Those Intangible Things

This talk, which Sigurd gave early in 1954 at the Izaak Walton League of America's national convention in Chicago, was his first attempt to discuss in detail the concept of "intangible values." It was a topic he came back to again and again, and in his later years he rewrote parts of this speech for his 1976 book, Reflections From the North Country.

At the time Sigurd gave this talk he was the Izaak Walton League's wilderness ecologist, and he was completing his first year as president of the National Parks Association. He also was just about ready to search for an agent for the book manuscript that two years later would be published by Alfred Knopf as The Singing Wilderness. He's shown at left in March 1954 singing a song with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, after a hike meant to generate support for the preservation of Maryland's Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. (For more on that hike, see "This Month in Olson History" for March 1954.

To talk about those intangible things is difficult because they are hard to define, explain, or measure. You can measure soil and you can measure water and trees, but it is very difficult to measure intangible values.

Before I begin to talk about intangible values, let us try to define, if we can, what they are. Intangible values are those which stir the emotions, that influence our happiness and contentment, values that make life worth living. They are all tied up with the idea of the good life. Sometimes I wonder if we actually know what the good life means. But this we know—that whatever it is, the intangible values are so important that without them life loses its meaning.

We talk about the practical considerations of conservation, and they are important, too. We know that we cannot embark on any conservation program entirely on theory. Back of all concrete considerations, however, are always other factors which we call the intangibles. They are what give substance to the practical; they provide the reasons for everything we do. Their values are so involved and integrated in all conservation work that it is impossible to separate them.

There is no question about the intangible values of works of art. We have always recognized them. I was over in the Art Institute yesterday morning and saw a woman standing engrossed before a great painting. She stood there in reverence, her head bowed. I looked at her closely and in her eyes was a strange, happy light.

What was she getting out of that picture? She was certainly not interpreting it in terms of the canvas that was there, the beautiful frame, or the amount of oil and pigment that artist had used. She was catching something which inspired her as it has inspired many others. She was enjoying the intangible values in that particular work of art. Ask her what it was she saw and she might not be able to tell you, but it did affect her deeply, and that was all that mattered.

Is it possible to explain the intangible values in a beautiful piece of music? As you listen perhaps to a Beethoven sonata, can you explain exactly what it does to you? There too are intangible values.

Do you know why you like a particular poem? What do William Cullen Bryant's lines do to you:

Whither, 'midst falling dew
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day....

What do those lines from "To a Waterfowl" do to you duck hunters? I know what they do to me. They are far more than just words printed on a piece of paper. They embody sunsets on the marshes, the whisper of wings, and many things that others do not know. Bryant caught something in those lines, something which you know and I know, the intangible values of ducks against the sky.

There is no question in our minds of those values inherent in works of art and I believe there is no question as to the intangibles involved in conservation.

There have been a great many definitions of conservation. Aldo Leopold, whom you all know and revere, said, "Conservation means the development of an ecological conscience." I am not going to try and explain fully what is meant by an ecological conscience, for it would take a long time and there are men sitting on either side of me who are probably much better prepared to discuss that with you. But what I think he meant was that unless man develops a feeling for his environment and understands it; unless he becomes at one with it and realizes his stewardship; unless he appreciates all of the intangible values embraced in his environment, he does not and cannot understand the basic need for conservation.

I think of [Louis] Bromfield's brief definition: "Conservation is living in harmony with the land." More simply, he was saying what Leopold said. What is meant by "in harmony with the land"? Certainly not the creation of dust storms, or gullies, or mining the soil. In harmony with the land means living the good life on the land.

I ran across a definition not long ago which points up particularly what I am trying to say. I like and and I think you will too, and I want you to remember it because it ties together all the other definitions I know and gives substance to the idea of intangible values. It was Paul Sears of Yale who said, "Conservation is a point of view and involves the whole concept of freedom, dignity, and the American spirit."

A beautiful thing to say, and something that will be repeated for generations to come. Conservation is a point of view. It is a philosophy and a way of life.

What do we mean by our way of life? How many of us know what the good life is? Generations of Americans have enjoyed this thing we call the good life. In fact we have taken it for granted as part of our due without ever trying to define it or wonder where it came from. This much we know—that the good life is one of plenty, of breathing space and freedom, and for Americans it means the out of doors. If the open country was taken away from us and the kind of outdoors we know, would we still be living the good life?

Is our country heading toward a state of mechanized civilization where the good life as we understand it is going to disappear? Are we going to mistreat our natural resources to the point where it is no longer possible to enjoy the kind of good life we have imagined was ours forever?

I flew over the city of New York the other day. For some reason the plane circled over the miles and miles of tenements and slums that is Brooklyn. As we circled I looked down and wondered about the good life, thought of the children down there who never saw grass or trees or clean running water. I wondered what they thought about the good life and if they knew what it was?

I also saw Central Park that day, a little green oasis far below, surrounded by the roaring, bustling city of New York. That little natural area was worth uncounted millions of dollars, but then I knew its intangible values to the people of the city were far more important than any others. Here was a sanctuary of the spirit in the midst of one of the greatest industrialized cities of the world.

How is all of this involved with the conservation of our natural resources? What does it actually have to do with the practical problems of soil and water and living things? You have heard much about soil at this convention, and I am not going to enlarge on the subject. I merely want to quote Sterling North, who said, "Every time you see a dust cloud or a muddy stream, a field scoured by erosion or a channel choked with silt, you are witnessing the passing of American democracy." I would have added to that statement five words—"and our way of life."

More and more we are talking about the relationship of natural resources and their conservation with our way of life. One of our great historians, in describing the migration of races from east to west, said, "In dust and rubble along those great migration lanes are the palaces, pyramids, and temples of the past."

Old civilizations can be traced along those lanes where man was on the search for food. What happened to those ancient peoples? They mistreated the land, their forests, and their waters, and thereby lost their way of life. They failed to recognize the intangibles before it was too late.

It is easier for me to think of the intangibles with respect to water than most other resources, for I've always lived close to it. When I say "water" I instinctively thing of my own country, the Quetico-Superior and the wilderness canoe country of the international border. What is the importance of that country, its timber, its vast deposits of iron and other resources? There is no denying the part it plays in our economy, but when I think of it, I remember the vistas of wilderness waterways, the solitude and quiet, and the calling of the loons. They are the intangible values which someday in the future with our zooming population may far outshadow all others in importance.

Water. I think of Izaak Walton and the verse in the stained glass window of the cathedral at Winchester, England, where he is buried. There are only four words—"Study to be quiet"—but they embody his whole philosophy and way of life. Here was his search for tranquility and peace, here the whole reason for his communion with the out of doors. He did not mention the number of fish he caught. He remembered the quiet and the intangible values of the things he wrote about.

I visited Crater Lake, Oregon, this past summer and remember its startlingly blue water, its high peaks and snowfields. I remember especially how it looked in the early morning when it was half covered with mist. It is one of the most dramatic vistas on the continent and possibly in the world. Intangible values? Capture them? You bring them away with you but you cannot explain them.

I remember a little trout stream of a long time ago. I had followed it to the headwaters on the advice of an Indian who had told me I would find a pool that no one had ever fished. I found that pool after looking for it for two whole days. I have never gone back there, and I do not want to go back, because I've heard that the pool has changed.

That pool was about the size of this room. There were great trees around it, primeval yellow birch, huge white pines and hemlocks. It was a rock pool, and I climbed out on a ledge and looked down into water that was clear and deep. Down on the bottom were schools of speckled trout, just laying there fanning their fins. I remember tossing a pine cone onto the surface and how the water exploded with rising trout. I sat on that ledge for a long time and watched those trout and all the great trees around the pool, and I thought to myself, "This is something very special; this is a part of America as it used to be."

Some years later, I described that pool in an article I wrote. "This," I said, "must be what we all think about when we sing, 'Thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills.'" Here was something perfect. There were no dollar values around that pool, only intangibles.

Whenever I think of little rivers, I think of the 23rd Psalm, "He leadeth me beside still waters; He restoreth my soul." Again, the intangibles and spiritual values.

And what about wildlife and the intangibles there? Do you duck hunters remember how many ducks you shot last year or the year before? No, but you remember the sound of wings in the dawn or at dusk. You remember as though it was yesterday that mallard hen quacking far out in the rice and how the rushes looked when they were gold against the blue water.

One day just about eight years ago, I was walking along a river in Germany. It was quiet and dusk and there was a dull glow in the west. On both sides of the river were the silhouettes of bombed buildings, and a bridge lay broken in two in the current. I wasn't thinking of duck hunting, for it was spring and I was far from home, but then I heard a familiar sound, a whistle of wings overhead. I looked up and there was a flight of mallards heading down the river. For a moment I forgot everything and was back in the rice beds of the Minnesota lakes. The whistle of those wings were intangible values to me.

Last summer on a pack trip in the Sun River country of Montana we were riding through a dense stand of spruce in the bottom of a canyon. I got off my horse to lead it around a windfall and there in the center of the trail I saw the track of a grizzly. We never did see the bear, though we found where he had scratched great marks in the bark of a spruce as high as he could reach. From that moment on the country changed. It was the land of the mountain men of another century, the country of Lewis and Clark, part of the Old West. Those grizzly signs belonged to the intangibles.

It is hard to place a price tag on these things, on the sounds and smells and memories of the out of doors, on the countless things we have seen and loved. They are the dividends of the good life.

Have you ever stood in a stand of virgin timber where it is very quiet and the only sounds the twittering of the nuthatches and the kinglets way up in the tops? John Muir once said, "The sequoias belong to the solitudes and the millenniums." I was in the sequoias not long ago and it was a spiritual experience. To realize that those great trees were mature long before the continent was discovered, that their lives reached back to the beginnings of western civilization, was sobering to short-lived man and his ambitions.

We need trees. We need them for our mills, for industry, for paper. We must have them for our particular kind of civilization. They are an important factor in our economy. But let us not forget that there are other values in trees besides the practical, values that may be more important in the long run.

You heard today that by 1970 there will be a fifth mouth to feed at every table of four. What is that going to do to our way of life? What is it going to do to the places where a man can still find silence and peace?

I read an editorial in the New York Times last year when the Supreme Court of the United States gave its favorable decision on the validity of the air space reservation over the Roadless Areas of the Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota. The heading of the editorial was "Tranquility is Beyond Price." Tranquility is one of the intangibles. Solitude is also one of them. Those things are truly beyond price.

Much of my time is spent in the effort to preserve wilderness regions of the United States. They are the wild areas set aside by the states and the federal government as forests and parks. A constant effort is necessary to save them from exploitation. What we are fighting for is to preserve this less than one percent of our total land area. we are thinking of those places not only in terms of the physical resources within them but of their spiritual resources and intangible values.

The fact that last year forty-six million people visited our national parks and over thirty million our national forests, indicates that there is a hunger, a need in the American people to renew their associations with unspoiled nature.

We are trying—and when I say "we" I mean the Izaak Walton League together with all other conservation groups, the National park Service and the U.S. Forest Service—to hold the line and pass these areas on unimpaired to future generations, so that there will always be someplace where men can find peace and quiet.

And so when we talk about intangible values remember that they cannot be separated from the others. The conservation of waters, forests, soils, and wildlife are all involved with the conservation of the human spirit. The goal we all strive toward is happiness, contentment, the dignity of the individual, and the good life. This goal will elude us forever if we forget the importance of the intangibles.