An 'Environmental Ethic'
Howard Zahniser's Legacy
A Civic Conversation with Ed Zahniser
By Dan Forbush and May Braaten, Skidmore '24
Ed Zahniser delivered the keynote remarks in 2014 at the 50th Anniversary celebration of the National Wilderness Preservation Act of 1964, authored by his father Howard Zahniser.
We're tracing the through-line that started with the New York Legislature's passage of the Forever Wild clause of the New York State constitution in 1894 to Congress's passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Much of this history plays out in western Warren County, the ten-town Hudson River corridor we call the First Wilderness.
With Ellen Apperson Brown, we've focused on John Apperson, who drove the early wilderness conservation movement in the Adirondacks. Here's that conversation.
With David Gibson, we've focused on Paul Schaefer, who teamed up with Apperson in 1931. Here are Parts I and II.
Now we come to Howard Zahniser, who wrote 66 drafts of the Wilderness Act and fought for eight years to win its passage in 1964. His son, Ed Zahniser, was 10 years old when Democrat Hubert Humphrey first introduced the bill in the Senate on June 7, 1956.
Codifying an 'Environmental Ethic'
Howard Zahniser bought this cabin at Paul Schaefer’s urging in 1946, It’s still in the Zahniser family.
"I went on a lot of lobbying runs with my father," Ed recalled in our conversation. "Back in the day, members of Congress didn’t have the money they do now, so a lot of Western congressmen couldn't go home on the weekends. So my father would take me and my two sisters to Capitol Hill, where we could meet directly with legislators when they weren't protected by their staffs. We would leaflet them and give them a little speech. Most members thought this was pretty cute."
The bill that passed eight years later "constitutes Zahniser's greatest legacy," writes Mark Harvey, author of Wilderness Forever, a biography of Zahniser published in 2005.
"The law embodied and codified an environmental ethic that placed a high value on sustaining natural conditions and plant and animal communities largely unaffected by human influence. It also inspired a new generation of activists who regarded wilderness protection as an essential element of the emerging environmental movement."
The Wilderness Act established the National Wilderness Preservation System which, having started with 9.1 million acres, today stands at 111 million acres. This statute permanently protects these areas from roads, mechanized vehicles, and equipment such as chain saws.
"Wilderness achieved a legislative designation instead of an agency designation," Ed explained. "That's essentially what the Forever Wild clause did for wilderness in New York State. The big difference is that the federal law makes no provision for a plebiscite that puts the power to change the statute directly in the hands of the American people."
"New York's experience convinced my father that the only road to truly preserving wilderness was to do it under federal statute," Ed said. "You had to take it out of the hands of the public lands agency managers."
Stumping for Wilderness
This biography of Howard Zahniser by Mark Harvey is a great resource for any wanting to know more about his eight-year effort to gain passage of the Wilderness Act.
It was in the 1930s that Howard first became a nationally respected spokesperson for wilderness conservation in working with the U.S. Biological Survey and writing a column for Nature Magazine. His mentor was Edward Preble, a field biologist Howard so respected that he and his wife Alice decided in 1946 to name their newly-born son in his honor. It was also in the Biological Survey that Howard met the internationally known mammalogist and eventual proponent of Alaska wilderness, Olaus J. Murie and his wife Margaret E. “Mardy” Murie, often called the First Lady of Wilderness.
That was the same year Howard was named Executive Secretary and Editor of the Wilderness Society. It was also in 1946 that Howard, Alice and their three older children took their summer vacation with the Schaefers in Bakers Mills on the edge of the Siamese Ponds Wilderness.
The experience "changed their lives," writes Mark Harvey:
"Schaefer told him about the work of Verplanck Colvin, an engineer from Albany who hiked and climbed many Adirondack peaks in the 1870s, and who first conceived of a forest preserve to help protect the area. He also described for Zahniser the New York Constitutional Convention of 1894, when 122 delegates voted unanimously to amend the state constitution and to guarantee that "the lands of the state, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the forest preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands."
Before they left the Schaefer cabin, Paul took Howard "up a nearby hill and showed him a parcel of land belonging to his neighbor, Harold Allen, which Allen wanted to sell. Shortly after, Allen found a buyer for the six-and-a-half acre parcel on which the cabin sat, but he had another 25 acres he wanted to sell and offered the entire 30 or so acres for $1000.
"Schaefer quickly wrote to Zahniser to urge him to purchase the whole parcel, calling it ‘the best buy I have yet seen up in that country,’ adding that he was ‘personally thrilled at the prospect.’ Zahniser did not hesitate. Gathering maps and photographs, he went to his banker in Washington, D.C. and arranged for a signature loan, which required no collateral. He then wrote a check to Harold Allen, and asked Schaefer to arrange the purchase. Within a few days, he had his deed, issued by the Warren County clerk's office.
"Zahniser now had a family getaway in one of the premier state parks in the country, and he and his family had access to splendid wilderness. The Adirondacks soon became their treasured getaway."
Howard named the cabin "Mateskared," coining it from the first syllables of his children's names: Mathias, Esther, Karen, and Edward. Here’s the telegram that Paul sent to Howard upon the purchase of the cabin from the Morehouse family:
“Yours are the woods, waters, and wildlife of an Adirondack cabin land—up at the end of the trail where the wilderness begins, where a long peaceful valley meets the rocky buttresses of Crane and a sea of peaks rolls on to a far horizon. May you always cherish these rough untillable acres as a wild deer loves a sunny mountain ledge or an eagle the boundless reaches of sky.”
Acquisition of the cabin tightened his alliance with Paul Schaefer. As Harvey tells us:
"Zahnie’s federal government public relations work had taught him the machinations of multi-media publicity. But from and with Paul Schaefer in the Adirondacks, Zahnie learned firsthand the art of grass roots organizing and stumping for wilderness. Paul Schaefer built a statewide coalition of hunters, anglers, and other conservationists and held it together by the strength of his personality for 50 or 60 years."
Ed adds:
"The chain began with John Apperson, who figured out how to use grassroots proselytizing—lobbying—in his work to protect the shorelines of Lake George. His motto was, 'We will wake them up!' He had a huge impact on Paul, who then introduced and trained my father in grassroots work in the Black River War in the western Adirondacks. There's one very important link between Apperson, Schaefer, and my father."
Ed's Career in Wilderness Conservation
In his 36 years with the National Park Agency, Ed Zahniser continued his father’s legacy, fighting to present our national parks “holistically as a human experience” and “natural history as part of humanity.”
In addition to accompanying his father on visits to Capitol Hill, Ed and his two sisters would assist with Wilderness Society mailings.
"We kneeled at our piano bench and stuffed ungodly numbers of envelopes," he recalled, often with multiple inserts.
More fun were the job-related trips on which Howard took the family, including a vacation they took out West in the summer of 1956. That vacation included visits to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota, Devil's Tower, the Tetons, and the Bob Marshall and Glacier Peak Wilderness Areas. Joining them along the way were such renowned wilderness activists as David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club, and Ernest Oberholtzer, who was an early advocate for wilderness in Minnesota, and Robert Cooney, champion of the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana.
Because Ed knew so many of the people and the issues that concerned them, The Wilderness Society gave him his first real job. "I filed years of stacked up correspondence, ruining the cuticles of my fingers." Later, he ran the Society's Addressograph and Multilith machines and was Assistant to the Editor of the Society's magazine.
After what he described as an "extremely lucrative" stint with a public relations firm in northern Virginia, Ed joined the National Park Service, where he eventually became senior editor of the Publications Group, which produces visitor information brochures and books on national parks.
“We fought to present these natural parks, so to speak, as cultural places, because some of them had a cultural history that was greater than some cities,” he told an interviewer. “So that was a big breakthrough in treating parks holistically as a human experience, as natural experience, as humans as part of natural history, natural history as part of humanity.”
“I quickly realized that one of my jobs as an editor was to protect the readers from geologists and archaeologists, because they want to take people so far into the weeds--because they’re not thinking about the reader,” he added.
Later in his Park Service career, Ed started receiving many invitations to give talks about wilderness.
"Fortunately, my boss was supportive," he said. "I started doing a lot of traveling and speaking. The fact that I had been to lot of wilderness areas gave me a bit of confidence and made people more disposed to listen to this guy from West Virginia yammering about wilderness all over the North American continent."
A Shared Interest in Poetry
In his latest collection, Ed explores seven decades of vacationing in Cabin Country.
In Wilderness Forever, Mark Harvey notes that Howard Zahniser "benefited immeasurably from his parents' devotion to reading."
"Family reading sessions frequently served as a source of entertainment on evenings when his parents gathered the children around and shared their favorite poetry, fiction and other books. The experience had a special intimacy that Zahniser liked and the stories themselves fired his imagination."
Continuing this tradition with his own children, Howard instilled in Ed and his siblings a similar love of language, stories, and ideas. Ed started writing poetry in junior high school, and has practiced the craft all his life. Among the collections he has produced: At the End of the Self-help Rope, Three Shepherdstown Poems, Mall-hopping with the Great I Am, A Calendar of Worship and Other Poems, and The Way to Heron Mountain.
Ed has just published a new collection, Adirondack Cabin and Mountain Poems, that explores seven decades of vacationing in Cabin Country. Dedicated to the "genius of the New York State Constitution's Forever Wild clause" and the families with whom he has formed close friendships over the years, he offers 80 narrative poems with titles like "The Old Barn," written in memory of his father, and "At the Schaefer Cabin," written in memory of Paul and Carolyn Schaefer.
"I have grandchildren who will spend their summers up there," he said. "My major motivation was to make a record of things that stand out in our family history, a sourcebook that will give them a sense of place."
In His Own Words
An extensive array of Ed Zahniser's work is available on the web. Below are a few of our favorite links.
Crane Mountain as it appears from the Zahniser cabin today.
The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Wilderness Act
"Howard Zahniser said that in preserving wilderness, we take some of the precious ecological heritage that has come down to us from the eternity of the past, and we have the boldness to project it into the eternity of the future. If you are looking for good work, you will find no better work than to be a conduit for those two eternities. Go forth, do good, tell the stories, and keep it wild."Howard Zahniser's Poetry Heroes and the Wilderness Act
"At his Mateskared writing table Zahnie could lean back and look out the double-hung cabin window at distant Crane Mountain. Who knows what thoughts its isolated granitic monolith inspired? Might one or two reside in that wilderness statute protecting “an enduring resource of wilderness?” The Wilderness Act called into question — revised, even — the very notion of the Myth of Progress against which William Blake and Henry Thoreau had railed.'"Mateskared: The Zahniser Cabin in Johnsburg
"In the mid-1990s Harold Allen reminisced about my father Howard Zahniser: “He bought the place, and he never had seen it,” Harold said. “Paul Schaefer was the one who told him about it.”Lilac Time in Bakers Mills
"(E)nvironmental historian Mark Harvey tracked down three letters my father wrote that same day, April 29. One he wrote to my sister Karen, away at college then. One he wrote to his sister Helen and her husband Lee Snyder. And this letter to Paul Schaefer. Your father knew he was dying then, Mark told me."
Many thanks to May Braaten for her great work in cohosting and reporting our Civic Conversations during Skidmore College’s spring semester. We wish her the best in her future studies and career, wherever it leads her.
