Marshall Pioneered Wilderness Protection
Bob Marshall was the perfect misfit.
Reared in Manhattan, he longed for the wilderness. Bequeathed a fortune, he lived a simple life.
He devoted his work as a professional forester, as well as a half million dollars in inheritance to the preservation of wilderness.
By 1939, when he died suddenly of a heart ailment at the age of 38, Marshall had covered more ground on foot than most horses will cover in a full life.
Considered a radical bureaucrat in his time, he’d paved the way to protect more ground than a bulldozer could ruin.
Marshall was born to a wealthy New York family in 1901. Later, he wrote that in fits of depression he would imagine that he “had been born a century too late for genuine excitement.”
He was captivated by the journals of Lewis and Clark.
As a student at Harvard, he became legendary for his appetite to hike, first in the Adirondacks, then in Montana and Idaho, and as far as Alaska.
By the time he was 36, Marshall had logged more than 200 wilderness hikes of 30 miles in a day, 51 hikes of more than 40 miles and several of up to 70 miles.
Seasoned by his time in the West and in Alaska, Marshall returned to the East to study for a doctorate. He was at Johns Hopkins University when he wrote a thesis called “The Problem of the Wilderness.” Admirers called it the Magna Carta of the wilderness movement.
In the report, published in Scientific Monthly, Marshall warned that the “shrunken remnants of an undefiled continent are being desponded.”
Valleys that once knew “only the footsteps of wild animals,” now know “the terrors of modern highways,” he said. Gone is the ground cover of fresh sorrel and twinflower. Here to stay is “asphalt spotted with chewing gum, coal dust and gasoline.”
That was in 1928.
The doctrine of “the greatest good to the greatest number of people” does not apply to every acre on earth, he said. “If it did,” he wrote later, “we would be forced to change our metropolitan art galleries into metropolitan bowling alleys.”
In his first major report for the U.S. Forest Service, Marshall said, “The universe of the wilderness, all over the United States, is vanishing with appalling rapidity. It is melting away like the last snowbank on some south-facing mountainside during a hot afternoon in June.”
He proposed protecting 45 million acres - 9 percent of the nation’s commercial timberland - as wilderness of several classifications, where nature and recreation would take precedence over chainsaws.
In 1937, he was named chief of the Forest Service division of recreation and lands.
Shortly before he died, Marshall helped convince the Forest Service to adopt regulations prohibiting logging in wilderness areas. It was one of his greatest successes.
Marshall was the catalyst for creation of the Wilderness Society. In 1941, two years after his untimely death, he became the namesake of a 950,000 acres of Western Montana preserved as wilderness in his memory. Today, The Bob has been expanded to more than 1 million acres and is surrounded by two other wilderness areas and three national forests.