 OWAA Legends
Father of the Wilderness Concept
By William D. Brown
"Never heard of him!" – the response most often given by professional
conservationists, when asked, "Who was Arthur H. Carhart?"
Art Carhart is the most profound unsung conservation hero, writer, gentleman
and visionary that I've come across. He is characterized by the anonymous quote:
"It's amazing how much you can accomplish if you're not concerned with who gets
the credit."
Carhart's writings during his scant four years with the U.S. Forest Service
form the foundation for the wilderness and recreation policies that exist today.
His Grandpa Hawthorn's tales of nature, hunting, fishing, trapping and the
Old West shaped young Arthur's interests. Carhart's destiny as a writer was
fixed early. At age 11, he sold his first article about the downy woodpecker to
Women's Home Companion for $2.
Art received the first Landscape Architecture degree ever granted by Iowa
State University. He paid for his education by captaining a college orchestra –
though he had never received professional training as a musician.
The young architect worked a short time for a Chicago firm, but "Over There" a
war was going on and he enlisted. His talents were soon recognized and he became
a bacteriologist for Walter Reed Hospital and finished the war as first
lieutenant, in charge of public health for Camp Meade, MD. That’s when he
married the love of his life, Vera Amelia Van Sickle.
In 1919, Carhart became the first landscape architect hired by the U.S.
Forest Service. He developed the recreational facilities of national forests in
six states, from Superior Forest on Wisconsin’s Lake Superior to the San Isabel
in southern Colorado.
Imagine if you will, Art Carhart in his first real job. He's newly married
and poor. His job is to survey the area around a lake for road construction that
would lead to home sites and development leases. Instead, on Dec. 10, 1919, he
sent a memo to Aldo Leopold following a conversation they'd had on Dec. 6.
"The problem spoken of in this conversation was, how far shall the Forest
Service carry or allow to be carried man-made improvements in scenic
territories, and whether there is not a definite point where all such
developments, with the exception of perhaps lines of travel and necessary sign
boards, shall stop. The Forest Service, it seems to me, is obligated to make the
greatest return from the total forests to the people of the nation that is
possible. This, the Service has endeavored to do in the case of timber
utilization, grazing, watershed protection and other activities. There is,
however, a great wealth of recreational facilities and scenic values within the
forests which have not been so utilized, and at the present time the Service is
face to face with a question of big policies, big plans and big utilization for
these values and areas."
At Trapper Lake in 1919, on the Gila in 1920 and on Lake Superior in 1921, he
recommended no roads, no disturbances, no leases and no motorized anything. His
plans were accepted. Miracle? No, he was a good salesman, a word wizard with
vision. His memos mark the turning point in thought about the use of our
national forests. Leopold is often credited as the father of the wilderness
concept. Credit Leopold never claimed. Fortunately, because of the work done by
Donald Baldwin in his 1965 work titled Historical Study of the Wilderness
Concept, Arthur Hawthorne Carhart was finally recognized as the father of the
wilderness concept.
Unfortunately, a turf battle took place between the Forest Service and the
U.S. Park Service. Art Carhart was in the middle. The clash came in 1921 during
an impromptu presentation he gave at a National Parks Conference. Up until
Carhart’s hiring, national forest policy was to maximize economic production
from forest resources. The employment of a landscape or recreation architect
marked the first step toward recognizing the economic and aesthetic value of
hunting, fishing, camping and other leisure activities. At the conference, he
spoke of the recreation potential of the national forests, stating that the
parks and forests are not in competition, but complement one another as
attractions to be enjoyed by all Americans.
Stephen Mather, director of the Park Service since it's 1916 inception,
blasted Carhart and his forest policies toward recreation as duplicating the
great work being done by the Park Service. Carhart, ever the gentleman, stayed
calm and refrained from getting involved in a personal fight. Instead, he
focused on the issues, policies and objectives. Mather had his political ducks
well in line and Carhart's request for $45,000 to meet the recreation needs on
53 million acres of national forest in six states was reduced to $900. Carhart
quit the Forest Service in 1922.
Free to pursue his architectural career, Carhart became a success as an
institutional landscape architect. He worked on such notable projects as the
Colorado General Hospital, Swedish Sanitarium, the Myron Stratton home and many
others. More importantly, in his work as a self-taught writer he was free to
take on the fight for wilderness and aesthetic forest values. A new road scheme
was proposed for Lake Superior that would destroy its wilderness value. Carhart
joined forces with many early conservationists like Wil Dilg, the Izaak Walton
League, Paul Riis and Sigurd Olson in the fight to preserve Lake Superior's many
water systems.
A prolific writer, he took on the pen name of Hart Thorne, from his middle
name, Hawthorne, for many of his 24 novels. Drum up the Dawn was a popular novel
of the time as was the thriller The Wrong Body under the pen name V.A. Van
Sickle. In 1931 Carhart abandoned the landscape business to write. As
conservation advocate, some of his 4,000 articles reached out to preach beyond
the choir to publications that didn’t normally carry a conservation theme. In an
early interview, Carhart reckoned he'd "made" practically every magazine. He
sold nearly 350,000 words per year, about one-third of his total output. Two of
Carhart's later books, Timber in Your Life and Water in Your Life, are
conservation classics.
In a letter to Horace Albright, Carhart says of himself: "I guess, Horace,
I'm a non-conformist, totally; an old buck always off the reservation and
hunting lonely."
In the pages of Outdoor Life he carried on the battle to reverse the
preferential treatment Western grazing interests were receiving on national
forests.
In Outdoor Life’s “A Man for the Wilderness,” (March 1976), Bill Vogt wrote:
"One series of articles – on overgrazing of livestock and the havoc of the
resulting range destruction was causing among game animals – drew heavy fire
from some of Carhart's former Forest Service co-workers, and some cattlemen
promised to shoot him on sight if he ever ventured onto their grazing ranges or
ranches."
Carhart responded: "I was said to be trying to hamstring an industry
indispensable to the life of the nation. All this was to be expected since these
are the old stock methods followed by entrenched interests for years when they
wangled and badgered members of Congress and officials into giving concessions
on our public lands."
In 1937 congress passed the Pittman-Robertson Act, a federal tax on firearms
and ammunition that directed money to the states for wildlife conservation and
research. Carhart was hired in 1938 to direct Colorado's program. He performed
baseline studies, the results of which are still being used today."
"During those years we learned things that are still being used to answer the
anti-hunting crowd: that man has replaced the big cats as predators and has
upset the balance so much that game animals must be managed for their own
survival. Hunting has become a matter of animal husbandry."
But with 14 of Carhart's 17 men fighting in the war, he was unable to do his
job effectively; he quit in 1943.
In 1947 he wrote Hunting and Fishing is Big Business for Sports Afield and
updated it in the same publication in 1951. His work was some of the first to
put a dollar value on wildlife. By no longer speaking airily about aesthetics,
Carhart made it easy to understand.
The annual outlay of hunting and fishing sportsmen is approximately twice
the total value of all hogs on farms Jan.1, 1947, as reported by the Bureau of
Agricultural Economics. Sportsmen's business is about eight times the total
value of all sheep on farms last New Year's day. And the sportsmen spend in 12
months an amount approximating half the capital value of all cattle in the
nation at the beginning of this year.
Later in the article he wrote:
It is time for sportsmen to
take the facts in hand and beat the truth into public consciousness. It is the
most effective approach to offsetting the dollar-talk of exploiters.
Properly and effectively used,
the general realization of the actual position of hunting and fishing in the
business fields is the best of insurance for the future of wildlife resources.
I've seen the same kinds of
things happen over and over through the years. The thing so many of today's
conservationists don't know is that most of it has been done before.
One of the projects I'm working
on now is to see if some of the old classics on conservation can be reprinted in
paperback, if I can find someone to sponsor it. Such books as William Vogt's
Road to Survival and Gifford Pinchot's Breaking New Ground. I think a dozen or
so such books could help keep conservationists from repeating work that's been
done before, and would give new insights on things being done now.
A November 1975 letter to Carhart stated: "That was a good note you shot at
the gun control people. I hold with you entirely (no reference was given to a
particular article) that the strict application of the laws prohibiting men with
criminal records owning guns and quick, severe punishment for those who use them
in committing crimes would do more to correct the crime picture than anything
else.” Signed, As Ever, Jim (James Cagney).
This, along with his many boxes of letters from notables such as Ed Zern,
Grits Gresham, Wayne Aspinall, Rachel Carson, Ralph Edwards, Dwight Eisenhower,
Arthur Godfrey, Jimmy Stewart, Lowell Thomas, the Muries and OWAA members from
all over, show that Carhart’s soul and his connections helped his writing be
heard.
He felt his most important contribution was the creation of the Conservation
Library Center (CLC) at the Denver Public Library. Today the CLC is the historic
core for anyone doing conservation research. Without Carhart’s work, it simply
wouldn’t have happened.
William D. Brown is a Colorado resident, free-lance writer and filmmaker,
specializing in outdoor, travel and construction topics. His latest film with
Wolfgang Obst, for Audubon, was "Mysteries of the Mojave."
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