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Show 462. help where they could get it. And there was a terrible paradox in linking the fate of the Parks and Reserves to the railroads, who had been, since the eighteen sixties, one of the chief destroyers of the forests, burning tremendous quantities of wood in a pre-petroleum economy. Even during the depression of the nineties, railroads continued to support themselves by using the vast land grants they had obtained three decades earlier. They could afford to support the creation of Parks and Reserves precisely because they had already taken such a large and unearned bite out of the public domain. They had already violated the garden. It was going to be a dangerous game, depending on vested interests like the railroads, and hoping that the Army might be made to protect the growing Reserves in the West. Looking backward we can see that industrial tourism and national defense were to become two of the greatest enemies of wilderness. The third, of course, is "energy development." Was Muir aware of this twin threat? And the question still remained, what role would he play in the forests' future? This was the same question he had asked himself twenty years earlier. But now, he was prepared to work within the system. He would try to become a mediator. And he saw immediately that his credibility with the Forestry Commission and others would depend on his ability to take neither the narrowly botanical position of Sargent, nor the use-oriented position °f Pinchot. Even before he travelled with the Forestry Commission, he said in Century, |
