Robert Gottlieb is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban Environmental Studies and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. He is author or co-author of ten books including Environmentalism Unbound

(MIT Press, 2001).

Resources and Recreation: The Limits of the Traditional Debate

A "GREEN UTOPIA"?

To understand a complex movement with diverse roots, it might be best to begin with a paradoxical figure within environmentalism. Passionate about his hiking and climbing, a champion of the poor and powerless, deeply committed to wilderness, and equally forceful about the need to make nature a direct part of people's lives, Robert Marshall is an enigmatic figure for those who have sought to define environmentalism in narrow and limiting terms. Yet this intense, engaging, always smiling, always curious radical forester proposed a common thread for a movement split between those focused on the management and/or protection of Nature and those who defined environment as the experience of daily life in its urban and industrial setting. The liberation of society, Marshall proclaimed, was a condition for the liberation of Nature, and the liberation of the natural environment from its would-be exploiters was an essential condition for social liberation. The absence of such a common thread serves as the environmental movement's actual point of departure.

The son of a well-known lawyer who was a senior partner in the prestigious Washington, D.C., firm of Guggenheimer, Untermeyer, and Marshall, Robert Marshall grew up steeped in liberal values, including defense of civil liberties, respect for minority rights, and the fight against discrimination. Encouraged by his father, whose strong interest in forest conservation led him to make a large endowment to the Forestry School at Syracuse University, Marshall decided to attend the program at Syracuse to launch a forestry- related career. After graduation, he worked in various capacities for the U.S. Forest Service, where he began to develop strong feelings about forests as a necessary retreat "from the encompassing clutch of a mechanistic civilization," a place where people would be able to "enjoy the most worthwhile and perhaps the only worthwhile part of life." Marshall quickly became a strong critic of development pressures on forest lands and the activities of private logging companies, which had led to a decline in productivity, increase in soil erosion, and "ruination of the forest beauty."

Marshall most loved to hike and explore. He was constantly on the move, a pack on his back, entering and discovering new lands, new environments, new wilderness. In Arctic Village, a 1930 bestseller describing his activities in the Arctic wilderness area, Marshall spoke of a "vast lonely expanse where men are so rare and exceptional that the most ordinary person feels that all the other people are likewise significant." His compassion for people and powerful desire to be in touch with wilderness eventually led Marshall to adopt two distinct, yet, for him, compatible positions about wilderness protection. On the one hand, Marshall feared a loss of the wild, undeveloped forest lands in both their spectacular western settings and in the less monumental forest areas of the East, such as the Adirondacks. In a February 1930 article for the Scientific Monthly, Marshall laid out this concept of wilderness as a "region which contains no permanent inhabitants, possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means, and is sufficiently spacious that a person crossing it must have the experience of sleeping out." To achieve that goal, Marshall urged a new organization be formed "of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness" and be militant and uncompromising in their stance.

At the same time, Marshall argued that wilderness belonged to all the people, not simply to an elite who wanted such areas available for their own use. Already by 1925, Marshall was writing that "people can not live generation after generation in the city without serious retrogression, physical, moral and mental, and the time will come when the most destitute of the city population will be able to get a vacation in the forest." Marshall was particularly critical of the policies of the National Park Service with their expensive facilities and concessions. Though he argued against more roads and increased development in either park or forest lands, Marshall nevertheless wanted wilderness accessible to "the ordinary guy." During the New Deal era of the 1930s, this was a particularly appealing position to the Forest Service, which convinced Marshall to head a new outdoors and recreation office. Through this office, the Forest Service hoped to contrast itself as a kind of blue- collar alternative to the Park Service.

Despite his agency role, Marshall remained a critic of both the Forest Service and the Park Service, blunt in his attack on the prodevelopment posture of the Forest Service as well as the Park Service's recreation-oriented policies, which ended up destroying wilderness. His criticism of the Forest Service, laid out in his best-known work, The People's Forests, was tied to Marshall's overall critique of private forestry and its role both in destroying wilderness and in injuring the work force, the community, and the land itself.

In The People's Forests, Marshall distinguished between private ownership of forest land (where the vast bulk of private lands had already been overcut), private ownership with public regulation, and full public ownership, which Marshall strongly endorsed. With public ownership, Marshall argued, "social welfare is substituted for private gain as the major objective for management." To Marshall, that meant a new labor and rural economic development strategy and careful land use planning, more research and science, and safeguarding recreational values from "commercial exploitation." His concept of linking protectionist objectives within a social policy framework was, according to one reviewer from The Nation, the best assurance for future generations that the forests could provide "a green retreat from whatever happens to be the insoluble problems of their age."

This search for a green retreat, or a "green...