No Day More Ripe
Remarks by Ed Zahniser at the
Wilderness Week Rally on
Capitol Hill, September 21, 2004

  A belated Wilderness Week welcome to Capitol Hill in the Nation�s Capital, city of my birth. You are a soaring sight for wild-weary eyes. It is an honor to be with you here. My father Howard Zahniser�s soul must stir now�to see so many wilderness advocates in one place, and to have that place be Capitol Hill. What a wild bunch you are. What a crucial role you play for our day, our time, in this our wild and deep tradition.

  Let�s have a show of hands: how many of you are here today because you went to the jobs fair at your high school, college, or university, and a nattily dressed recruiter promised you big bucks and great benefits as an entry level wilderness advocate?  . . . What, no hands raised? . . . This is a self-selecting calling. But fret not. I�ve got a feeling my father and Dave Brower and Olaus and Mardy Murie and Celia Hunter and Charlotte Mauk are preparing crowns for you this very day.

  Tax laws were vague for nonprofits in the 1950s and 60s, so Zahnie, as my father was known, lobbied mostly after work and on weekends. He seldom lobbied representing the Wilderness Society then. He lobbied on behalf of the Council of Conservationists or Natural Resources Council of America. Of course he had helped create both groups. The letterhead address for one of them was 6222 43rd Avenue , Hyattsville , Maryland . That happened to be our home address, too.

  Sometimes my siblings and I were drafted to lobby on Saturdays. Congress wasn�t yet a jet set then. Western members did not rocket home on weekends. Nor were they protected by office staff on weekends. We kids split up and walked the marble halls with our squeaky wilderness spiels and our leaflets, often lobbying the members themselves. Later, my brother Matt helped recruit Idaho Sen. Frank Church for wilderness. Who knows that Rivers of returns your work will have?

  The Sierra Club�s Dave Brower liked to tell a story about my father�s lobbying against the Echo Park dam proposal. The dam was proposed inside Dinosaur National Monument . Dave Brower produced a 16 millimeter film called �Two Yosemites� to fight the dam. The film compared the Echo Park proposal to the damming of Hetch Hetchy valley inside Yosemite National Park in 1914. My father found a perpetual 16mm film projector. You didn�t rewind the film. It showed as a continuous loop. Zahnie wheeled the film on a coastered projection cart from office to office.

  Dave Brower loved the fact that Zahnie�s mobile wild film festival brought tears to the eyes of committee chair, Gracie Pfost. That early 1950s Echo Park dam fight built the first-ever national conservation coalition. In 1956 Zahnie and Dave Brower put the coalition to work on what became the eight-year campaign for the Wilderness Act. I know you know the drill.

  You are here today in the tradition of Howard Zahniser and David Brower and Olaus and Mardy Murie and Dick and Doris Leonard and Charlotte Mauk, just as they then journeyed here in the tradition of Robert Marshall and Aldo Leopold and Benton MacKaye and Rosalie Edge. Be persistent. Be consistent. Be actively patient.

  It took way more than eight years to get the 1964 Wilderness Act. The Wilderness Society governing council voted to pursue some such protection in 1946 or 1947. That makes it an 18-year effort. But our wilderness movement goes back to 1894, when Bob Marshall�s father Louis Marshall got the Forever Wild clause into the New York State Constitution. Or wait, our lineage goes back 140 years�to 1864 when George Perkins Marsh published his book Man and Nature.

  Or how about the Transcendentalists in the 1830s? Maybe it took 170 years to achieve 105 million acres of designated wilderness. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Sarah Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau anchor our wild lineage in which we lobby today. You see how deep our lineage is? Be consistent. Be persistent. Be actively patient.

  It took 120 years to turn Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller�s broad agenda for social reform into Sen. Hubert Horatio Humphrey�s 1950s legislative package that included not only the Wilderness Act but the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act�120 years. The genius of the Transcendentalist reformers was in their sense of history. They believed that no day in the history of humanity was more ripe for realization than today. Today. September 21, 2004 .

  You are part of a wilderness lineage that is a living lineage: Benton MacKaye, a founder of the Wilderness Society, once met a man who�d gone fishing with Henry Thoreau. Benton MacKaye wrote the letter hiring my father at the Wilderness Society. You and I here today enjoy living contacts clear back to our Transcendentalist roots.

  Be consistent. Be persistent. Be actively patient. Today is Tuesday, September 21. This day is as ripe for realization as any day the world has ever known. I adjure you, sons and daughters of our lineage. This is your day. Go forth. Do good. Tell the stories. And keep it wild.