Chapter 23
America’s Natural Heritage
Cape Lookout, Big Bend, the Grand Canyon
American environmental activist David Brower (1912-2000) executive director of the Sierra Club, leads an ultimately successful protest against the proposed construction of dams on the Colorado River near the Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, 1966.
Arthur Schatz / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock
I
When Lyndon Johnson ratcheted up the Great Society’s commitment to preserve what he called “America’s natural heritage” in his special message to Congress on February 23, 1966, he didn’t need to search for a constituency; most Washington lawmakers were on his side. Point by point, the president offered specific conservation measures to fight air pollution, make cities healthy places, and save historic places, in addition to his extensive reform plan to clean the nation’s waters. David Brower, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Barry Commoner, and all those preservationists who had, as he once said, “stood up against private greed for public good,” were enthralled. In fact, Johnson began the special message by quoting the epigraph of Silent Albert Schweitzer’s warning: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the
Americans in the twenty-first century should read the “Natural Heritage” speech to understand conservation leadership at its best. Only Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt equaled Johnson in prioritizing preservation and then driving appropriate measures into law around the power of his persuasive personality. Johnson rhapsodized about saving “uncharted forests, broad sparkling rivers, and prairies ripe for planting,” using language that could have been lifted from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Then, sounding like John Steinbeck, the president insisted that California redwood groves be spared the lumberman’s ax, for they were ambassadors from another time. Once again, he made it clear that national lakeshores needed to be established in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Underneath the picturesque imagery, though, his special message was a warning in the style of Silent He said, “We see that we can corrupt and destroy our lands, our rivers, our forests and the atmosphere itself—all in the name of progress and necessity. Such a course leads to a barren America, bereft of its beauty, and shorn of its
Johnson’s preservation theme was clear: the country was grappling with an unprecedented environmental crisis. Treasured landscapes had been compromised by synthetic pesticides, industrial debris, poor planning, and pollution of every type. He vowed to bend the will of Congress to pass bills aimed at arresting the unacceptable degradation of America’s natural resources. Backed with fresh scientific data from the blockbuster report of the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee report, released in November 1965, he was well prepared to win Congress over. He described in heartbreaking detail the destruction of America’s major rivers such as the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri by the discharge of treated and untreated sewage collected from a population of nearly 50 million citizens. Sounding like Bill Douglas on the loose, he lashed out at the chemical industries for poisoning rivers with by-products that wouldn’t break down benignly in the water.
The good news was that the Water Pollution Control Act of 1965 had begun the process of stopping polluters by means of interstate water standards. It authorized a $3.4 billion grant program over a four-year period for the construction of sewage treatment facilities and removed the dollar limitation on grants to enable large cities to participate more fully and increased the grant percentage. In addition, the act led to a comprehensive investigation into the effects of pollution and sedimentation on fish and wildlife, outdoors recreation, water supply, and other beneficial water uses in estuaries and estuarine zones of the United
What Johnson wanted from Congress in 1966 was appropriations to clean and preserve entire river basins from their sources to their mouths by having one federal regulatory agency uphold one standard. In his plan, the federal government would help low-income river communities receive funding for new sewage treatment plants. Going further, he called for the establishment of a National Water Commission to advise on the entire range of water resource issues. “The technology of water treatment must be improved,” he stated. “We must find ways to allow more ‘re-use’ of waste water at reasonable costs. We must remove or control nutrients that cause excessive growth of plant life in streams, lakes and estuaries. We must take steps to control the damage caused by waters that ‘heat-up’ after cooling generators and industrial
William Ruckelshaus, who in 1970 would become the first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Richard Nixon, credited Johnson’s 1966 special message as the origin of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. “None of these environmental historians get it right,” he groused later. “They all want to write about the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society because it’s romantic. But the story of the 1960s environmental movement should be centered on how Johnson and then Nixon launched an effective campaign for comprehensive sewage treatment in America. That’s what has made the difference. The problem is that few academic historians want to become sewage treatment experts and the popular presses don’t think it’s
What Ruckelshaus said was true; Johnson’s determined efforts to curtail water pollution and reform sewage treatment protocols had been marginalized even at the time amid the excitement of the administration’s Wilderness Act and Highway Beautification Act efforts. Johnson’s public willingness to chastise corporations and citizens for treating the country’s rivers as sewage drains for everything from poultry farm waste to hog manure to toxic chemicals didn’t seize the public imagination.
Johnson’s special message couldn’t have been smarter or more realistic, yet it was largely ignored in the press, drowned out by scornful Vietnam War coverage; the number of US troops in South Vietnam would soon hit the 250,000 mark. Even as US planes began bombing Hanoi and Haiphong, the message made clear that LBJ wasn’t finished with his expansionary New Conservation federal park initiatives. “It is possible to reclaim a river like the Potomac from the carelessness of man,” he said. “But we cannot restore—once it is lost—the majesty of a forest whose trees soared upward 2,000 years
Building on Kennedy’s Cape Cod feat, Johnson realized the same national park status for Cape Lookout, a pristine string of three largely uninhabited barrier islands situated off the North Carolina mainland and accessible only by Cape Lookout, which is a section of the southern Outer Banks, below Ocraco*ke Island, is possibly the finest stretch of white sand beach in the United States, a rich biosphere for conch, scallops, whelks, and sand dollars, among hundreds of other life-forms. Due to its proximity to the Gulf Stream, tons of Scotch bonnets (the North Carolina state shell) regularly washed up on the beaches. The Outer Banks had long been renowned for fishing, with charter boats taking anglers out from the mainland to catch wahoo, king mackerel, and tuna. Johnson predicted that the national seashore designation would enhance that recreational activity and that tourists from all over the world would be drawn to photograph the wild Banker horses that lived on Shackleford Banks, one of the islands making up the Cape Lookout complex. Johnson raved about the picture-postcard, black-and-white diamond-patterned vintage lighthouse on the Cape, as well as the supposedly sunken remains of Blackbeard the Pirate’s circa 1700 ships.
At the White House signing ceremony for Cape Lookout National Seashore on March 10, Johnson, in good humor, caught the press by surprise. With Lady Bird at his side, he stood in the East Room, smiling at the small crowd. His wife seemed to understand the sincerity of what her husband said: “Unless we begin now to restore the environment in and around our cities, we will be condemning a large part of our population to an ugly, drab and mechanical
Johnson’s oration that afternoon was significant because he used “the clear water and the warm sandy of coastal North Carolina as a basis to explain what the New Conservation effort meant to him in personal terms and why the Great Society’s “necklace of national sea and lakeshores” was the ultimate gift to future generations of Americans. Made just fifteen days following the Special Message on Preserving Natural Heritage, the remarks showed that Johnson’s desire to create Parks for People wasn’t a passing impulse. If there was a moment when Johnson rose to the rhetorical heights of Jack Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr., it was in his rambling “I See an America” speech at the Cape Lookout signing:
I see an America where city parks and plazas, as numerous as today’s parking lots, bring rest and relaxation to shoppers and to office workers. If I were the mayor of any big city in America today, I would immediately put the best minds in my city to work to plan and program areas within reach of my population, and see if I could effect a coordination between the city, the State, and the Nation so that the people who make up the industrial genius of this empire will have a place to take their kids and to relax and to rejuvenate themselves for the mighty production that may be ahead in the following years.
I see an America where city streets are lined with trees and city courts are filled with flowers.
I live in a little community of 600. My daughter wrote an article last year and they paid her for it. She took the money and put four live oak trees around the plaza of that town. They were planted in memory of her grandmother, as I observed last week. And it made the town look like a different place. The bank planted some flowers in front of its doors. The merchants down the street got some shrubs and put them up there.
That can be and should be and is being done all over America. Because that is an assignment that doesn’t have to come out of Washington. That is something that every lady who belongs to a garden club can make a contribution to. That is an assignment that every businessman can contribute to. That is a business getter. People will come to look at his lawn and his window and admire it and maybe make a purchase while they are there.
I see an America where our air is sweet to breathe and our rivers are clean to swim
This marvelous “I see an America” oration drew only a smattering of publicity nationwide. As usual, most newspaper editors and TV producers were too distracted by Vietnam and Dr. King to consider much else. Few reporters understood that protecting America’s treasured landscapes was truly dear to LBJ’s heart. When the president said, “I do not want my children, or my grandchildren, or those who may come after me that may bear my name, to ever be able to point to blight and trash as their inheritance from me,” he meant every word of To read the speech today, it may be hard to realize how hopeful, even quaint, some of his imagery seemed in 1966.
Shortly after the establishment of Cape Lookout, the Fish and Wildlife Service funded the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in ten scattered units along fifty miles of southern Maine coastline between Kittery and Cape Elizabeth. Created in cooperation with the state of Maine, the refuge protected essential salt marshes and estuaries for migratory birds. The complex embodied Carson’s sea trilogy and conservation activism by returning to nature the environment she most cherished, without much disturbance by humans. And closer to Cape Lookout, the Rachel Carson Estuarine Reserve—a cluster of islands and marshes totaling 2,315 acres near Beaufort, North Carolina, accessible only by boat—was preserved as a habitat for osprey, snowy egret, and Wilson’s
Following President Johnson’s lead, Maine voters soon authorized a $1.5 million bond to protect the “wilderness character” of the Allagash and St. John Rivers. Those waterways drained in a storied region of wilderness in the Maine North Woods not far from Thoreau’s noble Mount Katahdin. The lobbying of Bill Douglas, Ed Muskie, and Stewart Udall had paid off. The area needed rehabilitation, after logging actually altered the flow between the area’s myriad waterways and lakes. The Johnson administration worked with Maine’s legislature to designate the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in 1966. Later in July 1970, it became part of America’s National Wild and Scenic River
II
When the spring rains came to Washington that early April 1966, the First Lady, with Stewart Udall and George Hartzog, the National Park Service director, as companions, set off for Big Bend National Park in Texas, which covered more than eight hundred thousand acres along the green-tinted, slow-flowing Rio Grande. The towering Chisos peaks made it a very different ecosystem from her acreage in Stonewall near Austin. Pausing to look around, to soak in the rugged grandeur and majestic low mesas, Mrs. Johnson, in full booster mode, declared the desolate “big sky vistas” of west Texas her muse. Her “priceless days” in the fresh air of Big Bend country was like an anti-stress
Everybody was in a playful mood. Mrs. Johnson had photos taken of seventy or so reporters as if they were the celebrity subjects of interest. Those in her entourage thought of the trip as a break from the hurly-burly of Washington politics. The national press corps, tagging along, were given a comic warning by Udall: “You are headed for the wide-open spaces. It is two hours to everything! Relax, take a tranquilizer, enjoy the landscape. It’s bigger than all outdoors. It IS all outdoors! Get with the wilderness The airport nearest to the park was in Presidio, Texas, known to Mrs. Johnson only because, with its temperatures routinely about 100 degrees, it was often registered as the hottest place in the United States. There, one woman from Marfa, Texas, came up to her and said, “Nobody ever stops here. All they do is fly over Mrs. Johnson recorded in her audio diary that she had greeted a herd of skittish antelopes grazing near the runway and seen a placard that read WELCOME LADY BIRD, UDALL AND YOU It was a festive arrival, made more so by the Sul Ross State college band loudly playing “The Yellow Rose of
The two-hour drive from Presidio to Big Bend was through “Pancho Villa Country,” territory also famous for its Comanche Indian lore. “The scenery was an ever-changing panorama of mountains and what looked like volcanic flows, swirls of tumbleweed, a few struggling bluebonnets, cactus and yucca, and finally great expanses of nothing at all except creosote bushes with little tiny yellow blossoms on them,” she wrote. “It was a harsh, forbidding land, hostile to man, a land of arroyos and mountains barricaded by boulders and armored with plants that ‘either stick or sting or stink,’ as somebody has
When Lady Bird arrived in Panther Junction, a visitor center in the park, she was greeted by a mariachi band and the Odessa Chuck Wagon barbecue outfit. Dressed like Elizabeth Taylor in the movie which had been filmed in the nearby town of Marfa, Mrs. Johnson praised the splendor of Big Bend and vowed to help the National Park Service protect other Texas ecosystems such as the lush Big Thicket and bayous, along the Louisiana border.
When JFK had visited Yosemite, in 1962, he had turned down the invitation to hike to Vernal Falls, remaining behind at the lodge in his navy blue suit. In contrast, Lady Bird, in blue jeans and checkered shirt, the local attire, wanted to explore every inch of Big Bend as a Girl Scout might. Udall was attentive to the First Lady’s needs. Her cottage in the national park was redecorated and Instead of taking his usual anxious, lunging strides, he held back, not wanting to walk ahead of her in west Texas. To some, that shift in habit reeked of sucking up to the boss’s wife. To others, it was a masterstroke for the preservationist movement, which at that very moment was advancing Wild and Scenic Rivers legislation through Congress. Acting like a schoolteacher, Udall spoke to Mrs. Johnson about the sandstone cliffs, piñon pines, and peregrine falcons. “Stew is a natural outdoorsman,” the First Lady remarked the next
Hiking up Lost Mine Trail, Mrs. Johnson observed with childlike enthusiasm the haughty chickadees, sky-dancing hawks, tiny purple wildflowers, and mighty oaks. “Stew and I set the pace and a naturalist came along beside us to tell us about the wildlife,” Lady Bird recorded in her diary. “... On the way up, surrounded by the marvelous vistas, Stew and I both said at once, ‘On a clear day you can see forever!’ And you can. In one direction you see into Mexico. It’s a wild, free land and it does something to
No tour company could have planned a better trip to Big Bend than the one the NPS had unfurled for Lady Bird. Everything was perfectly choreographed. The El Paso Natural Gas Company paid for catering, so taxpayers weren’t stuck with the bill. At dusk a full moon rose higher and higher. Wildlife experts lectured about mountain goats, rattlesnakes, and the strangeness of the landscape. Navajo blankets were spread out on the ground for stargazing. Old English ballads from the Appalachians and cowboy songs, such as “Little Joe the Wrangler,” were sung hootenanny style. Thick T-bone steaks were on the menu, as were riveting frontier tales about the rancher Charles Goodnight and the Comanche leader Quanah Parker. It was conservation politics as fiesta. “Sometimes I think the Lord made up in this Western country for what he didn’t give us in rainfall and in verdant vegetation with the glory of the sky,” Mrs. Johnson reflected in her diary. “It was the most superb theater, fit subject for a symphony or a poem—but for me just an hour of delight that was almost tangible—of the heightened feeling of being alive.... What a night to remember!—sheer magic, and a day worth five ordinary days of
At dinner, Mrs. Johnson wore a bright red dress that caught Hartzog’s eye. Playing stage manager, he insisted that the First Lady stand next to a spectacular cholla tree in full bloom. The twilight lighting was perfect, and Hartzog clicked away on his no-frills camera. Bursting with excitement, he sent the roll of film to Marathon, Texas, to be developed overnight and then released to the press. Late that evening, a runner brought the pictures to Hartzog. “I don’t think you are going to like these,” he said.
“Why?” Hartzog asked the runner. “Didn’t they come out?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, “they came out real nice—in black and
After a good night’s sleep, Lady Bird was served “cowboy” coffee, ham, sourdough biscuits, and pancakes for breakfast. April 3 was Palm Sunday, and the entourage was observant. The day would be full, but not quite as insouciant as the previous one. After chow, the First Lady embarked on a five-hour rubber-raft journey down the Rio Grande through the Mariscal Canyon, hemmed in by the Chisos Mountains. But it wasn’t an unscripted expedition. Greyhound buses spat diesel fumes down dirt roads to the Tally put-in spot. A tape recording of coyotes was played to create an atmospheric effect. Secret Service officers in rafts were omnipresent on the ten-mile journey, with Lady Bird’s raft taking the lead. Portable latrines were erected along the way. It all added up to an overkill of VIP All 139 people who floated with the First Lady that afternoon down the Rio Grande River—more than the population of many a west Texas town—were treated as if dignitaries. Lady Bird’s press secretary, Liz Carpenter, was barking orders like a Broadway stage manager. A ticked-off Secret Service agent was heard to say, “I keep this gun for just one reason.”
“Why?” someone asked.
“To shoot the first son of a bitch that tries to rescue Liz Carpenter in case she should fall in,” he
The journey down the Rio Grande is one of the great outdoor adventures the National Park Service offers. In a raft, the traveler looks up to see enormous cliffs rising with giant pipe organs and cathedral spires like lording shadows. It was chilly on the river in the morning, only to turn broiling hot by lunchtime. “There were always cries of ‘Man overboard!’” Mrs. Johnson wrote in her diary. “And I remember while shooting down the rapids I saw one man clinging to a rock and fighting a losing battle to maintain his grip against the swift rush of
Once the raft trip ended at Rio Grande Village Camp Ground, margaritas and Carta Blanca beer were served for a warmhearted toast to US-Mexican relations. In her diary of the Big Bend trip, Mrs. Johnson raved about seeing a roadrunner in an ocotillo, green cottonwoods, Colima warblers, and “all kinds of cactus,” along with Spanish dagger, agave, and Udall handed out faux certificates to the press members who had rafted, designating them “Original American Wet-bottoms.” And he praised Lady Bird for her uncomplaining demeanor and overall frontier spirit. “You have had a wilderness experience,” Udall told her. “I think you will look back five, ten, or twenty years from now and remember this as
III
While Lady Bird was in Texas, President Johnson signed an executive order establishing the President’s Council and the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Recreation and Natural Beauty, a development inspired by his wife. LBJ joked about why he didn’t accompany Mrs. Johnson on her Rio Grande rafting excursion with Udall and Hartzog. “We have a wonderful Big Bend Park that Lady Bird has been visiting, but it is a long way for me to get to stroll in the woods,” he chuckled. Then he squinted as if to make a profound point: “It is a long way for people to go who live in Washington and Baltimore and Philadelphia and New York and Los Angeles. We need some of those areas right where the people live. There is not a front yard in the country, there is not an apartment house in the land, there is not a public building anywhere, there is not a street, there is not a sidewalk, and there is not a road that cannot be improved and made more
LBJ knew that America’s blighted cities in 1966 were in dire financial and environmental shape. Urban parks, often blacktopped, were beset by drug dealers and petty criminals. Garbage pickup in low-income zones was spotty at best. Reports that children in schools were falling sick from lead and asbestos contamination made front-page news. Deadly smog was especially thick in northeast cities that spring and summer. Determined to rectify the health hazard, Norman Cousins, still editor of the Saturday Review and still a leading anti-nuclear activist, chaired New York City’s Air Pollution Task Force, which sought to eradicate chronic smog in the five boroughs. Cousins told the New York Times that day after day when he looked out the window of his apartment on Park Avenue at 35th Street, he saw the hideous towers of a power plant “spouting smoke and fumes into the air.” Wedded to scientific data, he oversaw a pollution crisis report that was released that May and caught LBJ’s attention. Reflecting on how his work with SANE from 1957 to 1963 contributed to President Kennedy’s Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Cousins insisted that the emerging fight against smog, atomic radiation, and the Vietnam War were intertwined. “It’s the same thing, a fight to preserve the human
Like Norman Cousins, LBJ was keenly sensitive to the problem of pollutants and dangerous chemicals in impoverished American neighborhoods. But even he was caught off guard by the revolutionary struggle that emerged in California’s San Joaquin Valley in 1966, led by Mexican American agricultural leaders and a venerable reform group called the National Consumers League. The setting was a hearing in Visalia, California, the home base of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), a new union struggling to organize produce pickers. Three senators from the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor—Harrison Williams of New Jersey, Bobby Kennedy of New York, and George Murphy of California—were on a short tour to investigate conditions for California farmworkers. The star witness on March 16 was Cesar Chavez, the leader of NFWA (which was changed to the United Farm Workers in 1972). He spoke bluntly about the economic plight of laborers who were paid far below the standard minimum wage. Another witness, Elizabeth Coleman, was on the board of the National Consumers League, a group started by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams that had been advocating better treatment of migrant workers since 1906. Citing the fact that agricultural work was the third most dangerous employment of any sector of the economy, Coleman listed exposure to pesticides as one of the two perils of a picker’s work, elevating it to equal status with the danger of farm
Significantly, the only other people at the Visalia hearing who mentioned agrichemicals were farm owners, who threatened that if wages for field-working staff increased, they would replace the weed pickers with herbicides. That, of course, would expose the remaining pickers to even more chemicals. Chavez was nearly overwhelmed by the challenge of organizing laborers in the face of such dire threats, but the workers’ health was his main concern. For that reason, he sought to establish a rudimentary clinic when the NFWA organized its first strike. The reports from physicians and nurses at the clinic were alarming. “Union leaders and health care workers realized the pervasive and collective nature of the pesticide problem,” wrote the historians Laura Pulido and Devon Peña in the journal Race, Gender & When Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, the driving forces behind the NFWA, saw the ghastly reports, they added health and safety to their labor demands, and by that, they meant strict regulation of the use of agrochemicals.
Press reports circulated that Cesar Chavez had been greatly influenced by Silent which had awakened him to serious medical problems caused by pesticide sprays that were adversely affecting agricultural farmhands. The first time DDT was banned in the United States wasn’t by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1972; it was by a NFWA contract with grape growers in 1966–1967. Both of Chavez’s grape boycotts, beginning in the late 1960s, focused on pesticides as a health threat to consumers as well as to farmworkers. Chavez’s longtime nurse (and later physician), Marion Moses, became one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the effects of pesticides on agricultural workers. Chavez’s last, and longest, tactical fast, in 1988, was to protest the pesticide poisoning of farmworkers and their
The concept born in the Central Valley of California was that those directly affected by the use of chemicals by any controlling entity—whether an employer or a neighboring factory—had the right to object to exposure to those chemicals and even restrict it legally. The principle was morally sound: nobody should get sick while picking fruit and vegetables. At the time, in the mid-1960s, Chavez and Huerta put clauses insisting on environmental justice measures in the union contracts they submitted to farm owners. Throughout the arduous process of establishing the union and securing the contracts with farm owners, they made sure that the clauses remained. Chavez used the pesticide issue to bring environmental activists onto his side and as a show of power to the owners of big farms, who were used to monopolizing the power in the Central California agricultural zone.
Kennedy sided with Chavez’s cause in the press. There wasn’t anything about Cesar Chavez that RFK didn’t grow to admire. When the Senate hearing ended, the union leader announced that he would be walking three hundred miles from Delano to Sacramento to protest unfair labor practices and the use of pesticides. A Roman Catholic, Chavez declared his march to be a peregrinación (pilgrimage) to uplift the spirits of farmworkers in their struggles to He said, “Since this is both a religious pilgrimage and a plea for social change for the farmworker, long advocated by the social teachings of the Church, we hope that the people of God will respond to our call and join us for part of the walk just as they did with our Negro brothers in
Singing hymns and holding placards that read ¡VIVA LA HUELGA! and VIVA LA the protesters marched during the Catholic holy season of The march ended on Easter Sunday, when Chavez arrived in Sacramento as a true Gandhian martyr in spirit and in body—walking with blistered and bleeding feet to awaken the world to the plight of farmworkers and migrant field hands. Even though that Easter RFK was at home in McLean, Virginia, overseeing an egg hunt with his family and the Udalls, he read about Chavez’s historic march walk with boundless appreciation. As Ethel Kennedy recalled, her husband considered the NFWA leader a “brother” in the crusade for human
IV
Because her highway beautification effort and the Big Bend trip were press successes, Mrs. Johnson headed to California in September 1966 to keep promoting the New Conservation. At the start of the trip, she visited Point Reyes National Seashore, where she hosted children involved in the Audubon Society and in the Sierra Club and also a constellation of labor union leaders. The event took place in front of the attractive beige cliffs of Drakes Beach, one of Ansel Adams’s favorite subjects to photograph. She told the guests, “One of the dominant facts of modern times is that Americans are now more and more divorced from natural surroundings.” She intimated that every American needed a place to recreate—a national or state park to love. “The growing needs of an urban America are quickening ‘the tick of the conservation clock,’” she warned. That evening, she arrived at the San Francisco Opera to attend a performance and was greeted with a bomb threat. Police arrived from all corners. Protesters paraded in front of the venue with signs that read, LADY BIRD, BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW and BEAUTIFY AMERICA, BUT DEFOLIATE VIETNAM?
In her 1966 book Styles of Radical Susan Sontag compared LBJ’s Vietnam War with the genocide of Native Americans and wilderness conquering. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” Sontag wrote, “it is the white race and it alone—its ideology and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilization whenever it spread, which has upset the ecological balances of the planet which now threatens the very existence of life Usually calm and collected, Mrs. Johnson was rattled by “the aura of madness, sort of a mob spirit” in California, and the writing of She saw firsthand how the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart.
After San Francisco, Mrs. Johnson headed to Carmel to promote California’s first “scenic highway.” State Senator Fred Farr had asked her to dedicate the Big Sur Coast strip of Highway 1, which she did gladly. Starting in Carmel, her entourage visited Hurricane Point and Bixby Creek Bridge. Ansel Adams was there to greet and photograph the First Lady peering out into the blue Pacific. For a day, Mrs. Johnson forgot about Vietnam and urban riots and enjoyed the symphony of waves crashing and seagulls crying.
Throughout 1966, the Johnson administration was engaged in one of the most controversial environmental battles of the decade: the Bureau of Reclamation plan to build dams on the Colorado River at both ends of Grand Canyon National Park. To the shock of environmentalists then and now, Udall (who oversaw the Bureau) favored it. Perhaps he hoped to return to Arizona someday and run for either governor or senator and so felt obliged to take a pro-dam stance, which would be popular with the voters. Turning a cold shoulder to him, Brower, Adams, and other preservationists did not share his enthusiasm for the recreational opportunities afforded by the reservoir that would be created by each gargantuan dam, and Udall unexpectedly became the bane of the Sierra Club. He was assailed as a turncoat for supporting the Colorado River Basin Project, as the twin dams were called. Around the time Mrs. Johnson was in Big Bend, Brower described himself to Udall “as a conservationist who has supported you strongly and wants to improve that support.” Brower continued, however, that Udall could “hardly win a blacker mark... so far as I can see it, your conservation career is at stake and our parks and wilderness
Most Indigenous tribes in Arizona opposed the double damming of the Colorado, but Udall never allowed them a public hearing. As assuredly as Martin Luther King, Jr., broke with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, Brower broke with Udall over the proposed Marble Canyon and Bridge Canyon Dams on the Colorado River. The Sierra Club had been wrong in 1955, he said, to allow the dam at Glen Canyon (“The place no one knew”) to be constructed in exchange for protecting the sanctity of Dinosaur National Monument. Not this time.
In 1966, Brower refused to let the desecration of Grand Canyon National Park happen on his watch at the Sierra Club. Like Thoreau in the Mexican-American War, he even pledged to go to jail before he would allow the dams to be built and flood the Grand Canyon, turning ecosystems adjacent to a sacred World Heritage Site into man-made reservoirs for pleasure boats and electricity for Nevada casinos. The general public, he believed, could be mobilized to save the Grand Canyon.
The Johnson administration, with Floyd Dominy in the commissioner’s seat at the Bureau of Reclamation, saw the proposed dams as cash registers that would finance the Central Arizona Project, which would divert Colorado River water to provide Phoenix and Tucson with electric power and the environs with irrigation. Because Brower was a comfortable public speaker, at ease explaining ecological science and ready with comic turns of phrase, he was popular on the university circuit. Visiting campuses, he recruited volunteers for the Save the Grand Canyon cause. The charismatic Brower even convinced three recent MIT graduates—Alan Carlin, an economist with the RAND Corporation; Laurence Moss, a nuclear engineer; and Jeff Ingram, a mathematician—to lend their analytical skills to the Sierra Club to help sway public
Throughout 1966, the battle over the Grand Canyon grew in ferocity week by week. Each side was dug in: environmentalists, in favor of sanctity for the Grand Canyon, and reclamationists, in favor of hydroelectric power salvation. Aspinall, chairing the House Interior Committee, and Udall, running the Interior Department, wanted the dams and had considerable clout on their side. The Sierra Club had moxy. Heading the resistance was Brower, who appeared on TV shows such as The Tonight starring the enormously popular Johnny Carson, and CBS News to argue for leaving the Grand Canyon alone. He had an ally in John Oakes, the Sierra Club board member who was a senior editorial writer for the New York A long editorial in the paper on January 17, 1966, stated, “If this dam is built, it will destroy irreplaceable scenic and archeological values.... It might therefore be supposed that the arguments for building it are exceptionally strong. In fact, they are Joseph Wood Krutch also defended the need for the Grand Canyon to remain undiminished by bulldozers. “The canyon is at least two things besides spectacle,” he wrote. “It is a biological unit and the most revealing single page of earth’s history anywhere on the face of the
Leading politicians on the Western Slope of the Rockies—both Democrats and Republicans—insisted, to the contrary, that the massive project was necessary to make the desert bloom. They believed that the Grand Canyon dams would rival the Hoover Dam and the gargantuan Colorado–Big Thompson Project reservoir network in the generation of power. Brower testified at congressional hearings in 1965 and 1966, eloquently describing what would be lost if dams were built. A Republican senator accused him of being a patsy for California water interests, which competed for every drop they could get. They had no desire to see Arizona siphon off billions of gallons. But Brower never lost his cool. He became even more of a media superstar when Life magazine profiled him on May 27, 1966, in an article entitled “Knight Errant to Nature’s Rescue,” with gorgeous photographs of the Grand Canyon to illustrate the story. The writer, Hal Wingo, described Brower as unquestionably America’s “No. 1 Working
Enjoying the limelight, Brower hatched a controversial plan to rattle the public about the danger to the Grand Canyon posed by the proposed dams. He had been impressed with advertisem*nts created by the edgy San Francisco agency Freeman & Gossage. In particular, he admired their charmingly written campaign for Whiskey Distillers of Ireland, which had run in the New He also liked that it used his favorite typefaces, Centaur and Arrighi, the same ones he had long used in his exhibit-format books. Without waiting for clearance from the Sierra Club board, he drafted language for an advertisem*nt in the form of “An Open Letter to Stewart Udall,” and then took it to the Freeman & Gossage offices, located in an old firehouse in the Barbary Coast neighborhood of San Francisco.
After days of haggling, Brower and the advertising firm came up with two different statements. Brower’s version was headlined “Who Can Save the Grand Canyon? You Can and Secretary Udall can too, if he will.” At the bottom of this ploy was a Sierra Club coupon asking for a financial contribution. The Freeman-Gossage ad—the one that went into the New York far more cunning. The headline read, “Now Only You Can Save Grand Canyon From Being Flooded... For Profit.” It provided seven coupons addressed to decision-makers such as President Johnson, Interior Secretary Udall, and Representative Aspinall. When the full-page ad appeared in the New York Times that June, it didn’t just hit a nerve; it electrified the political discourse of the nation. “I never saw anything like it,” Dan Dreyfus of the Bureau of Reclamation complained. “Letters were arriving in dump trucks. Ninety-five percent of them said we’d better keep our mitts off the Grand Canyon and a lot of them quoted the Sierra Club
When Udall saw the New York Times stunt, he was apoplectic, feeling it was a betrayal by Brower. The Interior Department, under his leadership, had fought in tandem with Brower. That very month the Sierra Club, with Udall’s approval, was lobbying Congress to establish the North Cascades and Redwood National Parks. In retaliation, Stewart had his brother Mo direct an IRS agent to deliver a legal notice to the Sierra Club’s San Francisco office stating that since the ad had sought to influence US government decisions, it had nullified the club’s status as a nonprofit.
The IRS decision to withdraw the Sierra Club’s tax-exempt status didn’t intimidate Brower one iota. The IRS action became headline news across the country, reported as the federal tax bully Goliath picking on little David Brower, an earnest national park defender from Berkeley. The week the first New York Times ad ran, Sierra Club membership soared. Likewise, the Sierra Club book Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon (1964) had a surge in sales. Striking back at Stewart (and Mo), Brower placed a second ad in the New York Times on July 25, 1966:
Dinosaur and Big Bend. Glacier and Grand Teton, Kings Canyon, Redwoods, Mammoth, Even Yellowstone and Yosemite. And The Wild Rivers, and Wilderness.
How Can You Guarantee These, Mr. Udall,
IF GRAND CANYON IS DAMMED FOR PROFIT?
Once again, bushels of coupons and letters poured into Udall’s Interior Department office. Seemingly overnight, Udall became the demon of counterculture activists, environmentalists, and every other type of outdoors-loving American. Feeling scapegoated by Brower, Udall pondered his next chess move. He thought he was media savvy, but Brower had beat him to the punch. Like a lightning bolt, a third Sierra Club ad ran in six newspapers. It was the most controversial of them all: SHOULD WE ALSO FLOOD THE SISTINE CHAPEL SO TOURISTS CAN GET NEARER THE
The Sierra Club challenged the IRS in court for rescinding its tax status and lost. The Sierra Club suffered a drop of donors because contributions were no longer tax-deductible, but it gained a sharp increase in membership. Brower observed, “People may not know whether or not they like the Sierra Club, but they know what they think about the
While the self-aggrandizing Brower was a prickly person to deal with, his campaign to save the Grand Canyon was a masterpiece of environmental activism. Once he turned national attention to the dams, he then made clear that the Sierra Club was also opposed to logging the last redwoods in California; the construction of a power plant at Storm King Mountain along the Hudson River in New York; and a plan to build a new air cargo terminal in the San Francisco Bay Area. In November 1966, he testified before a House committee against the Grand Canyon dams. Mo Udall, who was on the committee, tried to paint Brower as a wilderness extremist, unable to compromise. Brower won the showdown:
MR. UDALL: What would the Sierra Club accept? If we have a low, low, low Bridge Canyon Dam, maybe 100 feet high, is that too much? Is there any point at which you compromise here?
MR. BROWER: Mr. Udall, you are not giving us anything that God didn’t put there in the first place, and I think that is the thing we are not entitled to compromise....
MR. UDALL: You say that you will continue the fight and try to defeat the bill unless it contains a provision setting aside that dam site once and for all in the Grand Canyon National Park.
MR. BROWER: We have no choice. There have to be groups who will hold for those things that are not replaceable. If we stop doing that we might as well stop being an organization, and conservation organizations might as well throw in the towel.
MR. UDALL: I know the strength and sincerity of your feelings, and respect
Shortly after that televised exchange, both Udalls threw in the towel on damming the Colorado River. The bill authorizing the dams withered away without ever coming to a vote in Congress. The biggest influence on Stewart Udall’s about-face on the dams, however, wasn’t Brower; it was the fact that Senator Henry Jackson, the chairman of the Senate Interior Committee, opposed them because they were “the primary means of financing the importation of water into the Colorado River Basin from the Pacific He didn’t like that part of the master plan. Nevertheless, Brower claimed the victory.
In September, before the proposal collapsed, Brower sent President Johnson a petition signed by California’s residents in strong opposition to the Bridge Canyon (Halipai) and Marble Gorge Dams being built. It was the wording of the petition that was noteworthy: “As power plants ONLY we can see no reason why alternative means cannot be used, such as thermal or atomic plants to provide Arizona with its energy needs.” That Brower was willing to consider nuclear energy to stop the dams must have surprised Johnson, who did read the
In the aftermath of the Grand Canyon showdown, the Bureau of Reclamation had to find an alternative way to electrify Arizona’s growing metropolises. The solution chosen was the Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant near Page, Arizona. Philip Hyde was photographing the Navajo wild lands for the Sierra Club when that unfortunate turn of events happened. “Once more, the environmentalists buckled down the battle to save a last piece of the natural river, and once more—for the second time in a century—they were victorious,” Donald Worster wrote in Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American “Once more, however, they lost something as well, for the energy to make the CAP [Central Arizona Project] go would be derived instead from coal strip-mined on Hopi sacred lands at Black Mesa in northern Arizona and burned in the Navajo Generation Station near Page, polluting the crystalline desert air with ash and poison
In the end, Lyndon Johnson received scant credit for anything he did on the conservation front in 1966. He couldn’t catch a break. That his administration ultimately stopped the dams at Marble Canyon and Bridge Canyon was buried under criticism by the Washington Post and the New York Times of the vengeance that the IRS had inflicted on the Sierra Club. The Great Society’s urban renewal effort was painted by the New Left as white American gentrification that would only make cost-of-living prices soar in lower-income communities. Johnson’s would-be allies in the conservation world castigated him for protecting America’s natural heritage while simultaneously destroying the tropical ecosystems of Vietnam with napalm.
Photographer Philip Hyde was a leading Sierra Club activist for saving such treasured havens as the Canyonlands, Redwoods, and the Grand Canyon. Many of his original compositions are considered priceless conservation manifestos.
Steven Dunsky; courtesy of the Estate of Philip Hyde
When, in September 1966, Johnson launched a Water for Peace program green-lighting the Army Corps of Engineers to build dams in so-called Third World nations, Bill Douglas protested. From Johnson’s point of view, he was ensuring foreign populations would have water. From Douglas’s, the president was wreaking unnecessary havoc on global ecosystems that perhaps no one fully understood. Johnson, raised in the 1910s in the arid state of Texas, where water was sometimes a luxury, was slow to recognize that environmentalism’s constituency was no longer impressed by the impulse to generate electricity from hydroelectric dams. FDR had been dead for two decades and hydroelectric dams weren’t in vogue. Compromise, for the environmentalists, would never be a viable option when it came to large-scale construction projects the Bureau of Reclamation or Army Corps of Engineers had up their sleeves.
