April 1955 (age 56)

As part of his work, Sigurd spoke to many groups in the U.S. and Canada over the years. One example from this month: on April 15th he spoke at a meeting of the Greater Winnipeg Game and Fish Association and also taped an interview on the CBC TV program "Spotlight," which was broadcast on April 22.

April 1970 (age 71)

April 22 was the very first Earth Day. I don't know where Sigurd was that day, but it was a time of heavy travel. He spent some of the month in Washington, where the Wilderness Society (he was its president) initiated a lawsuit to prevent Interior Secretary Walter Hickel from allowing construction of the Alaska Pipeline. (Hickel himself, meanwhile, spent Earth Day flabbergasting conservationists by announcing during an Earth Day speech at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks that he would issue the right of way for the 390-mile pipeline, stretching from Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope to Valdez.) For the 71-year-old Olson, life was very hectic, as he made clear in a letter to a friend on April 16:

There is a tremendous amount to do constantly because of the upsurge of interest in environment. The Wilderness Society is up to its ears and as president I get drawn into it. The combination of my books, my tie in over the years with [the Department of the] Interior, and the [Wilderness] Society really keep me humping. What I should do is shed everything except my writing....At the moment I am compiling an anthology of my first five books [Wilderness Days] which is quite a job in itself....Then hanging over my head is my contract to write one on the rivers of the north, part of the [William O.] Douglas wilderness series. Whether I ever get around to that one I do not know. [He wouldn't.]

The Wilderness Society's participation in lawsuits was a new phenomenon. A precedent-setting court decision in 1965 gave the Sierra Club legal standing to join a suit seeking to protect Storm King Mountain in New York from a power project; during the next few years other national organizations began hiring lawyers and filing lawsuits in other environmental disputes. The trend began in earnest during Sigurd's years as Wilderness Society president. In 1968, the year he became president, the society spent just $610 on litigation, about a tenth of 1 percent of all expenditures for that year. By 1970 the group was spending more than $64,000, 7 percent of the year's expenditures, on litigation. Meanwhile, the ongoing wilderness debates continued to escalate costs. After celebrating the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, the Wilderness Society soon realized the downside of success. The act initiated a long process of federal review of potential wilderness areas; if the society was to have any substantial say in the makeup of the national wilderness preservation system it had so long struggled to establish, it needed to participate in the review process in many areas around the country at the same time. This meant sending staff members to study these areas and write reports, testify at hearings, and enlist public support. Sigurd, who was the Wilderness Society's vice president at the time (from 1963 until he became president in 1968), argued along with the majority of the governing council that the Society had no choice but to engage in deficit spending to meet these new demands. During Sigurd's presidency the group's total budget doubled, from just over half a million dollars in 1968 to more than a million dollars in 1971. The money brought in by the large numbers of new memberships did not meet the rapidly expanding costs. In the last year under Olson's leadership, 14 percent of the society's income came from the liquidation of capital assets.