1967: Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman Speech
At the 10th Biennial Wilderness Conference, held by the Sierra Club on April 7, 1967, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman gave an impassioned and philosophical address that focused on wilderness, compromises that made it into the Wilderness Act, and looming natural resource decisions. Many of the points highlighted by Secretary Freeman remain pertinent some 35 years later, as debates over oil, wilderness, consumption, and national security persist in America today.
The copper mine to which Freeman refers has never been built. One year after Freeman's speech, in 1968, Congress passed legislation to create a 684,00-acre North Cascades National Park complex, including 550,000 acres of adjacent Pasayten Wilderness on the Okanogan and Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forests.
The following excerpts come from Freeman's address:
"I am very glad to be here, both for personal and professional reasons.
I have a long-standing personal commitment to wilderness and its preservation. Like your commitment, mine is the result of experiencing for myself what wilderness has to offer. I have packed and camped in the Bob Marshall, the Sawtooth, and the North Cascades. I've enjoyed the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, back home in Minnesota, ever since boyhood...
I am also interested in wilderness for professional reasons. As Secretary of Agriculture I have final responsibility for administering our present Wilderness System and for recommending additions to it...
The first Federal land specifically described and formally designated for wilderness protection was in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. Today, about 1 acre out of every 12 in the National Forests is under wilderness protection. These are still the only acres so designated under the 1964 Wilderness Act.
The Act was a landmark piece of legislation... There have been other great conservation acts in the past, but usually they were remedial acts intended to repair an abused resource -- rather than to preserve it in the first place...
The Wilderness Act, by contrast, was an action -- not to repair -- but to preserve and protect from harm a priceless national asset. It was a rare example of foresight, rather than hindsight...
Both the Sierra Club and the Department of Agriculture strongly supported the Wilderness Act. Both of us opposed, during its period of gestation, certain of the non-wilderness 'exceptions' that were written into the final Act. And both of us, I think it is fair to say, came to the conclusion that the final legislation, even with the problems of administration that Chief Cliff mentioned this morning, was better than no legislation at all...
In the very near future this Wilderness Act, with all its perfections and imperfections, will be at issue in one of the most spectacular areas of the United States.
Those of you who have tramped the slopes of the North Cascades, as I have... know that I use the word 'spectacular' advisedly.
The Cascades are an ocean of mountains, frozen in space and time...wave after cresting wave of stone, dotted with the deep blue-green of alpine lakes...laced with the glacial remnants of another age [ellipses in original in this and following paragraph].
But to really know these mountains, one must experience them with all the senses...to hear the wind above timberline, a voice like all the rivers in the world, flowing over a thousand miles of granite and green...
If everyone could do this, even for a day, I am confident that most of the controversy over invasion of wilderness would rapidly disappear. But unfortunately it hasn't.
Within this fastness [of the Cascades] is Miners Ridge and Image Lake. This ridge is also the site of a valuable copper deposit, placed there, perhaps, by a wise Creator to test whether man could forego material riches for the fullness of the spirit.
We may face this test in the very near future, when and if application is made to begin open pit mining operations within the Wilderness.
The reasons given for this mine are not so very different from the reasons given for other resource development. The copper deposit is valuable; companies are being encouraged to increase domestic copper production; and, as we all know, there's a war going on...
It is not a case... of 'either-or.' It is rather a case of economics, of choosing alternatives; of balancing a priceless, yet intangible, national treasure against ledger sheets and profits...
It seems to me that we have to convince many more people than are presently convinced that a new National Park, or an additional Wilderness, or buying up another National Seashore Area is as important to them personally as a second car or a larger motorboat...
We are a nation bedazzled by technology, and addicted to crash solutions. But there are no instant ecologies; no instant wilderness. And so, in the final analysis, we must devote much more of our attention in the future to assessing each new technological development for its ultimate impact on man's environment.
I hope it's never said of this generation, as Stephen Vincent Benet said of another: 'They thought, because they had power, they had wisdom also.' We now have the power, literally, to move mountains. The next few years will determine if we have the wisdom to refrain from doing so."
Source:
Untitled speech by Orville L. Freeman, Secretary of Agriculture, at 10th Biennial Wilderness Conference of the Sierra Club, San Francisco, CA, April 7, 1967.
