Bob Marshall (wilderness activist)



Robert "Bob" Marshall (January 2, 1901 – November 11, 1939) was an American forester, writer and wilderness activist. The son of wealthy constitutional lawyer and conservationist Louis Marshall, Bob Marshall was first exposed to nature as a young child. He quickly developed a love for the outdoors, visiting the Adirondack Mountains numerous times to hike and climb, becoming one of the first Adirondack Forty-Sixers. He also traveled to the Alaskan wilderness and authored numerous articles and publications, including the 1933 bestselling book Arctic Village.

A scientist with a Doctor of Philosophy in plant physiology, Marshall became independently wealthy after the death of his father. He was also a supporter of socialism and civil liberties and held two significant public posts during his life: chief of forestry in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, from 1933 to 1937, and head of recreation management in the Forest Service, from 1937 to 1939. Defining wilderness as a social as well as an environmental ideal, Marshall was the first to suggest a formal, national organization of individuals dedicated to the preservation of primeval land. In 1935 he became one of the principal founders of The Wilderness Society and personally provided a majority of the Society's funding in its first years.

Marshall died of heart failure at the age of 38, but 25 years later, partly as a result of his efforts, The Wilderness Society became responsible for passing the Wilderness Act, which legally defined the wilderness of the United States and protected some nine million acres (36,000 km2) of federal land. Today, Marshall is considered largely responsible for the wilderness preservation movement. Several landmarks and areas, including The Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana and Mount Marshall in the Adirondacks, were named in his honor.

Early life
Born in New York City, Bob Marshall was the third of four children of Louis and Florence Marshall. His father, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, was a noted constitutional lawyer and a champion of minority rights. Louis Marshall was also active in the Syracuse Jewish community, co-founder of the American Jewish Committee; in 1891 he was part of a national delegation that asked President Benjamin Harrison to intervene on behalf of persecuted Russian Jews. An amateur naturalist and active conservationist, the elder Marshall was instrumental in securing "forever wild" protection for the Adirondack Forest Preserve in New York. He helped found the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, now SUNY-ESF. Florence Marshall, meanwhile, devoted herself to her family, the education of young Jewish women, and the work of several Jewish welfare organizations.

Bob Marshall attended Felix Adler's Ethical Culture School in New York City until 1919. The school's educational environment nurtured independent thinking and commitment to social justice. Like his father, Marshall became involved in nature from a young age; two of his childhood heroes were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. He first visited the Adirondack Mountains when he was six months old, and returned there each summer for the next quarter-century—and at every opportunity thereafter. His younger brother George later described the family's visits to Knollwood, their summer camp on Lower Saranac Lake in the Adirondack State Park, as a time when they "entered a world of freedom and informality, of living plants and spaces, of fresh greens and exhilarating blues, of giant, slender pines and delicate pink twinflowers, of deer and mosquitoes, of fishing and guide boats and tramps through the woods".

Schooling and early exploring


Despite his urban upbringing, Marshall was drawn to the outdoors. He discovered his passion for exploring, charting, and a love of climbing mountains, through the writings of Verplanck Colvin, who spent the post-Civil War decade surveying northern New York's woods. Throughout his life, Marshall kept a series of hiking notebooks that were illustrated with photographs and showed his preoccupation with statistical achievements. In 1915, Marshall climbed his first Adirondack peak, the 3352 ft Ampersand Mountain, alongside his brother George and family friend Herb Clark, a Saranac Lake guide. Through Clark, who accompanied them on most of their longer trips during adolescence and early adulthood, the two brothers learned the arts of woodcraft and boating. By 1921, they became the first climbers to scale all 42 Adirondack Mountains believed to exceed 4000 ft, some of which had never been climbed. In 1924, the three became the first Adirondack Forty-Sixers, hikers who have climbed to the summits of all 46 High Peaks of the Adirondacks.

After graduating from the Ethical Culture School, Marshall spent a year at Columbia University. In 1920, he transferred to the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University. Marshall had decided in his teens that he wanted to be a forester, writing at the time about his love of "the woods and solitude" and that he "should hate to spend the greater part of my lifetime in a stuffy office or in a crowded city". For a while he was unhappy and withdrawn at Syracuse. However, he succeeded academically and stood out to his fellow students for his individuality. As one classmate put it, Marshall was "always doing something no one else would ever think of doing. He was constantly rating things&mdash;the Adirondack peaks, his best days with George, and dozens of others." Warming to his collegiate experience, he became a member of Alpha Xi Sigma, the forestry college's honor society; ran on the Syracuse University freshman track team; and participated in both junior-varsity lacrosse and cross country running. Halfway through school, Marshall had become a class leader; he was elected as class secretary and appointed an associate editor of the Empire Forester, the College's yearbook.

During the early 1920s, Marshall was increasingly interested in promoting Adirondack recreation. In 1922, he became one of the charter members of the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK), an organization devoted to the building and maintenance of trails and the teaching of hiking in the park. He prepared a guidebook for the group: a 38-page booklet called The High Peaks of the Adirondacks, which was published in 1922. Based on his pioneering experiences on the peaks, the guide, which states that "it's a great thing these days to leave civilization for a while and return to nature", provides a brief description of each peak and arranges them in order of "niceness of view and all around pleasure in view and climb".

In 1924, Marshall graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in forestry, magna cum laude, finishing fourth in a class of 59 at the College of Forestry. The senior yearbook described him as "the Champion Pond Hound of all time, a lad with a mania for statistics and shinnying mountain peaks, the boy who will go five miles [8 km] around to find something to wade thru. And the man who is rear chainman for Bob will have to hump or get wet, and probably both." By 1925 he had received a Master's degree in forestry from Harvard University.

Forest Service and Alaska
Marshall was intrigued by the idea of the Alaskan wilderness, but the Forest Service—where he worked from 1925 to 1928—was unable to accommodate his request for an immediate position there. Instead he was assigned to the Northern Rocky Mountain Experiment Station at Missoula, Montana in 1925. Marshall's research at the Experimental Station focused on the dynamics of forest regeneration after fires, but he was faced with the task of fighting an actual fire after a July storm started more than 150 fires in Idaho's Kaniksu National Forest. He was put in charge of supporting and provisioning one of the organized crews led by the Forest Service. As he later recalled, Marshall worked "18 to 20 hours a day as time-keeper, Chief of Commissary, Camp Boss, and Inspector of the fire line". Spending time with loggers and fire fighters, as well as witnessing the conditions under which they worked, Marshall learned vital lessons about labor issues and natural resource use. It was while at the Experimental Station that Marshall became interested in the unsafe conditions for many working Americans, and this was the origin of his liberal and socialist philosophies.

In 1929, Marshall was 28 years old and less than a year away from completing a PhD in plant physiology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland when he made his first trip to Alaska, visiting the upper Koyukuk River and the central Brooks Range. The scientific objective of the trip was to study tree growth at the northern timberline near the Arctic Divide. For his 15-month sojourn in the small town of Wiseman, Alaska, Marshall rented a one-room cabin next to the only roadhouse in the village and furnished it with books, records, a phonograph player, and a writing desk. He placed the desk so that he could sit by the cabin's single window and admire the view of the Koyukuk River and the range of steep, snow-covered mountains in the background. His travels engendered in him a great love for the central Brooks Range in the Alaskan wilderness. Marshall was one of the first to explore much of the range, especially the headwaters of the North fork of the Koyukuk River, where he bestowed the name "Gates of the Arctic" on a pair of mountains. On September 11, 1929, Marshall's father Louis died in Zürich, Switzerland at the age of 73. Because their mother had died of cancer in 1916, the four children inherited most of their father's estate, worth several million dollars. Although he became financially independent, Bob Marshall continued to work throughout his life.

Shortly after receiving his PhD, he published "The Problem of the Wilderness", a celebrated defense of wilderness preservation that expanded some of the themes developed in his earlier article, "The Wilderness as a Minority Right". When it was published in The Scientific Monthly in February 1930, "The Problem of the Wilderness" had already been rejected by four other magazines, but it became one of his most important works. He argued that wilderness was worth saving not only because of its unique aesthetic qualities, but because of its ability to provide visitors with a chance for adventure. Marshall went on to state: "There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness." The article became a much-quoted call to action and is today considered seminal by wilderness historians.

In July 1930, Marshall and his brother George climbed nine Adirondack High Peaks in one day, setting a new record. In August, Marshall returned to Alaska. He planned to explore the Brooks Range to pursue more tree research, and also make a study of Arctic frontier civilization in Wiseman. He called the village, which was two hundred miles north of Fairbanks, "the happiest civilization of which I have knowledge." Befriending a number of the area's inhabitants, he meticulously recorded thousands of hours of conversation with them. He persuaded a number of villagers, most of whom were single white males, to take intelligence tests, and even developed statistics on all aspects of the villagers' lives, from their financial resources to their diets to their sexual habits. He spent twelve and a half months&mdash;from late August 1930 to early September 1931&mdash;exploring and collecting data. The book that resulted from these excursions (and his previous trip in Alaska) was 1933's best-selling Literary Guild selection Arctic Village. It was hailed as an important work of sociology because of its focus on lifestyle in the wilderness. Marshall shared the royalties from the book with the residents of Wiseman.

Writing and conservation
Marshall returned to the East Coast in late September 1931. Although he busied himself with writing Arctic Village, he also wrote prolifically on other topics and published several articles about American forestry. He was particularly concerned that few articles during this time were addressing the issue of deforestation, and went so far as to write a letter to the president of the American Forestry Association, George D. Pratt, on the matter. He also pursued a variety of other activities: he accepted an invitation to serve on a committee to dedicate a memorial to his father at the forestry college in Syracuse (Marshall Hall), and delivered speeches about his travels and wilderness preservation.

Shortly after his return, he was asked by Earle Clapp, head of the Forest Service's Branch of Research, to help initiate badly needed reforms in the forest-products industry and to create a broader vision of national forest management. Marshall moved to Washington, D.C. in September 1932 to take up the position, which entailed writing initiatives for forest recreation, and immediately began compiling a list of the remaining roadless areas in the United States. He sent this data to regional foresters, and urged them to set aside areas for wilderness; all of them responded negatively. Marshall's input into what became known as the Copeland Report amounted to three extensive chapters of a two volume, 1,677-page work. He considered it "the best piece of forestry work I have yet done".

Marshall had clearly defined himself as a socialist by 1932–1933. He told a correspondent: "I wish very sincerely that Socialism would be put into effect right away and the profit system eliminated." He became active in the Tenants Unemployed League of the District of Columbia, a group that helped unemployed people with housing problems; later he joined the fight against federal aid cuts to scientific research. He had learned of the American Civil Liberties Union from his father and served as chairman of the Washington branch. Marshall was even arrested briefly for participating in a March 1933 United Front demonstration. He did not forget his conservation causes, however, and soon pondered the question of wilderness and national parks. In the early 1930s, he joined the National Parks Association, eventually becoming a member of its board.

In August 1933, Marshall was appointed director of the Forestry Division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a position he held for four years. He besieged government personnel with letters, telephone calls, and personal visits in the cause of wilderness, rapidly gaining recognition in Washington as a champion of preservation. One of his last initiatives as chief forester of the BIA was to recommend 4800000 acre of Indian lands for management as either "roadless" or "wild" areas; the order, which created 16 wilderness areas, was approved shortly after Marshall left office to join the Forest Service once more. Marshall became increasingly concerned with civilization's encroachment upon the wild lands, writing "The sounds of the forest are entirely obliterated by the roar of the motor. The smell of pine needles and flowers and herbs and freshly turned dirt and all the other delicate odors of the forest are drowned in the stench of gasoline.  The feeling of wind blowing in the face and of soft ground under foot are all lost."

The Wilderness Society
In 1934, Marshall visited Knoxville, Tennessee and met with Benton MacKaye, a regional planner and originator of the Appalachian Trail. Together with Harvey Broome, a Knoxville lawyer, they discussed Marshall's 1930 proposal for an organization dedicated to wilderness preservation. Bernard Frank, a fellow forester, joined them later in the year; the men mailed an "Invitation to Help Organize a Group to Preserve the American Wilderness" to like-minded individuals. The invitation expressed their desire "to integrate the growing sentiment which we believe exists in this country for holding wild areas sound-proof as well as sight-proof from our increasingly mechanized life" and their conviction that such wildernesses were "a serious human need rather than a luxury and plaything".

On January 21, 1935, the organizing committee published a folder stating that "for the purpose of fighting off invasion of the wilderness and of stimulating ... an appreciation of its multiform emotional, intellectual, and scientific values, we are forming an organization to be known as the WILDERNESS SOCIETY". They invited Aldo Leopold to act as the Society's first president, but the position ultimately went to Robert Sterling Yard. Marshall provided the bulk of the Society's funding in its early years, beginning with an anonymous donation of $1,000.

T. H. Watkins, former editor of the society's magazine, Wilderness, contended that before Marshall and the Society there was "no true movement" for the preservation of the nation's roadless and primitive areas. "One could comfortably argue", Watkins wrote in 1985 on the occasion of the society’s 50th anniversary, "that Robert Marshall was personally responsible for the preservation of more wilderness than any individual in history".

Later efforts and sudden death
Marshall's last years were productive ones. By October 1937, he had taken charge of the Forest Service's Division of Recreation and Lands. Over the next two years, Marshall worked on two major initiatives: an effort to extend national forest recreational opportunities to people with lower incomes (as well as dismantling discriminatory barriers against minority groups), and a program to preserve more wilderness within the national forests. His biographer James Glover asserts that Marshall was probably the first high-level official to seriously fight discrimination in Forest Service recreational policies. During this time, Marshall continued to financially support The Wilderness Society, as well as various civil rights, labor, and socialist organizations.

During his last trip to Alaska (beginning in August 1938), which included further exploration of the Brooks Range, Marshall became a subject of interest for the Dies Committee, a House of Representatives committee investigating "un-American" activities. Named for its chairman, Martin Dies, the committee announced in The New York Times that eight federal officials (including Marshall) were contributing to communism because of their connections to such organizations as the Workers Alliance and the American League for Peace and Democracy. Marshall was too busy traveling to respond to the allegations: after leaving Alaska he spent time in Washington State, Montana, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and California. He visited Alaska for one last time the following year and made a tour of western national forests, addressing aspects of forest recreation. While he was in Washington state that September, two regulations (U-1 and U2) developed by Marshall's committee were signed; these "U-Regulations" protected wilderness and wild areas from road building, logging, hotels and similarly destructive activities. It also made their protected status more secure.

While on a midnight train from Washington, D.C. to New York City on November 11, 1939, Marshall died of apparent heart failure at the age of 38. His sudden death came as a shock because of his relatively young age and high level of physical activity, and he was greatly mourned by friends and relatives. His brother George said: "Bob's death shattered me and was the most traumatic event in my life." Marshall was interred at Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn, beside his parents and sister Ruth.

Legacy
A bachelor, Marshall left virtually all of his $1.5 million estate to three causes dear to him: socialism, civil liberties and wilderness preservation. Three trusts were established in his will. The first, focused on education related to "the theory of production for use and not for profit", received half of his estate; the second, aimed at "safeguarding and advancement of the cause of civil liberties", received one-quarter of his estate; and the third supported "preservation of the wilderness conditions in outdoor America", establishing what became the Robert Marshall Wilderness Fund, also receiving one-quarter of his estate. Trustees of the latter trust included Robert Sterling Yard, Bob Marshall's brother George, Irving Clark, Olaus Murie and Bill Zimmerman, early leaders of The Wilderness Society. He gave money to only one individual: $10,000 to his old friend and guide, Herb Clark.

Marshall's posthumously published book Alaska Wilderness, Exploring the Central Brooks Range (1956), edited by his brother George, became a seminal work, inspiring the establishment of the Gates of the Arctic National Park. His Adirondack writings were published by Lost Pond Press in 2006, as an anthology titled Bob Marshall in the Adirondacks: Writings of a Pioneering Peak-Bagger, Pond-Hopper and Wilderness Preservationist. It was edited by Phil Brown, editor of the Adirondack Explorer news magazine. According to the publisher, the book includes "numerous accounts of his hikes in the High Peaks and the vast wild region south of Cranberry Lake, spirited defenses of the state's forever-wild Forest Preserve, a charming portrait of Herb Clark, and excerpts from an unpublished novel set partly in the Adirondacks".

Since its conception, The Wilderness Society has helped pass many bills and has contributed a total of 109 million acres (421,000 km2) to the National Wilderness Preservation System. Marshall's dream of permanent wilderness protection became a reality 25 years after his death when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law on September 3, 1964. Written by Howard Zahniser, the bill enabled the United States Congress to set aside selected areas in the national forests, national parks, national wildlife refuges and other federal lands as units to be kept permanently unchanged by humans. In defining wilderness, Zahniser invoked Marshall and his contemporaries, stating that "in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, [wilderness] is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." The act's signing was the most important event in the history of The Wilderness Society; members Mardy Murie and Alice Zahniser stood beside Johnson as he signed the legislation. With The Wilderness Act, the United States guaranteed permanent protection of wild and scenic natural areas for future generations. The Society's most prestigious honor, the Robert Marshall Award, is named in Marshall's honor; its first recipient was Sigurd F. Olson in 1981.

Places and dedications
In the same year as the Wilderness Act became law, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, located in Flathead and Lewis and Clark National Forests in Montana, was created. It had previously been set aside as the South Fork, Pentagon, and Sun River Primitive Areas in 1941. The area encompasses a million acres (4,000 km2) and is one of the best preserved ecosystems in the world. Known as "The Bob", it is the second largest wilderness in the contiguous 48 states. In compliance with the 1964 Wilderness Act, there is no motorized or mechanical equipment (including bicycles or hang gliders) permitted. Although camping and fishing are allowed with proper permit, no roads or buildings exist in the area, and logging and mining are prohibited. The Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex (which encompasses Bob Marshall, Scapegoat, and Great Bear Wildernesses) is a habitat for the grizzly bear, lynx, cougar, wolf, black bear, moose, elk and a variety of other birds, mammals, and plants.

Mount Marshall (previously called Mount Herbert), which stands 4360 ft high in the Adirondack Mountains, Camp Bob Marshall in the Black Hills, and in the Brooks Range of Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle, are also named for him. As of 2008, the Adirondack Council is encouraging the state of New York to create the Bob Marshall Great Wilderness near Cranberry Lake in the western Adirondacks. If they succeed, it would be the largest wilderness area in the Adirondack Park at 409000 acre.

At the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF), Bob Marshall Fellowships in wilderness management and policy studies are offered to graduate students and faculty engaged in research in recreation resource management; the fellowships are supported by the college's Bob Marshall Endowed Fund. Also at SUNY-ESF, a student "outing club" named after Marshall honors his love of the outdoors and the Adirondack mountains, and a bronze plaque commemorating his contributions to wilderness conservation graces the entrance way of Marshall Hall, the hub of campus events and activities, named after his father.

Selected list of works

 * "The Problem of the Wilderness" (1930)
 * Arctic Village (1933)
 * The People's Forests (1933)
 * Arctic Wilderness: Exploring the Central Brooks Range (1956)