of ungulates. For example, there
is the elephant; he is the great path maker in Africa; he honeycombs the
country with his paths. After him come all the other animals, moving along
these paths and able to take advantage of the environment as a result of his
having done this preliminary work. He again can reach very high. He takes
off in a very, very rough way the top browse of very many trees, and that
prunes them down. The trees begin to grow a great deal of browse from their
lower parts, and this provides browse for species of antelope. They again vary
in their demand for browse or for grazing in the clearings made either by fire
(natural fire) or by different water situations, and you get this extremely in-
tricate niching of these species. Their utilization of the habitat is much, much
greater but entirely without deterioration as compared with the three exotic
animals which man brought into Africa. I would say that there are very, very
few areas in Africa that can withstand sustained cattle ranching or cattle
farming. It is a humbling thought, if I am right, that Africa is not a great agri-
cultural country; it is only in pockets that you can get a sustained agriculture.
Yet the whole trend is to talk of Africa as the great rich place of the future,
where enormous riches of food and what-not are going to come out. I may
argue this a bit more in discussion, but I will leave it now.

I would suggest that research into conversion cycles in the pristine condi-
tions of wilderness is not being pursued with sufficient vigor. We are apt to
be concerned with the ecological relationships and behavior of the more obvious
mammals and birds and with the plants usually considered to supply food and
cover to these animals, and we forget the immense bio-mass represented by
the invertebrate animal population and the intricate function that bio-mass
fulfills. It is all linked. We cannot consider the mammals as something apart,
or the birds as something apart. We have very much reached the stage of con-
sidering the mammals and birds in relation to vegetation, but we have to go
deeper still into this great complex of species which many of us don't even think
about. Human activities are so obvious in their effects on the stocks of mammals
and birds, that observation of such effects and the deductions we draw may
constitute wildlife ecology as we know it. But human influences are equally
great on invertebrate populations of the soil and those linked with vegetation.
The preservation of sufficiently large patches of wilderness is an urgent scientific
necessity, which through research into the physiology of communities could

WILDERNESS, SCIENCE, AND HUMAN ECOLOGY

101

jdeld results of vital interest to the wider fields of agriculture, forestry, nutri-
tion, and soil science.

I have used this term ''physiology of communities," and you might ask
me why I can't call it plain "ecology." The reason is that the emphasis is
on function in the supraorganism represented by any biologic community or
eco-system. When I use the word ''supraorganism," its meaning is that the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The trend in physiological studies of
the higher animals and man is to relate all the functions of the body to each
other for a greater understanding of the psychosomatic whole. Equally I think
we need this kind of teamwork leading to comprehension of eco-systems as
wholes as well as in ecological studies dealing with animals and their food
habits — which are presently sort of the backbone of wildlife and wilderness
ecology.

I want to come back a little to Africa. It is very much in the news just now,
and the general interest in Africa is extraordinary at the present time. I have
noticed this very big change since I was last in this country. It is tropical, and
I wonder if we realize the impact of African and European man on the environ-
ment of Africa as well as we might. Africa, as I said a few moments ago, is
not a rich country; it is a poor country. There are immense areas of the central
African plateau which are composed of red senile soils. Even a commission of
FAO from Rome, which visited there some seven years ago, said it was unable
to suggest any better system of agriculture than the shifting chitemene system
which is being practiced at the present time in central Africa. That country is
normally covered by forest, rather poor forest, in which there is a good infiltra-
tion of sunlight down to the floor, and the cycle of what is called chitemene
gardening is that of cutting a circle in among the trees, burning the wood and
growing crops for perhaps three years, and then leaving it for forty years to
recover. As long as you have a primitive and low human population, there is
no damage whatever to that environment. If you fly over certain areas, you can
see these little rings in the Miombo Forest, and you know that there is a low
population. But as the population increases, you see these rings coming closer
together, and again as you fly over the area (the airplane is one of the great
tools of the ecologist) you see the rings beginning to intersect, and then you
know that that country is in trouble. If you have to reduce your times of com-
ing on to that land to every twenty years, or every fifteen years, you are creat-
ing desert in the long run. That is happening now; there are many areas where
these intersections of chitemene circles are taking place, and you know that
there is overpopulation: a demand for resources from that country which the
habitat is unable to sustain. What are we going to do in these places?

Again, you get areas where there is considerable difference between the
rainy and dry seasons. Six months of rain and six months of absolute dryness.
In the rainy season it is remarkable what lush growth takes place. I suppose
I am one of the last people who will ever make a foot journey into the wilder-

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DARLING

ness of the west side of the Luangwa Valley in Northern Rhodesia. That is a
valley 500 miles long and well over 100 miles broad, in which there is one
perpetual river running down the middle. All the side streams dry up in the
dry season. Now there is a wealth of wildlife in that valley. It is still what it
was many years ago: a vast array of wildlife. The integration of land use by
that wildlife is quite remarkable. In the wet season, the whole wildlife is spread
over the whole valley, utilizing it. In the dry season, as the rivers dry up,
the animals come down to the river banks and the plains of grass alongside.
Then you say, what a vast assembly of wildlife! What an enormous number
there is! But they are the concentration of population that has been using
this great valley all the rest of the time.

Now they have established two very large reserves on the banks of the
Luangwa River. Splendid; there will be no killing at all in those reserves. (That
is not so good, I think, because it is not in line with the way we are thinking
at the moment.) But along comes the agriculturist. He says: "Look at this
beautiful bottom valley land; we could grow cotton there; we could grow
sorghum, Kaffir corn, etc., in large quantities." They have started doing that in
places near the foot of the valley, with the result that the wildlife impinges and
pretty well clears out the crops. Then, of course, there is a cry for the removal
of the wildlife, which is damaging agriculture — a terrible thing. And there is
a very real body of opinion among administration and the agriculturists that
this bit of valley bottom land is more important than the valley as a whole,
with its vast quantity of wildlife.

Well now, I feel that this is the wrong approach to the land use of the
wilderness. Wilderness is scarcely ever large enough now to be left utterly
and absolutely alone. Wilderness has edges, and it is on the edges that you
get wear, wear from the outside. There is impingement all the time, such that
you cannot really sustain the conditions that you would like. I can think of
places in Africa where the elephant population, even in 8,000 square miles,
cannot be accommodated: they must go out on a migration and back in again.
If you are going to neglect that size, you must do something about the popu-
lations of animals even within the wilderness areas.

I think probably the newer concept in parts of Africa would be to manage
these areas which will not withstand farming as game areas, in which a crop
of protein could be taken off as a secondary product of the area as a whole,
leaving the pristine vegetation. Be very careful of the amount of protein that
comes out of there, but quite definitely (and this will go hard with many of
you here) some crop will have to be taken off, because within that wilderness
area (even if it is 8,000 square miles) there is not enough space. If you leave
it utterly alone, you will get a building up of populations using the sanctuary
value of that area, and you will get punishing over-use of that great wilder-
ness area, and that means deterioration again. It is necessary to take this crop,
and in Africa the great nutritional need is protein.

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103

What do most of us do when we go into some new country of primitive
people: we set them growing more carbohydrates, and we give them big pot
bellies, and that is progress. That isn't what they want. If there is anything
hkely to produce dissatisfaction it is a pot belly full of mush. You feel all the
better after a piece of steak. The African is quite likely to want that protein
meal — he craves it — and strange as it may seem in that hot climate, the protein
is very necessary, very much more so than it is even farther north. When you
get to the Arctic, fat is the great thing; you crave fat as well as protein, but
in the tropics protein is a very necessary thing for human health. Whether
you are going to accept unlimited population increases in Africa, or whether
you are going to have a well protein-fed population of limited size: that is the
problem. There is no doubt that we could manage these wild lands of Africa
much more efficiently for a protein crop for a limited human population. But
this is not being considered; there is something derogatory about the wild
animal. It must be better to use the domesticated ones. The Jacobs of this
world are much better esteemed than the Esaus, you know. The whole trend
of administrative policy in Africa is to remove the tsetse fly, get into these
areas, and farm them with cattle — in spite of all the past indications that that
will mean deterioration of habitat.

These are the problems of wilderness in Africa which many of us are going
to be faced with, and I shall certainly do everything possible I can for the
maintenance of wilderness in Africa as the most productive state in which
that land could be left. I am cutting out entirely the emotion that moves every
one of us in this room: the emotion of love of wilderness for its own sake. But
we still have to face this population pressure, this political pressure of a very
high order in Africa; we have to shape up to what is coming. You can stand
on principle. I will very definitely stand on principle, but it is no good standing
on principle to the exclusion of the realities. It is just being silly to be an Ajax
defying the lightning. We've got to see it in terms of this growing awareness
in Africa, this growing population and administrative policy as a whole.

DISCUSSION Starker Leopold, Discussion Leader

Leopold: Dr. Darling has reiterated for us one of the basic principles of ecology which
all of us learn and can transmit rapidly to our students, namely this: that the processes of
evolution of communities, plants, animals, and soil are always towards complexity; that
the processes of our use of these communities are always towards simplicity. In reducing
the complex to the simple, we are channeling the flows of nutrients and of energy from the
circular path which is the natural path in any evolved community to an outflowing path,
in order to maintain ourselves and our domestic animals. The capacity of different parts of
the world to withstand this diversion of the energy channel varies greatly, as we all know:
from the one extreme, glaciated northwestern Europe, which has withstood this channel-
ing over many centuries, and from all we can see will withstand it indefinitely in the future,
to the very friable lands that actually compose the bulk of the earth's crust and the extreme
examples of which are the desert or the equally friable tundra, which is nothing but a
physiological desert, droughty because of ice rather than lack of water.

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DARLING

By diversion of these energy flows, we axe maintaining ourselves at the moment, and
going back to Professor Cowles's talk, we are trying by diverting more and more of this
energy to maintain more and more people. Some would say that the technologies of agri-
culture can compensate for this increasing need by use of machinery and fertilizers which
do increase yields per acre, but all that this is doing is accelerating an outflow of nutrients.
In other words, technological agriculture is not in any sense compensating for ecologic
disturbance; it is simply accelerating it, and in the case of friable lands this leads sooner or
later to loss of fertility and loss of production. This basic theme which Frank Darling reit-
erated for us, and for which Africa is one very good example, certainly should guide our
thinking on all land-use problems.

Luna Leopold: I would like to ask Dr. Darling to comment on a question which relates
to the interaction of industrial and agricultural development in Africa. But before asking
the question directly, I would like to make a very brief statement as an introduction.

There are trends to be seen in all countries of the world towards the substitution of
atomic energy for other forms of energy for many different reasons: the decrease in petro-
leum resources, the absence of coal (which may be the case in certain parts of Africa) and
the word, which trembles on the lips of some conservationists, that the development of
atomic energy would relieve some of the pressures on the wilderness for the building of
hydro -electric plants. But you might be interested in an article published a couple of months
ago in the Atomic Scientist by Wallace Delaguna, which emphasized, as it is not very gen-
erally known, that the radioactive waste from atomic reactors built for the purpose of energy
development is perhaps a more serious problem than is generally realized. Delaguna makes
the statement, that at the rate we are planning to develop atomic energy, by the year 2000
we will be developing on an annual basis (if I remember the figure) approximately 10^
curies of strontium-90 alone. This is only one of the many kinds of wastes. You could not
dispose of 10^ curies by dilution into all the water in the whole world, including the glaciers,
and this is on an annual basis. There is the possibility then that atomic development, in
industrialization of a continent like Africa, might be called upon because of the necessity
owing, let's say, to lack of the kinds of coal resources that we have in this country. Is there
any talk in Africa now about the kinds of effect which the disposal of radioactive wastes
from this industrial development tied to atomic energy might mean for African agriculture
in the future?

Darling: I don't think there has been any thought of that kind at all. I don't think
that degree of industrial development has been really seriously thought of, although we
know perfectly well (as Professor Cowles has said) that there is very considerable indus-
trial development in the South. South Africa's industrial output isn't to be ignored at all.
But Africa, of course, is a big place, and I don't think that that has been thought of at all
seriously. What I would say possibly has been thought of is what is going to follow atomic
energy in many ways. Energy use is rather like air travel: as soon as an airplane comes into
use, it is really obsolete ; it is the one on the drawing board that counts, and atomic energy
is probably only a stopgap between petroleum and the conventional fuels and gathering in
energy from solar radiation. If that comes about, of course, Africa would be in just the
right spot.

EiviND ScOYEN (Associate Director, National Park Service) : I have a comment on the
management of wilderness areas, such as National Parks, which are used a great deal by
the public. The entire system of development areas and road corridors in Yellowstone Park
was complete in 1908, and the only thing that has happened since then (when they had
about 20,000 visitors) up to now (when they have about 1,500,000) has been that the facili-
ties have been expanded within those corridors and those developed areas that are already
established. But no new corridors have been established to handle the tremendously increased
number of people using the Park.

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105

Secondly, I think another very interesting and important part of this problem is the
providing of alternate outlets. I view this whole question of recreation as a great flood
control project. If you let these people flow into the parks and forests uncontrolled, then
great damage will be done. But if upstream along the watersheds of our highways, etc.
you can put dams and diversions where these people can go into alternate areas, I thmk it
will help the problem a lot.

Finally, there is the problem of waste. I had dinner one evening with a professor from
the University of London who was considered the greatest English authority on American
history. We asked him if he were quickly, in one sentence, to describe the American civiliza-
tion what he would say. He said: "That is very easy: it is the most wasteful civilization that
ever existed on earth." Now I think conservation is the prevention of waste. I don't want to
get into the farm problem, but if overproduction is waste, then we are actually paying a
large sum of money to waste our resources. This is a different sort of waste than was just
mentioned, but I think that as conservationists we ought to point out the whole problem,
of which the wasting of wild lands resources is only one aspect.

James Roof (University of California, School of Forestry) : I would like to ask Dr.
Darling if his remarks concerning Africa also apply to the United States — specifically, the
management of wildlife areas.

Darling: Well, in a way it is you who have been the pioneers in this field. Insofar as you
can keep wilderness area untouched, it is to be untouched; you have ways of taking crops
off on the outside, but at the same time you must watch the densities which may be building
up within the limits of the wilderness area. I think it is worse in a tropical area than it is
here, but if you take Yellowstone Park, which is almost a symbol of the American wilder-
ness dream from its earliest times (we know how that dream has changed in texture, but
nevertheless it is there), Yellowstone Park is the outstanding symbol, and you know what
the elk is doing there. You cannot consider the Yellowstone Park as a wilderness area to be
left untouched any more. You have to take off a considerable crop of elk every year, although
because of general attitudes which are not yet ready to see cropping of wilderness areas or
the shooting of elk, it is better when there is a clump of trees between whatever happens and
the road. That is the way general attitudes are. They will have to change, and I see nothing
derogatory to the principle of wilderness in keeping that clear eye on the population of
animals within the wilderness, and when it is the moment to remove some, to do so. When
you see range being overgrazed by wild animals, it doesn't take much more research to solve
the problem ; something has to be done to remove some of the animals that are doing the
overgrazing.

Professor Paul Zinke (School of Forestry, University of California): You were
describing natural eco -systems as probably being those in which man was present in the
hunting stage. Do you feel that man has a natural part in the present eco-systems that are
developing ?

Darling: As soon as he ceases to be a hunter or food gatherer, he ceases in my thoughts
to be natural. As soon as ever he scratches the ground and grows something or processes
something, and especially when he begins to move resources from one place to another, that
is a very, very dangerous stage in the unnaturalness of man — when he starts tapping a
resource, especially an animate resource, for its removal to a population elsewhere. A
hunting, food-gathering man simply cannot exist in large numbers in one place, whereas
the human being is intensely social. It is his great desire to be gregarious; and he made the
big breakthrough in the Neolithic age by establishing an agriculture which gave him that
buffer, that store of food which enabled him to be gregarious. We know of places like
Kotzebue in the Arctic, and wasn't it Medicine Bow in Kansas, where the Eskimo and the
Indian have gathered. They could only gather about two or three weeks at a time; then
they had to get back to the range, because they just couldn't hold up that standard of gre-

106

DARLING

gariousness any longer. Well, as soon as man makes this breakthrough into highly organized
gregariousness, he loses his place in the natural order and ceases to be indigenous fauna.

Mrs. Neil Haig (Seattle, Washington) : I just wanted to ask Dr. DarHng one question.
He spoke of game going over from a wilderness area into the next area and invading it.
Do they use buffer zones in any of the wilderness areas, and how wide should a buffer zone
be, for instance, between a National Forest and a National Park? If it is cut right up to the
line, it will cause a blowdown. Would a buffer zone help solve the situation for recreational
areas which are next to wilderness areas?

Darling: I think that is a very good point indeed. Actually, in many parts of Africa
there are perfectly good game departments, and these chaps have done a wonderful job in
arranging what they call controlled hunting areas around either national parks or game
reserves. But unfortunately, game departments are not in general popular with administra-
tions, and administrations are always on top. A game department is looked upon as a luxury
department, and therefore if there is any question at all, the administration will tend to
override the game department. Northern Rhodesia, for example, has the most up to date
system of controlled areas around their reserves that you could possibly imagine — a per-
fectly good workable system, but it is breaking down because it isn't administered.

You yourself spoke more from the logging point of view which is very much to the
point. To put it in a way, a forest must have a good skirt. If you can begin to see a forest's
knees, something is wrong ; it is much better that it should have a skirt well down to the
ground. The shanks of a lodgepole pine should not be seen from outside.

KARL W. ONTHANK, CHAIRMAN

Report of Committee
on Recommendations

All the Wilderness Conferences have culminated in a series
of recommendations, formally put to a vote in the formal
session, to express a sense of the meeting but to bind no indi-
vidual, organization, or participating government agency.

Dr. Onthank's committee on recommendations vs^as
appointed by conference chairman Dr. Miller to include Dar-
win Lambert, of Ely, Nevada; Professor Paul Zinke, of the
University of California Forestry School; and David Brower.
Charlotte Mauk served in Brower's stead when illness pre-
vented his attending.

RESOLUTION 1

Wilderness as a Scientific Resource

The biological sciences, especially those which emphasize relationships and
interdependence of plant and animal life communities, are being recognized as
of critical importance to the welfare of mankind and the nation. In order to
evaluate life processes in areas where man has changed the face of the Earth,
it is necessary to have a variety of areas still in their natural state for purposes
of comparison — to serve as "benchmarks" with which to relate the effect of
man's activities on the plant and animal Hfe upon which his own life depends.

The destruction of life communities that still remain in their natural state,
such as the wilderness portions of National Parks, National Forests, WildHfe
Ranges, and other parts of the wilderness system, would be an irreparable loss
to man's understanding and survival.

Therefore, as an essential step in the program of preserving areas in their
natural state, and to encourage the urgently needed biological-ecological re-
search which must include work in such areas, we recommend the passage of the
Wilderness Bill without further delay.

[No discussion. The Resolution was adopted unanimously.]

RESOLUTION 2

Wilderness Research and Education
The proper use of all our pubHc lands requires a better understanding by
administrators and lay citizens alike of:

[107]

108

ONTHANK

a) the interrelationships of plants, animals, soil, water, and air;

b) the effects of man's activities on these interrelationships;

c) the value of unmodified areas as gauges of our progress toward the best
possible utilization of managed lands.

This understanding can be gained only by long-term research, involving
every branch of science, on areas that are deliberately reserved unaltered, and
by transmission of research findings to a large and receptive audience.

Because the most receptive audience may be found in those persons who
seek publicly-owned lands for their recreational values, it is urged that each
agency administering such lands undertake a large-scale program including:

a) research on the lands under its jurisdiction, or cooperation with appro-
priate agencies and institutions in the conduct of such research;

b) enlarged interpretive staffs whose members participate in, or keep in
touch with, the results of research and are not burdened with irrelevant respon-
sibilities;

c) utilization of all possible media — displays and exhibits, motion pictures,
lectures, and informal individual contact — for the information of the public,
so that citizens may appreciate, enjoy, take pride in, and seek to protect the
lands dedicated to recreational and scientific uses.

To this end the agencies administering these public lands — especially the
National Park Service and the United States Forest Service — should have
budgets adequate to support both research and education of this type.

In addition, all other agencies (including universities) concerned with
study and management of natural resources should be urged to undertake or
support further research on ecological problems affecting natural areas.

DISCUSSION Hov^ARD Zahniser, Discussion Leader

The final sentence of Resolution 2 resulted from the following remarks.

William Drake (Western Representative, Nature Conservancy, Berkeley) : I person-
ally feel that this is probably the most significant recommendation coming out of this con-
ference. The problem of management is going to be the key problem in the whole effort to
preserve wilderness, and it is on management policy that all of these controversies focus.
Also, the obvious conclusion to be drawn from almost every speech is that only through
basic research, in what Dr. Darling called "conversion cycles in pristine conditions," can we
understand enough about the natural behavior of wild areas to know how to manage them
properly. I think this resolution is certainly very good, as far as it goes, but I personally
feel that the speakers themselves presented a much more sweeping problem to us, that
perhaps demands a much more sweeping resolution, in terms of a research program.

Two years ago at this conference, it was said that what takes place outside of wilder-
ness is probably more important in preserving wilderness than what takes place inside, and
I think the same might be said for the research program. The kinds of research on natural
areas done outside the wilderness might contribute more toward preserving wilderness itself
than the actual program in wild public lands. The reason I say this is that most of the
productive area of the country was once wilderness, and only a very small fragment of it
remains so. I think, for example, that research programs in the ecology of the grasslands of
the Central Valley, of the great plains of the Southwest, or of some of our coastal areas

REPORT OP COMMITTEE ON RECOMMENDATIONS

109

would be much more significant in contributing basic knowledge, probably because they are
closer to our universities and so on than the program of research in National Forest or
National Park lands.

I feel that what is needed nationally, before it is too late, is a coherent, comprehensive
approach to all of the wild areas of the country, no matter how large or how small, and
perhaps we should emulate the British, who established a special ecological bureau you might
say to handle this sort of problem. That is: create a kind of registration of all of the nature
reserves that are now in existence. Second: inventory all of the eco-systems that constitute
the natural landscape of North America; and third: establish research stations which would
be clearing houses of information for basic ecologic knowledge. This would be a compre-
hensive system of research, far more sweeping than just the research on existing pubUc
lands, and it would bring together a program that is now scattered around at various
institutions throughout the country.

I haven't any specific proposal. I think it is premature to suggest that the United States
Government establish an ecologist in its Cabinet, as Dr. Cowles told me the British have
considered doing, but I think it is a first step to ask for such a research program on our
existing public lands.

Lewis F. Clark (Secretary, the Sierra Club) : The object of this resolution is to get
more money for research in our wilderness areas, if it can be briefed down to such simple
language. I hope that in selling it beyond this room, where all are dedicated to this wilder-
ness idea, a way will be found to formulate the ideas incorporated in this very excellent
resolution in simple form, so that the layman will get the idea without possessing all the
background that we have.

Henry Vaux (Dean, School of Forestry, University of CaHfornia) : My comment, I
think, is very much along the line of Mr. Drake's. The approach to research in this resolution
should perhaps be broadened, and not point just to the research groups connected directly
with land administration agencies, but should urge additional research in wild land prob-
lems, regardless of what the agencies are that may be qualified to contribute. As Mr. Drake
inferred, many universities and other groups could make important contributions that might
be much more difficult to achieve through research by the administrating agencies themselves.

I think the one further point to make in this connection is that there is a great deal of
interest in the matter of additional research on wild land problems of all kinds. For example,
in the last few years here in California there has been developed a so-called wild land
research plan ; it attempts to state, in fairly understandable terms, the most pressing research
needed to meet some of these problems that have been under discussion — whether they be
of wilderness lands or of non-wilderness wild land areas. Whether or not that particular
plan has the proper answers it is important, because it provides a means through which all
groups interested in this research approach to the problem can unite and exercise efforts
jointly in this direction. Perhaps simply broadening the resolution a bit, to make it support
research by all qualified agencies in this particular area of affairs, would be helpful.

Mr. Drake: I feel a distinction ought to be made: we are not just asking for more
research. We are asking for a certain kind of research, and we don't want, with all due
respect to the public agencies that have researchers in this room, simply to have more
research along, for instance, engineering lines. How to produce more. How to do more of
what we are doing already. I think it is very important (Dr. Vaux, I think, hinted at this) to
have research that is really basic and that is in a sense detached— as university circles are
from the seat of the management problem. We need to produce more people to think on the
level that Dr. Darling does, and I don't think such people are very apt to come out of prac-
tical jobs of management. I think, to assure the independence of the research that is really
to be basic ecological research, that this shouldn't be simply an additional research budget
for an existing agency.

110

ONTHANK

Dr. Cain: I am one of the persons who suggested the increase of basic research by the
National Park Service; I have since been asked a question: "Where would all those qualified
investigators come from if all of a sudden there was a lot of money?" and I want to give a
word of encouragement now. The National Science Foundation has been in existence for a
few years, and every year it has had more money for support of basic research. I happen
currently to be the Chairman of the Environmental Biology Panel of the NSF, and I will
describe to you what has happened. In this period of growth we arrived at January with
106 proposals for independent research in environmental biology, at least seventy-five per
cent of which had to do with wild lands in the broad sense, and none of which were oriented
towards increasing profit for anyone. The total sum requested by these projects amounted
to about two and one-half million dollars. The funds available for this kind of independent
research are adequate to meet every proposal of the last two years that the panel has
judged worthy of financial support. Now where were all these investigators five years ago?
They were scattered around the universities and the colleges and the other places without
financial support for this kind of activity. Here was an unused human resource. I say to you
that if our universities today offered outlets for basic ecological research — where people
could get decent employment, in terms of compensation, according to their abilities — we
could very quickly raise an adequate generation of investigators, who would find outlet
for their interest along these lines. The big bottleneck, in my opinion, has not been the lack
of talent, but the lack of encouragement to talent to go in this direction. If the various kinds
of suggestion and encouragement that can come from groups like this will promote, and
ultimately gain, financial support for such wild land research, the investigators will come,
as it were, up out of the bushes.

[The Resolution was adopted unanimously.]

RESOLUTION 3

Outdoor Resources Review

The Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission is just starting to
inventory and evaluate our national recreation and scenic resources and to
estimate future needs for them. At the very time this task is getting under way
areas recognized as having high potential recreational value, including wild
lands, are being opened to competing uses. It is obvious that if such areas are
eliminated from future recreational use — of a wilderness type, or otherwise —
by action prior to consideration by the Commission, the very purpose of the
survey is thereby frustrated and defeated just as it begins to operate. Such
contradiction could not, of course, have been intended by Congress when it
passed the Act creating the Commission and setting up its task.

The Conference therefore urges all land-management agencies to safeguard
from any untimely use for other purposes all such areas of potential wilderness
designation and accordingly urges the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review
Commission to pay particular attention to the wilderness values of such areas.
Examples of these areas include the Glacier Peak-North Cascades region in
Washington, the recently eliminated portion of the Three Sisters area in Oregon,
the Kern Plateau in California, and the proposed Great Basin National Park in
Nevada. To provide an orderly and effective policy and program as a basis for
recommendations regarding such areas of potential wilderness, as well as for
the immediate protection of existing areas of designated wilderness, the Con-

REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON RECOMMENDATIONS

111

ference further urges the prompt enactment of the Wilderness Bill as an aid to
the program of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission as well
as for the other urgent and desirable purposes that make this a most important
piece of basic legislation.

[Resolution 3, in its final form, was the product of a brief discussion, in
which it was decided not to eliminate the Kern Plateau as an example of poten-
tial wilderness areas.]

RESOLUTION 4

Shoreline Wilderness

That the vulnerability of the wild shores of oceans and lakes is now being
recognized is expressed in proposals to preserve such areas as the Olympic
shoreline in Washington, representative sections of the Pacific Coast in Oregon
and California, the Michigan dunes, and a portion of Cape Cod. The Conference
urges upon Congress and the American people the importance of adding littorals
that are still wild to our protected scenic and recreational resources.

The shoreline strip in its native condition represents a particularly valuable
scientific asset, but is subject to rapid and destructive alteration by such activ-
ities as skin-diving and the taking of the littoral flora and fauna.

For protection of this valuable resource the Conference urges appropriate
action for preservation of adequate shore areas, including not only the designa-
tion of suitable new preserves but also the extension of jurisdiction of the
agencies administering existing shoreline parks and preserves beyond the
present boundaries at high-tide line so that they may include an adequate
portion of the underwater plant and animal community.

[No discussion. The Resolution was adopted unanimously.]

RESOLUTION 5
Alaska

Time still remains for the preservation of a few small fragments of primitive
Alaska, but it is rapidly running out. If we do not persist more diligently in our
efforts, assets of inestimable value will be lost.
Recommendations:

a) This Conference supports the establishment of the Arctic Wildlife Range
and the Kuskokwim and Izembec Refuges. It views with grave concern the pro-
longed and seemingly unnecessary delay in submitting for Congressional action
the basic legislation which the Department of the Interior proposed in 1957
for establishment of the Arctic Wildlife Range. The Conference urges the Secre-
tary of the Interior to take early and specific action in this conservation pro-
posal which he has endorsed and which has received widespread public support.

b) Katmai and Glacier Bay National IMonuments, of increasing value to
recreation and research, should be given National Park status.

c) Legislation is essential to protect such species as polar bear, walrus,

112

ONTHANK

wolves, and others, which will be unable to withstand the effects of increased
hunting and destruction of habitat.

d) Wilderness areas should be designated within both Tongass and Chu-
gach National Forests. Establishment of the Tracy Arm-Ford's Terror Wilder-
ness Area including Endicott Arm, in Southeastern Alaska, should receive
priority.

e) We respectfully urge upon the people of Alaska the necessity for giving
the most careful consideration to the remarkable resources of wilderness and
wildlife within the boundaries of the new State. We further request that, before
developing any programs which might destroy these resources for all time, they
make a careful long-range study of the potentials of these wilderness resources,
both to the people of Alaska and to the nation.

f ) It is reported that an experimental plan calls for the atomic blasting of a
harbor at Cape Thompson on the Arctic coast in 1961. This proposed "new"
harbor will not be used as such; will have no specific purpose other than testing
atomic power as a dredging tool. It is understood that this area has uniquely
important biological quaHties which have not been considered in planning the
location of this experiment. Therefore, this Conference protests the planning of
such a project without full consideration of the results to the natural marine
and shore communities affected.

[No discussion. Resolution adopted unanimously.]

RESOLUTION 6

Population Problem

As wilderness is one of the first of the earth's important natural resources
to come into short supply as a result of world-wide human "population explo-
sion," the final destiny of all wilderness may hinge on this trend. This Confer-
ence, recognizing that both economic standards and the quality of human living
are at stake, accordingly recommends that research on human population prob-
lems be greatly increased and that social, governmental and other appropriate
agencies give immediate and urgent attention to the development of desirable
population controls.

[No discussion. Resolution adopted, three of audience voting No.]

RESOLUTION 7
Zoning

Increasing population pressures and the threat to wilderness from competing
uses because of lack of adequate areas elsewhere better suited to these other
uses require a zoning system to assure optimum use. The setting aside of land
for use as wilderness is thus an essential part of the planning of land use and
should be recognized as such. Furthermore, the preservation of wilderness
should be recognized in the context of overall land-use planning and zoning by
appropriate governmental agencies.

[No discussion. Resolution adopted unanimously.]

REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON RECOMMENDATIONS

113

RESOLUTION 8

Land Restoration

Millions of acres of potential timber lands are not now producing, and the
efficiency of timber production from available land resources is far below what
is possible. Much grazing land, also, is far below full potential production be-
cause of past overgrazing and other denuding influences. Much forest land of
greater efficiency in the use of such potential resources, including areas on the
National Forests and other public lands that were once productive but are now
impaired, would aid the economy and would also tend to reduce pressure for
commercial use of wilderness areas.

The Conference therefore recommends that the Congress, the United States
Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and other land-administering
agencies be urged to put more emphasis on tree planting, reseeding, and other
techniques for restoring maximum production on degraded lands available and
appropriate for timber production, forage production, or intensive recreational
use.

DISCUSSION Howard Zahniser, Discussion Leader

Henry Vaux (Berkeley) : This resolution, I think, raises an important point that was
implicit in our discussion this morning and in much of what has come about this afternoon.
It is an extremely constructive statement that can be helpful in minimizing some of the
pressures on wilderness areas. My only criticism of it is that it does not go far enough.

I would like to see it go further in one specific respect. It seems to me that the morning's
discussion highlighted in a very fundamental and significant way that, in terms of the
essential concept of wilderness use, perhaps the greatest danger that wilderness faces is from
those types of recreational use that we might define as mass recreation in wild land areas.
The increasing population pressure here in California and elsewhere makes it clear to us
every day, but there is certainly a great deal that could be done to minimize the dangers to
wilderness from pressures for mass recreational development by better utilization of our
non-wilderness wild land areas for this purpose. With this in mind, I would like to see this
particular resolution make allusion not only to increasing the efficiency of timber production
on timber growing land and to forage production on forage growing land, but to increasing
the efficiency of recreational use for mass recreation in non-wilderness wild land areas.

I would amend the last sentence of the first paragraph to read as follows: "Much forest
land under heavy and concentrated recreational use needs more intensive management if it
is long to sustain present and anticipated recreational impacts." Instead of the phrase "tree
planting, reseeding, etc.," I would use the following language: "tree planting, reseeding, and
other techniques for managment of the resource and its users." Finally, in place of the last
four words which are now: "timber or forage production," I would like to substitute:
"timber production, forage production, or intensive recreational use." Mr. Chairman, I
would hke to move this as an amendment.

Lewis Clark (Secretary, the Sierra Club) : There was recently a statement made by a
scientist that the world is moving toward a higher temperature; the temperature of the
world is going up due to the greater use of petroleum fuels and the flowing into the air of
CO2, and part of our economy of the world in keeping the atmosphere in balance is to have
more trees that convert the CO2 back into, I suppose, oxygen and products that we should
use. So perhaps we will be working in the right direction.

[The Resolution was adopted as amended without dissent.]

UNIYEBSITY COLLEGE AND TJNIVEBSITY COLLEGE HOSPITAL
MEDICAL SCHOOL, LONDON

The Third

RICKMAN GODLEE LECTURE

THE CALL AND CLAIMS
OF NATURAL BEAUTY

DEUVERED BY

PROFESSOR G. M. TREVELYAN, O.M.

IN THE GREAT HALL OF THE COLLEGE

z6tb OCTOBER, ip}i

CHAIRMAN

Professor Ei^ERiTus SIR THOMAS BARLOW, Bt.,
K.C.V.O., F.R.C.P., F.R.S.

[115: Appendix ]

On the recto of this leaf is a reproduction to scale of the
title page of the pamphlet (32 pages plus cover, 5^ x SYi
inches) from which *'The Call and Claims of Natural
Beauty" is reprinted. Omitted here is the introduction of
Professor Trevelyan by Sir Thomas Barlow, who describes
him as a writer of history and biography whose life
and service in Italy and the Balkans "have had a great
share in strengthening our national sympathy with those
nations," and who, moreover, "has presented invaluable
tracts of beautiful scenery to be safeguarded in perpetuity
for the delight of the English people"

The late Judge Robert W. Sawyer, an honorary life
member who was ever helpful to the Sierra Club in its
efforts to preserve wilderness, sent this pamphlet to me
too soon before his death to have learned of my full
appreciation of Professor Trevelyan' s lecture (which I
am sure Judge Sawyer enjoyed fully) or to see how well
it would complement these proceedings. — D.B.

[116]

G. M. TREVELYAN

The Call and Claims
of Natural Beauty

Sir Thomas Barlow, Mr. Provost, Lady Godlee, Ladies, and Gentle-
men: I had not the pleasure of knowing Sir Rickman Godlee, but I have heard
much about him, and I have learnt much in the last few minutes from the very
high authority of the Chairman. I have also learnt much from the perusal of
his delightful volume entitled A Village on the Thames*j wherein he studies
one after another the antiquities, the natural history and the beauty of the
region that he made his home. I have learnt that he was an outstanding example
of a type that has always specially attracted me — the speciaHst who has a wide
outlook, broad knowledge and warm enthusiasms outside his own subject as
well as in it ; and more particularly a man whose mind has been trained in the
splendid discipHne of a physical science, but whose heart and eyes take also
delight in the triumphs of art, the history of man, and the beauties of nature.
Such a man is about the best thing that our modern civilisation can produce.

Two things are characteristic of our age and more particularly of our island.
The conscious appreciation of natural beauty, and the rapidity with which
natural beauty is being destroyed. No doubt it is partly because the destruction
is so rapid that the appreciation is so loud. When someone you love is being
executed before your eyes, it is natural to cry out.

Meantime, how much I loved him
I find out now I've lost him.

The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat.

This passion for natural beauty that consumes so many of us to-day, found
recent expression in the most popular of post-war poems, the late poet laure-
ate's Testament of Beauty. And in the sphere of practical effort we have
National Trusts, Councils for the Preservation of Rural England, Town Plan-
nings and other efforts of Mrs. Partington to sweep back the tide of machine-
made ugliness a little while longer — in the desperate hope that the tide will
some day turn, or consent at least to be channelled into limited streams and
lakes, leaving to posterity some islands of the blest. Whether all this feeling
and effort is to prove vain or not wholly vain, whether it be a rearguard action
or a march to some modified victory, in any case many of us feel we must fight
it to the end because of the faith and fire within us.

It is quite possible that our ancestors were as fond of natural beauty as we
are, but they talked less often and less elaborately about it. Self-consciousness,

*A Village on the Thames, Whitchurch Yesterday and To-day. George Allen & Unwin.
7s. 6d.

[ 117]

118

TREVELYAN

the examination and proclamation of personal feelings is a modern character-
istic, in this as in other matters. Moreover, in our time, most people live buried
deep in ugly towns, removed from every natural sight and sound save a strip
of sky far overhead and the swish of rain on dirty streets. It is only on high
days and holidays that we go out into the country, and therefore we more
consciously relish

Our holiday of delight

In the beams of the God of the Muse.

Even Milton, the cockney, had that experience in a modified form:

As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine —

And if it was so with Milton, it is very much more so with us, for we are now
nine-tenths of us cockneys — city-dwellers — and in such cities, compared to
which old London, for all its annoying sewers, was a paradise of beauty.

Our ancestors, most of whom lived all the year round in unadulterated
rural surroundings, took less conscious note of natural beauty, because it was
the common air they breathed, the element in which they lived and moved. It
pervaded and formed their minds and personalities. The Cavaliers drew their
charm from the fields and the Roundheads their strength from the earth.
Cavalier and Roundhead are alike a vanished race, for they are not to be bred
under the influences of modern city life, machinery and the cheap press of to-
day. So too it was the influence of the fields and woods of Elizabethan England
that fostered the thousand-and-one lyric poets and musicians, those

Bards who died content on pleasant sward,
Leaving great verse unto a little clan.

— the high-hearted company of English minstrels of that day, of whom Shake-
speare was but the finest flower. Such poetry was as characteristic an expression
of that country life, and its influences, as problem and detective novels are of
the mechanical life of to-day. If we cannot save something at least of England's
rural beauty, I do not believe there is any future for English poetry, or for the
t5rpes of thought, feeling and aspiration to which poetry is akin.

The Elizabethan song-men had no doubt a certain consciousness of their
own delight in natural beauty —

By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals.

They too could notice the sun

Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.

THE CALL AND CLAIMS OF NATURAL BEAUTY

119

But theirs was a simpler, more childlike delight in the obvious that was always
around them. The modern attitude to natural beauty, more philosophic and
more conscious, began, in this country at least, with Wordsworth, who gave it
not only its first but its finest expression. That is why he still appeals to so
many of us to-day.

Going back to Chaucer's time we find the same influence of natural beauty
as in the age of Shakespeare. I will give two examples from that period; the
first shall represent the conscious delight in natural beauty, simple and unphilo-
sophical indeed, but awake and intense. It comes from that beautiful poem
The Cuckoo and the Nightingale which Wordsworth admired and modernised
so successfully. But I quote the original version:

There sate I down among the faire flours
And saw the birds trip out of hir hours,
There as they rested hem all the night
They were so joyful of the dayes light
They began of May for to done honours.

They could that service all by rote,
There was many a lovely note,
Some song loud, as they had plained.
And some in other manner voice yfained.
And some all out with the full throte.

And the river that I sate upon
It made such a noise as it ron,
Accordaunt with the birdes armony,
Me thought it was the best melody
That might ben yheard of any mon.

I think the last Rickman Godlee lecturer. Lord Grey of Fallodon, would agree
with that old English poet that the sound of birds singing by falling water was

the best melody
That might ben yheard of any mon.

And now, from Chaucer himself, I will take a few lines to illustrate the
unconscious effect of the all-pervading atmosphere of natural beauty, of natural
sights and sounds, on the thought and language of the men of that age and
country. Chaucer is describing a beautiful and sprightly young woman, and he
does so in four metaphors — one taken from the minted gold, the other three
from familiar, vulgar rural sights and sounds and smells.

Ful brighter was the shining of hire hewe
Than in the Tower the noble iforged newe.
But of her song it was as loud and yerne (brisk)
As any swalow sitting on a berne (barn).

Thereto she could skip and make a game
As any kid or calf following his dame.

Hire mouth was sweet as bracket or the meth (honeyed ale or mead)
Or hord of apples laid in hay or heth.

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TREVELYAN

How simple, strong yet exquisite it is — a lost strength and simplicity, because
the influences of daily life that made it are lost, or at least far less prevalent and
overmastered by others more mechanical and ugly.

We, I fear, can never again expect to live under the continual and ubiqui-
tous influence of natural and lovely sights and sounds. Through the conquests
of science over nature, the human race has assigned to itself another destiny.
Our present lot has its compensating advantages on the material side and in
some respects on the intellectual side also. Doubtless the city life of to-day
can in many respects be preferred to the rustic seclusion of old. I am not
debating the general question of relative loss and gain, or trying to strike a
balance. But to many of us city life can only be rendered tolerable on the con-
dition of frequent holidays in the real country, and for that reason, if for no
other, the real country must be preserved in sufficient quantity to satisfy the
soul thirst of the town dweller. That the unspoilt countryside is worth some-
thing also to its regular inhabitants, the downtrodden race of English agricul-
turalists, is another fact, too frequently ignored.

The appeal of natural beauty is not a single, simple thing. The aspect of
nature varies from place to place and day to day; and its appeal is made to the
highly composite mind of modern man, which contains an infinity of aptitudes,
tastes, desires, traditions, mysticisms, primeval inheritances and physical and
physiological urgings, to all of which natural beauty makes, in a variety of
ways, its strange and haunting appeal. To analyse that appeal is, therefore,
not easy. Indeed, how can we analyse it at all without doing wrong to its delicate
and fugitive spirit. "We murder to dissect." Yet, without pretending to make
either a philosophical or a scientific analysis, I should like to pass a few
remarks about the call of natural beauty, as I hear it.

It is clear, as I have said, that its appeal is made up of several, perhaps of
many, different elements, so inextricably blended in their action upon us that
we can with difficulty distinguish them apart.

Obviously one appeal is the aesthetic, the mere beauty of form and colour
apart from all association. Few would deny that general statement. Yet even
here we are in the region of disputes, for on aesthetics there are many different
views held in different times and places. A highly cultivated clergyman of the
mid-eighteenth century, banished to the remote Rectory of Elsdon in Northum-
berland, wrote to his friends in the South that in the summer the moors around
him were covered by the purple flower of a plant called ling, which made the
landscape "indescribably hideous." Yet some of us like heather for its colour,
as well as for its smell, and I should add for its "feel" — or, in aesthetic parlance,
its "tactile value."

Again, a living artist of high name and accomplishment, once told a friend
of mine, then his pupil at the Slade, that he should not paint bluebells in grass,
because green and blue made a cacophony of colour. That may be true of those
colours in a room — I am no judge — yet in early summer woods the combination

THE CALL AXD CLAIMS OF NATURAL BEAUTY

121

of green and blue, even in its aesthetic aspect, seems to have charms for the
human race. And the varieties of green in the early English summer makes
our island, whenever the sun shines on it, at moments the loveliest spot on earth.

But the esthetic appeal does not by any means make up the whole appeal
of natural beauty, though it enters into and enhances all the other subtle and
strange emotions that mankind feels in the presence of nature. One of these
calls of nature is the sense of life and youth ever renewed, the eternal recur-
rence of spring — at once allegory and reality, the mighty mother for ever and
for ever reborn. WTiat joy when after a long winter one looks out into the
garden and sees by some little sign that incorrigible old Mother Earth is "at it
again." The crocus, pushing up its golden finger through the still half-frozen
sod, aspiring out of darkness to light and life and warmth, fills us with a sense of
joy, more primeval and powerful than the mere delight in its yellow colour. The
thrush or blackbird's ''mellow fluting note,"

Sings us out of \\^ter's throat
The young time w-ith the life ahead.

These instances you may call religious or what you will; but they are older
than any formal religion, older than homo sapiens himself. This joy in spring
and early summer inspired prehistoric man to make those strange old rites and
legends which Sir James Frazer has collected in the Golden Bough. Chaucer
is full of it, from the first line of the Canterbury Tales onwards. Such joy in
the re\i\ing year is natural to all the animals, to all the children of the Great
Mother, to all the inhabitants of earth of whom man is one — save only in so far
as he shuts himself up in cities and ceases to be a part of free, visible nature.
And then, being cut off from these yearly sights and sounds that are natural
to him by an infinitely long inheritance, he broods, pines, is miserable, muti-
nous, wants very often he knows not what, and goes off into follies, madnesses
and meannesses innumerable.

But it is not only in the spring that we feel the love of growing things. It is
a natural, brotherly love that we feel for trees, flowers, even for grass, nay even
for rocks and water. We and they are all, literally, children of earth, for we have
been evolved as science teaches us, out of earth by infinite generations. We are,
literally as well as allegorically, brothers and sisters of a family, and when a
beautiful esthetic form has been given to our brother the tree, or our sister the
water leaping over our brother the rock, we feel our kinship and delight in them
and in their pulsing life, with a feeling of attachment stronger than the mere
esthetic pleasure, although that is certainly a great part of the sentiment. I
do not mean that this family feeling of kinship with nature is often a conscious
thought, but it is, I believe, at the back of our impulse towards nature, and
there are moments when I for one am strongly conscious of it. George Mere-
dith's poetry gave the most definite expression to this idea of our famih' rela-
tionship to earth and nature, an expression sometimes too philosophical for

122

TREVELYAN

the purposes of poetry, but when it was purely poetic as in Love in a Valley
and the Day of the Daughter of Hades, most powerful in its charm.

Man, as far back as we have evidence about his feelings, has always rejoiced
in nature. But not all of mankind has rejoiced in the whole of nature. There has
always been picking and choosing. The Arab has seen God in his deserts, where
more casual visitors have only seen the Devil. The wild Highlanders have loved
their rugged mountains from before the days of Ossian. But those mountains
were, until recently, a horror to the lowlander and above all to the Englishman,
though the Englishman rejoiced in his own green and ordered landscape of
field, hedgerow and coppice. I should hke, with your permission, to examine a
little this change of our attitude with regard to mountain scenery ; the change
is almost identical in time and progress with the march of the industrial revolu-
tion, and has, I think a certain causal connection with it.

Let us first state the case for the old horror of mountains felt by civilised
man until the latter part of the eighteenth century. I quote the locus classicus,
Mr. Burt^s letters, written to a friend, about 1725-7, from the Highlands of
Scotland. This observant and highly intelligent gentleman was not a mere
casual visitor to the Highlands; he lived among those wild hills for some years,
as civil adviser of General Wade in the construction of his famous roads, the
first thrust of civilisation into that heart of old darkness. But Burt had not
been born and bred among the mountains, and he had never met a civilised
man who pretended to admire them. He had therefore no idea that admiration
was their due. Here is what he wrote in his simplicity, very interesting to us
to-day:

The summits of the highest (mountains) are mostly destitute of earth ; and the huge
naked rocks, being just above the heath, prodtice the disagreeable appearance of a scabbed
head. Those ridges of the mountains that appear next to the ether, by their rugged irregular
lines, the heath and black rocks, are rendered extremely harsh to the eye. But of all views,
I think the most horrid, to look at the hills from east to west, or vice versa; for then the
eye penetrates far among them, and sees more particularly their stupendous bulk, frightful
irregularity, and horrid gloom, made yet more sombrous, by the shades and faint reflections
they communicate one to another.

Observe that it was not from want of carefully observing the form and chiaro-
scuro of mountains that Burt failed to appreciate them. In the next passage that
I shall quote, Burt indicates one of the causes of the dislike felt by civilised man
for mountains in those days, his lively fear of the fate that was apt to befall
him amid their recesses. As Macaulay pointed out, the fear of having one's throat
cut at the next turn of the track, was not conducive to picturesque raptures
amid Highland scenery. The ruggedness of the mountains was associated in the
mind of the lowland visitor with the lawless character of the inhabitants, the
hard quality of board and lodging, the unbridged torrents and paths winding
perilously among precipices. In this connection Burt writes:

In passing to the heart of the Highlands we proceed from bad to worse, which makes the

THE CALL AND CLAIMS OF NATURAL BEAUTY

123

worst of all the less surprising. But I often heard it said by my countrymen, that they
verily believed, if an inhabitant of the South of England were to be brought blindfold into
some narrow rocky hollow, inclosed with these horrid prospects, and there to have his
bandage taken off, he would be ready to die with fear, as thinking it impossible he should
ever get out to return to his native country.

Burt was by no means insensible to natural beauty. But his idea of a "poetical
mountain" was Richmond Hill, rising amid the green, luxuriant landscape of
South England. That was the hill, the hill for him:

Now what do you think [he continues] of a poetical mountain, smooth and easy of
ascent, clothed with a verdant, flowery turf, where shepherds tend their flocks, sitting under
the shade of tall poplars, etc? In short what do you think of Richmond Hill, where we have
passed so many hours together delighted with the beautiful prospect? But after this descrip-
tion of these [Scottish] mountains, it is not unlikely you may ask, of what use can be such
monstrous excrescencies ?

But in the next paragraph the purposes of the Creator are explained, on the
ground that the Highland mountains contain minerals, break the clouds, replen-
ish the rivers, and serve for the breeding of cattle.

This passage, comparing Richmond Hill so favourably with the Highlands,
is much the same as the sentiment of that old ballad writer of the Lady and her
Demon Lover.

*0 what are those hills ; those pleasant hills

That the sun shines sweetly on?'
'O those are the hills of heaven,' he said,

'Where you will never win.'

'And what is that mountain there,' she said,

'So dreary with frost and snow?'
'O that is the mountain of hell,' he said,

'Where you and I must go.'

How very different are our feelings to-day. It is not that we love Richmond
Hill less (except in so far as we have spoilt it by urbanisation) — but that we
have learnt to love the Highlands and the snowy Alps also. There are, I think,
more reasons than one for this change. In the first place there has been a change
in aesthetic appreciation — our tastes are wider, we still love the woodland hedge-
row, but we love the black rugged line of rocks on the skyline, in spite of, or on
account of, its irregularity and darkness The chiaroscuro of light and shade in a
highland strath pleases instead of repelling our taste. This is, in part, a matter of
growth or fashion in aesthetics; I state the fact, but I do not attempt to analyse
it in so far as it is purely aesthetic.

But as regards associated ideas that have greatly contributed to this change
of taste, I have something to say. No doubt Macaulay was right in attributing
the dislike felt by our ancestors for mountain scenery in part to the danger,
hardship and discomfort that then attended a tour in the Highlands. Yet that
does not cover all the ground. Between 1915 and 1918 I knew a great many

124

T REV ELY AN

people whose daily occupation it was to be in danger of being shot among the
Alps, yet who did not for that reason fail to appreciate their beauty. And the
modern mountaineer, though he likes his hardships moderated, deliberately
seeks danger as an element in his relation to the mountains. The climber does
his best not to be killed, but the danger such as it is is his own choice and
creation.

The Spartan psychology of the modern mountaineer has been stated by
Meredith in the 53rd chapter of Harry Richmond.

Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased: not to sit down in sight of them
ruminating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the soul, and set you measuring our lean
humanity against yonder sublime and infinite; but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out
among the peaks; taste danger, sweat, earn rest: learn to discover ungrudgingly that haggard
fatigue is the fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest is your uttermost reward.
Would you know what it is to hope again and have all your hopes in hand ? — hang upon the
crags at a gradient that makes your next step a debate between the thing you are and the
thing you may become. There the merry little hopes grow for the climber like flowers and
food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient if just within the grasp, as mortal
hopes should be. How the old lax life closes in about you there ! You are the man of your
faculties nothing more. Why should a man pretend to be more ? We ask it wonderingly when
we are healthy. Poetic rhapsodists in the vales below may tell you of the joy and grandeur
of the upper regions, they cannot pluck you the medical herb. He gets that for himself who
wanders the marshy ledge at nightfall to behold the distant Sennhiittchen twinkle, who leaps
the green-eyed crevasses, and in the solitude of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand to the
mountain kine.

We must, therefore, I think, say that although the march of civilisation,
security and comfort into the Alps and Scottish Highlands has been a necessary
condition of their wide popularity, it is not in itself an explanation of the mod-
ern love of mountains. That we must seek elsewhere.

I believe that the modern aesthetic taste for mountain form, is connected
with a moral and intellectual change, that differentiates modern civilised man
from civilised man in all previous ages. I think that he now feels the desire and
need for the wildness and greatness of untamed, aboriginal nature, which his
predecessors did not feel. One cause of this change is I think the victory that
civilised man has now attained over nature through science, machinery and
organisation, a victory so complete that he is denaturalising the lowland land-
scape. He is therefore constrained to seek nature in her still unconquered cita-
dels, the mountains. Even that citadel he will soon conquer and desecrate unless
he takes thought: are we not even now struggling against Sty Head and Wry-
nose Roads and the prospect of hotels on our mountain tops?

A new form of human desire has, under these conditions, arisen to get away
from the vulgarity of man's triumph over nature, back to the old beginnings, to
nature as God made her, as first she rose from the deep of time. Another use has
been found for Mr. Burt's horrid mountains, in a way that he did not foresee;
the providence and foresight of the Creator has been further justified.

This taste for mountain scenery, this love of nature in its most natural and

THE CALL ASD CLAIMS OF NATURAL BEAUTY

US

unadulterated form, has grown pari passu with the Industrial Revolution. Watts
and Stevenson were contemporaries of Rousseau and Wordsworth, and the two
movements have gone on side by side ever since, each progressing with equal
rapidity.

The first sign of the change in taste was the movement for landscape gar-
dening. In the later eighteenth century, Capability Brown persuaded the noble-
men and gentlemen of England to apply the hand of taste to their estates, and
to bring the grass and trees of their parks up to the walls of their country seats,
abolishing the formal Dutch and Versailles gardens in which their grandfathers
had rejoiced. He was appealing to a new-born desire for wildness. That desire
to go back from the artificial to the natural in landscape gardening, resulted
from the fact that nature had been by that time sufficiently tamed in England
and was even getting a little too tame. The enclosures of the eighteenth century
were turning south England into a chess-board — a very pretty green chess-
board certainly, but less irregular and less accidental than the heaths, forests,
commons and irregularly shaped fields that were vanishing before the march of
progress. In ancient and mediaeval times, when man was still battling with
forest, fen and heath, the lords of creation desired to retire occasionally from
the wild aspect which was then nature's normal appearance, and take refuge
in formal gardens made for their delight. The grandees of the Roman Empire
had loved their gardens, deep with ordered shade and shine. So too the !Mediae-
val pleasaunce had been trim and rectangular, as you can see in MSS. illumina-
tions, a plot of order in the surrounding wild. And such was the ideal of a garden
and pleasaunce until in the middle of the eighteenth century the ordinary
landscape had become so tame that men began to desire a little more wildness,
such wildness at least as an English parkland affords.

We, in our turn, have to complain of worse outrages on nature than the
enclosure of square fields in lovely hedgerows. And the parklands, attacked as
public nuisances by the wisdom of our statesmen and financiers, are as rapidly
as possible to be turned into building estates. So it's awa to the hielands, Lizzy
Lindsay — there is no other refuge. Or to the Alps themselves, where we address
nature in Matthew Arnold's words:

To thee only God granted

A heart ever new —
To all always open,

To all always true.

Ah ! calm me, restore me ;

And dr\' up my tears
On thy high mountain-platforms

Where morn first appears;

Where the white mists, for ever,

Are spread and unfurl'd, —
In the stir of the forces

Whence issued the world.

126

TREVELYAN

You will note in those lines of Matthew Arnold a personifying of nature in
the Alps, as a friend and comforter to the individual man.

To thee only God granted

A heart ever new —
To all always open, ^

To all always true.

Nature, no doubt, acts as a comforter and giver of strength even in southern
woodlands and on smooth hillsides. But to many of us the moorland and the
mountain seem to have more rugged strength and faithfulness with which in
solitude we can converse and draw thence strength and comfort. And the moun-
tain above all seems to have personality which says to us as we gaze on it at
evening from the valley-head below — "I know, I understand. Such is the lot of
man. I have watched him through the ages. But there is a secret behind. It will
always be a secret." That at least is what the mountains say to me when they
talk. To others they may say something different. But to many they have some-
thing important to say, whatever it may be. If this personality of mountains is a
fallacy, it is none the less a potent and beneficent emotion. It is one of the ways
by which men see God. It is one of the sacraments prepared for man, or dis-
covered by man.

This sense of personality in the mountain has been nobly rendered by
Browning in his Saul:

Have ye seen when Spring's arrowing summons goes right to the aim,

And some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held (he alone,

While the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a broad bust of stone

A year's snow bound about for a breastplate — leaves grasp of the sheet ?

Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet,

And there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, your mountain of old,

With his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages untold —

Yes, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow and scar

Of his head thrust 'twixt you and the tempest — all hail, there they are !

— ^Now again to be softened with verdure, again hold the nest

Of the dove, tempt the goat and its young to the green on his crest

For their food in the ardours of summer.

And in our own day Miss Margaret Cropper, in her poem The Broken Hearth-
stone has expressed the same idea of the personality of a mountain in a different
but no less marvellous manner.

But while we may note, account for and approve this recent tendency of
super-civilised man to seek for nature in her most natural and uncompromising
forms, we do not any the less love the ordered lowland landscape of hedgerow
and covert, meadow and cornland, with farm and village nestling into the scene
as an essential part of its purely aesthetic beauty, and of its association and
intimate appeal. Here, in the South-English landscape, wherever it has not yet
been spoiled, we have what we may call the marriage of man's work and nature's

THE CALL AND CLAIMS OF NATURAL BEAUTY

127

in perfect harmony. It reached its culminating point of perfection in the reign
of George III, with the last enclosures, the great plantations of woodland
estates and parks round the country seats, and the building in great profusion
of substantial but beautiful farms, farmbuildings and cottages harmonious with
the landscape. I think the island as Wordsworth and Keats knew it must have
been even more beautiful than in its wilder state in olden times. But after that,
with extraordinary rapidity, a change came over the spirit of the scene. In the
nineteenth century the machine age, commonly called the Industrial Revolu-
tion, destroyed our native school of architecture, debauched the taste for awhile
even of the most cultivated persons, and substituted for the beautiful materials
of which old buildings and fences were constructed, materials which were ugly
in proportion as they were cheap, in proportion therefore as they were imposed
by economic necessity on the improver. By the end of the nineteenth century
it was already true that almost all that was old was beautiful, almost all that was
new was either ugly in itself, or in shrieking disharmony with the natural
beauty amid which it was set.

In the twentieth century, so far as it has yet gone, two things have hap-
pened. The taste of the cultivated classes and of a very large proportion of all
classes has greatly improved in architecture, and the desire to preserve natural
beauty has become widely spread. But this change has not yet had more than a
very slight influence on the action of the State, which continues to be increas-
ingly inimical to natural beauty by its activities, particularly in taxation. And,
moreover, the advent of the motor car, though it enables the dweller in our
unhappy cities to enjoy relief in the country more easily, is plastering the coun-
tryside with horrors of bungalows, advertisements and ugly houses in the wrong
places at a pace of which the Victorians might perhaps have been proud, but
which they were fortunately unable to rival for lack of the internal combustion
engine. The Victorians at least acted up to their own ideals like the moral,
serious folk they were. They did the best they knew, even though in our eyes
much of that best was bad. But we sin against our own light. We know that we
are disfiguring England and murdering beauty, yet we continue to do so.

Video meliora proboque,
Deteriora sequor.

Or, to speak more precisely, those of us who care for preservation of natural
beauty are still outnumbered and overborne by those who, though not all of
them wholly indifferent to our cause, place other considerations whether of
business or of politics in a higher place than any such considerations.

As the centuries pass the mystery of the Universe deepens. The thoughts of
civilised man accumulate like snowflakes on the summit of Everest, or the leaves
of many years in winter woods, burying one past system after another, one
fashion after another in religion, science, poetry and art. Knowing that so much
lies buried beneath, which but now was so hot and certain, it becomes ever

128

TREVELYAN

more difficult to trust so implicity as of old whatever still for the moment lies
on the surface of human thought, the still surviving dogma, or the latest fashion
in opinion. At least it becomes difficult to trust either to dogma or to thought
alone. Man looks round for some other encouragement, some other source of
spiritual emotion that will not be either a dogma or a fashion, something

That will be for ever,
That was from of old.

And then he sees the sunset, or the mountains, the flowing river, the grass and
trees and birds on its banks. In the reality of these he cannot fail to believe,
and in these he finds, at moments, the comfort that his heart seeks. It still
is so with us, as it was with that old contemporary of Chaucer who wrote The
Cuckoo and the Nightingale and gave this advice to an unfortunate lover:

*Yay, use,' quoth she, 'this mediceine,

Every day this May ere thou dine

Go look upon the fresh daisy,

And though thou be for woe in point to die

That shall full greatly lessen thee of thy pine.'

By the side of religion, by the side of science, by the side of poetry and art,
stands Natural Beauty, not as a rival to these, but as the common inspirer and
nourisher of them all, and with a secret of her own beside.

The appeal of natural beauty is more commonly or at least more consciously
felt to-day than ever before, just because it is no new argument, no new dogma,
no doctrine, no change of fashion, but something far older yet far more fresh,
fresh as when the shepherd on the plains of Shinar first noted the stern beauty
of the patient stars. Through the loveliness of nature, through the touch of sun
or rain, or the sight of the shining restlessness of the sea, we feel

Unworded things and old to our pained heart appeal.

And to the young who have no pain, who have not yet kept watch on man's
mortality, nature is a joy responding to their own, haunting them like a passion.

This flag of beauty, hung out by the mysterious Universe, to claim the
worship of the heart of man, what is it, and what does its signal mean to us?
There is no clear interpretation. But that does not lessen its value. Like the
Universe, like life, natural beauty also is a mystery. But whatever it may be,
whether casual in its origin as some hold who love it well, or whether as others
hold such splendour can be nothing less than the purposeful message of God —
whatever its interpretation may be, natural beauty is the ultimate spiritual
appeal of the Universe, of nature, or of the God of nature, to their nursling man.
It and it alone makes a common appeal to the sectaries of all our religious and
scientific creeds, to the lovers of all our different schools of poetry and art,
ancient and modern, and to many more beside these. It is the highest common
denominator in the spiritual life of to-day.

THE CALL AND CLAIMS OF NATURAL BEAUTY

129

Yet now that it is most consciously valued, it is being most rapidly destroyed
upon this planet, and above all in this island. In old days it needed no conserva-
tion. Man was camped in the midst of it and could not get outside it, still less
destroy it. Indeed, until the end of the eighteenth century the works of man
only added to the beauty of nature. But science and machinery have now
armed him with weapons that will be his own making or undoing as he chooses
to use them ; at present he is destroying natural beauty apace in the ordinary
course of business and economy. Therefore, unless he now will be at pains to
make rules for the preservation of natural beauty, unless he consciously protects
it at the partial expense of some of his other greedy activities, he will cut off
his own spiritual supplies, and leave his descendants a helpless prey forever to
the base materialism of mean and vulgar sights.

This matter has become a public question of the first magnitude. The value
of natural beauty is admitted in words by our public men, but when it comes
to deeds the doctrine is too new to bear much fruit. It has for centuries been
held sacrilege to destroy a church, so churches are guarded from destruction
and even exempted from taxation. But a place of natural beauty may be
destroyed, and is now actually to be taxed by the State in order that it may the
sooner be sold to the jerry-builder. Meanwhile, the State itself pours forth the
money of ratepayer and tax-payer for the perpetration all over the island of
outrages on the beauty of the country. Those who mourn over the destruction
of abbeys long ago, should look also at the beam in our own eye, and hasten to
save from destruction or disfigurement parks, woodlands and valley heads.

This is a civic duty that cannot any longer be neglected without dire conse-
quences. Destruction walks by noonday. Unless the State reverses the engines
and instead of speeding up destruction, plans the development of the country
so that the minimum of harm can be done to beauty, the future of our race,
whatever its social, economic and political structure may be, will be brutish
and shorn of spiritual value.

Conservation— and Tinkering

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By
land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony
with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his
right hand and chop off his left. . . .

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is
not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organ-
ism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how
little we know about it. The last word in ignorance is the man who
says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?' If the land mechanism
as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand
it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something
we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard
seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first
precaution of intelligent tinkering.

— Aldo Leopold, in Round River (Oxford, 1953)

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ALEUTIAN IS./
N.W.R.^

IZEMBEG
N.W.R.

^^ROPOSED)

B060SL0F

KODIAK
N.W.R.

SEMIDI
^N.W.R

1,SIME0N0F
° y N.W.R.

164'

156