Testimony Before Selke Committee

May 23, 1964

In 1964, the large amount of logging within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area became the subject of intense debate. The Izaak Walton League, the Wilderness Society, the Minnesota Wildlife Federation and six other organizations joined together as Conservation Affiliates to demand the BWCA's full preservation under the wilderness bill that was nearing passage in Congress. They asked for a logging ban, and for the Forest Service to enforce its policy that allowed outboard motors only in areas where they had become well established by 1948.

Calling for an end to logging meant breaking with Quetico Superior Council and the President's Quetico-Superior Committee. For thirty years these two organizations, led by Charles Kelly, Ernest Oberholtzer and Frank Hubachek, had pursued a treaty establishing an international land management program that would zone ten million acres for wilderness recreation and resource exploitation. If Canada and the United States had endorsed the proposal and signed the treaty, most of the region would have been designated as wilderness. Political realities, however, had reduced the amount of land under consideration to the two million acres within Quetico Park and the BWCA, and had dashed all hopes of a treaty. To many wilderness supporters, it no longer made sense to apply the zoning concepts intended for the entire watershed to one-fifth of the area, especially in light of the increasingly heavy recreational use.

Sigurd Olson (shown at left in the summer of 1964 at Listening Point) joined the call for a ban on logging. While the conservationists did not succeed in changing the wilderness bill (which was signed into law as the Wilderness Act in September 1964) they did convince Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, a former governor of Minnesota, to appoint a committee to decide the area's fate. The Boundary Waters Area Review Committee, chaired by George A. Selke, former state conservation commissioner under Freeman, held hearings during 1964 in Ely, Orr, Grand Marais, Duluth and St. Paul, collected written testimony, and visited the BWCA. In the end, the Committee designated 60 percent of the BWCA's acreage and 90 percent of its lakes and streams off limits to logging.

What follows is Sigurd's testimony before the committee in St. Paul, in which he advocates a ban on logging in the BWCA, and expresses his personal desire for an eventual phaseout of outboard motors. His testimony marked the beginning of a difficult period for him. His anti-logging stand nearly severed his thirty-plus-year connection to the Quetico Superior Council and the President's Quetico-Superior Committee, and once again he faced animosity at home. "As usual the Chamber of Commerce crowd are out to crucify me," he wrote to a friend on June 5.

What upset him the most, however, was that Izaak Walton league activists questioned his dedication. Early in June, Olson told one of the activists in confidence that he had been talking with Charles Kelly and Frank Hubachek and said he was trying to sort out the various strategies. The activist took this as a sign that Olson was wavering. When Sigurd arrived at the Blackhawk Hotel in Davenport, Iowa, for the league's national convention later that month, seven telegrams and two letters were waiting for him, all urging him not to lose his resolve. One of them said, "I always thought canoe men represented a breed of quiet strength and determination." Hurt by the insinuation, Olson angrily wrote to the activist who had betrayed his confidence:

For forty-two years I have fought threat after threat, any one of which could have destroyed the wilderness canoe country. We have not always achieved our objectives one hundred percent but have usually won substantially. In the process, I hope I have learned some wisdom and strategy on how best to get things done. Never before in all this time has anyone ever felt my hand and convictions must be bolstered. My record can stand.

And now (I feel like I'm introducing an episode of "The American Experience"), here is Sigurd Olson's testimony before the Selke Committee:

I appreciate the opportunity to discuss again the matter of wilderness preservation in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. We know the Quetico-Superior country of which it is a part is an unusual wilderness region, that there is no place on this continent with its particular type of terrain, lakes, rivers, and forests. While there is much beautiful country all over the north, nowhere is there quite the combination of clean glaciated rocks, crystal clear waters, and ecological communities as in the strip of country between Rainy Lake and Lake Superior. The country without question is unique, and the fact you are all here representing many citizen's groups as well as branches of government recognizes this fact as well as wide public interest.

Some of the talks this morning outlined the history of the area. I doubt whether there is any section between the Atlantic and the Pacific that has been so argued over, so fought over, as the area under discussion. I think I can say with assurance that in the process more conservation ideas have been born, hammered out, put to trial, used and discarded [there] than anywhere else. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area, roughly a third of the Superior National Forest, has been a proving ground for the management of wild country in many places, and the day will come when historians of these various movements throughout the United States will point to this border country and say, this idea started there.

When I look back over the conservation issues and many of you in this room have taken part in all of them since the 1920s, I see familiar faces before me—Don Winston and his late departed brother Fred, Ernest Oberholtzer, Charles S. Kelly, and others. Why did they wage battle over forty years ago? For the simple reason they were impressed by this country and loved it. They were willing to sacrifice, spend their money, their efforts and energies to preserve it.

I think of the threats that were faced then, of a great road system which would have ruined the idea of wilderness at the very beginning, the dams which would have put lakes, islands, and portages under as much as eighty feet of water and created sloughs and stagnant backwaters all along the border, the shoreline logging and the raising of water levels south of the border, the commercial exploitation by airplanes, the magnificent program of the Forest Service in acquiring private lands. If any one of these threats had succeeded we would not be here today, for the old wilderness as we have known it would be gone. As Charles Kelly, Chairman of the President's Quetico-Superior Committee, said this morning at the conclusion of this talk, "Amazingly enough, in spite of all that has happened, the canoe country is still there."

I shall not elaborate on any of the conservation policies which have been discussed here, argue them one way or the other. I merely want to say that all that has gone on during the last fifty years and before that can be summed up in one oft-quoted statement, "the past is prologue." We do have the past to work on, can use it to guide us in the future. If we fail to use that experience, then we are closing our minds to the real issues and what is best not only for this generation but for generations to come.

As I listened to the talks this morning, there seemed to be one basic reference of agreement, the protection of the wilderness character of the area. One group feels that this can be accomplished by preserving a shoreline strip of timber and harvesting trees back of a certain line. The other group believes that only by stopping all road building and timber utilization can this be accomplished. As one reads the proceedings of the efforts, controversies, and battles of the last forty years, that same dominant refrain goes through it all, the protection of the wilderness character of the Quetico-Superior country.

I speak as a canoe man. I have travelled with hundreds of them from all over the country and have talked to thousands more and know how they feel. This country of the Quetico-Superior breeds strong loyalties and no man who has ever taken a canoe trip forgets his experience or those who have been with him. These men whose convictions were welded together on the portages, the rivers and lakes of this area are for wilderness status and the protection of those qualities that give it meaning and significance.

A previous speaker called wilderness proponents "unreasonable zealots." There are of course no zealots on the other side of the fence, at least so he inferred. Once, out in San Francisco, I was introduced as belonging to the daffodil wing of conservation. Sometime after that I took a hike down the Olympic Coast to demonstrate that there should be no highway along this last strip of wild seashore. We had hiked for several days and when we reached the end of the trail, there was a big sign: "Bird Watchers Go Home." I do not resent such connotations if they represent those who are interested in the aesthetic, humanitarian, and cultural values of wilderness. Such values are all important to America and will become increasingly so in the years to come.

The night before last, I talked at a banquet in the West. The chairman had given me an impossible assignment: to tell in five minutes how I felt about wilderness and why it should be preserved. There were a number of speakers and they all had the same limitation. As the time approached, all I could think of was the statement of Albert Einstein shortly before he died:

"One of the greatest experiences of mankind is to know the sensation of awe and wonder at the mystery of the universe."

The more I thought about that, the more it seemed to sum up the meaning of wilderness, the awe and wonderment people experience when in undisturbed natural country, realizing that wilderness holds within itself all the mystery of the universe, the story of evolution, of growth and change and beauty from the beginnings of time. Wilderness is more than lakes, rivers, and timber along the shores, more than fishing or just camping. It is the sense of the primeval, of space, solitude, silence, and the eternal mystery. It is a fragile quality and is destroyed by man and his machines.

When I think of wilderness, I am constantly aware of the fact that all we shall ever have is about 2 percent of the United States' land mass, 98 percent being subject to non-wilderness. I think of our growing population and an estimated 350-400 million shortly after the turn of the century, and, as one speaker mentioned this morning, a possible visitation in the not too distant future of a million people in the Quetico-Superior. These projections give us pause. We are not living in the same era when the first controversies arose over this area. Trees do not mean the same. They have different values when they are part of an ancient ecology of great social value. The people of the future with wild country rapidly disappearing everywhere will be looking not for a partial or managed wilderness, but for the real thing. We should plan therefore not for the immediate future but with a long range point of view taking in the year 2000 or 3000, hoping that what we do will be for the best interests of the American people for all time.

Before Lyle Watts died, shortly after his retirement as Chief Forester of the U.S. Forest Service, we had a long talk about the Quetico-Superior and this is what he said:

"The more I see this country, the more I am impressed, and like most of the foresters who have been in on its management, I have developed a strong love and loyalty to it. I believe the predominant use here is wilderness recreation and that logging should be discontinued."

I asked if I could quote him and he said, "Go ahead, that's the way I feel. I've been a good forester all my life and much logging has gone on there under my direction, but things have changed and now it should stop."

Thinking about what Lyle Watts believed, I wonder about the idea of multiple use and its strict application to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. I am confidant it does not mean all uses on every acre, but rather a broad principle covering the forest as a whole in which zoning accomplishes the ultimate objective. If logging were discontinued in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area it would still be an integral part of the overall multiple use program for the Superior National Forest. One use would be eliminated in order to preserve the wilderness character of a part of it. If Wilderness Area status is the best way to do this, then it must be seriously considered. Perhaps a gradual phasing out process of timber utilization in this one third of the forest is the best approach, with the substitution of timber stands outside the area's borders.

Because of the swiftly changing pattern of the use of this area and the growing need for and appreciation of the true concept of wilderness, I feel the time has come to take a fresh hard look at the present plan of management with the objective of a shift in emphasis in line with what the region has come to mean to the people of this nation. According to the experts there is no timber famine in Minnesota, in fact there is said to be an actual surplus. Is it necessary therefore to probe the last corners of the canoe country for pockets of timber when outside its boundaries and still within the Superior National Forest are presumably adequate stands?

The real issue as always has been and is now the preservation of the wilderness character of this superlative region. To me as an ecologist, it is not true wilderness if it is crisscrossed with logging roads with only a fringe of trees along the lakeshores. Scientifically as well as aesthetically, such interference in the name of harvest and management changes the entire concept of unchanged ancient wilderness.

There are other adverse uses mentioned here today, the motor boat being one of them. I feel that sooner or later a zoning program must be worked out which will protect the wilderness core, and that on the larger border lakes the size of motors should be limited and controlled. Personally I feel that mechanized use should eventually be taken out of any wilderness, but am practical enough to realize that any such regulation here must be done through cooperation with the State of Minnesota as well as the interests bordering the area and the needs of local communities. This will take study and research for the problems are great and involved.

It is good to see so many conservation groups banded together once more to protect the wilderness character of this area. This speaks of genuine sincerity and hope for the future, and all of them merit respect. In George Selke, Secretary Freeman's Study Committee could not be in better hands. He too feels deeply about this area and I know will give this issue the best of his thought.

I want to close with a quote from a Greek philosopher of some 200 years ago: "Life is a gift of Nature, but a beautiful life is a gift of wisdom." To most of us, a beautiful life includes the out of doors, clean waters, open space, and wilderness. This is part of the American Dream. It will take the best and highest thinking of which we are capable to preserve what we have in the face of mounting population and industrial pressures. I am confident that when all the issues are weighed, the solution will come and that as a result of it, the unique wilderness values of the Quetico-Superior will be preserved.