Our Wilderness Heritage

Our Wilderness Heritage by Bruce Babbitt, Governor of Arizona

My favorite wild place is Sierra Ancha, the wide mountain. In August, when Phoenix heat is no longer bearable, we leave, driving east past Roosevelt Lake, up a rocky track past the forks of Workman Creek, through damp thickets of mountain locust, columbine, and raspberry into the rain forests that cover Aztec Peak. There the road ends. Wilderness begins. We spend mornings on random walks through the dense blue thickets of spruce and fir, pausing to gaze across the ramparts of Pueblo Canyon over the honeycovered desert stretching eastward 3000 feet below. In the afternoon, cumulus clouds boil up and explode in a frenzy of lightning, thunder, and sudden cold rain. Evening is a quiet play of light and shadow; as the clouds break up and drift away, a pale moon floats up from the pink desert horizon reaching through the twisted branches of old pines. Each wilderness visitor takes something distinctive and personal from the experience. For me, the essential quality of wilderness is its primeval stillness. Here the rugged land and the big sky come together, unbroken by roads, trucks, sputtering trail bikes, or the whine of chain saws. When my grandfather homesteaded the Flagstaff area a century ago, there was plenty of wilderness, in fact, too much wilderness. The very word connoted hardship, hostile Apaches, childbirth without medical help, and no search parties if you got trapped in an autumn snowstorm. His generation was out to tame and civilize the wilderness, and it probably never occurred to them that someday their descendants would be passing laws to preserve the very wilderness they were trying so hard to subdue.

For practical, economic reasons for maintaining wilderness areas. Leopold argues convincingly that the health of our land, water, and air is all tied to a complex biological cycle that we scarcely understand. He illustrates how our economic security and future development require that we maintain pristine examples of total life systems at work in their natural relationships, undistorted by the activity of man.

Most readers of Sand County Almanac are unaware that the most influential wilderness writer of the 20th century got his start right here in Arizona. Leopold graduated from the Yale Forest School in 1909, joined the Forest Service, and was sent to Apache County to survey and map timber stands in the White Mountains. Traveling on horseback, he rode the canyons of the Blue, topped out on Escudilla, and came to love the country. Years later, he recounted a dramatic incident that started the development of his wilderness philosophy. He had joined with ranchers and sportsmen in a campaign to exterminate lions, wolves, and other predators from the White Mountains. One day he spotted a wolf and her pups stalking a deer. Leopold rode up, fired several shots, and the wolf went down. "We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes something known only to her and to the mountain." In a flash of poetic insight, Leopold began a lifetime of productive study and writing about man and his relation to the natural world.

The change came around 1900 when a few visionary Westerners began to see that without protection the West would soon be timbered, trapped, grazed, hunted, and used to exhaustion. The leader was a North Dakota cowpuncher turned President, Teddy Roosevelt. During his ranching years, T.R. had watched the buffalo herds disappear and the ranges erode into useless gullies from overgrazing. Taking that experience to the White House, he acted to expand the national forests and to create an unprecedented number of parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges.

In the 1920s, the Arizona Highway Department began construction of the Coronado Trail over the Blue range, from Clifton to Springerville. The Coronado Trail was a triumph of modern road engineering. But Leopold saw the twisting road as a venomous serpent intruding into a natural paradise, the beginning of an invasion of men and machines that would destroy the pristine forests. Moved to action and eloquence, he began a campaign for wilderness designation. In 1924, Congress responded by establishing the Gila National Wilderness on the New Mexico side of the state line. It was the nation's first official Wilderness, an enduring monument to a man who saw the future in the green eyes of a dying wolf.

On a trip through Arizona in 1903, the President stopped over at the Grand Canyon and spoke to a small crowd of cowboys, tourists, and Indians, summing up his wilderness philosophy: Wilderness is also for our children. It guarantees they will have a chance to experience the raw flavor of the Old West as a guide to knowing and understanding the New West they will inherit in their time. Aldo Leopold put it this way. "I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?"

Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you.

Fortunately for Arizona, we still have some of those blank spots on the map. With a little luck and a lot of effort they will be there for generations to come.

The modern idea of wilderness is best explained in a classic book of short essays, Sand County Almanac. The author, Aldo Leopold, makes a powerful case for wilderness as a spiritual necessity, but he also explains the

The Call of the Wild

Let us probe the silent places Let us seek what luck betides us; Let us journey to a lonely land I know. There's a whisper on the night wind, There's a star agleam to guide us, And the wild is calling, calling... let us go.