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On the day I am writing this, June 7, the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge is celebrating its 85th birthday.
The 240,000-acre refuge is as much a part of our lives as the air we breathe or the sky above — almost always in our view — yet we may take for granted the access for hunting and fishing or just a quiet paddle on the watery pathways through the lush wild rice and lotus beds.
Thank goodness Wil Dilg didn’t take it for granted.
It was Dilg and the Isaac Walton League that he organized who led the effort to protect a scenic and as-yet unspoiled 300-mile stretch of the Upper Mississippi River. He spent a year lobbying for it and on June 7, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the bill to create the refuge.
Dilg’s achievement, though, was just one part of an historic movement for land conservation in America. Also in the 1920s, Wisconsin’s great ecologist Aldo Leopold was working in the Forest Service to create a national wilderness system. Just a few days before the Upper Miss bill was signed, the Gila Wilderness Area in New Mexico became the first such designation on June 3, 1924.
Also on June 7, 1924, the Clarke-McNeary Act expanded the ability of the National Forest Service to buy more land.
Future President Herbert Hoover was elected president of the National Parks Association in 1924. He advocated strong federal control for conservation and use of natural resources, according to John C. Miles in his book, “Guardians of the Parks.”
And Coolidge, aware that increasing auto ownership was allowing more people to travel, convened a national conference on recreational use of federal lands in 1924.
We can look back with satisfaction on what has been built since then — 193 million acres in national forests and grasslands, more than 150 million acres in federal wildlife refuges and some 84.6 million acres in national parks plus millions more acres in state parks and wildlife areas.
Yet even as we celebrate an anniversary of the refuge and other achievements, we have to admit the job of conserving our lands is far from over. We continue to lose farmland to erosion and development at an alarming rate, sedimentation is a serious threat to the health of the Upper Mississippi refuge, we despoil the air quality in Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and other parks and continue to threaten our wilderness areas with fragmentation due to road building.
Leopold warned of the latter even as the first steps toward formal wilderness designation were being taken in the 1920s. He told the recreation land conference in 1924 that the opportunity to retain wilderness was declining with a speed equal to the rapidity of road construction, according to Miles’ book.
Leopold might ask today as he did in the 1940s essay (“The Land Ethic”) “at what point will governmental conservation, like the mastodon, become handicapped by its own dimensions?”
He was suggesting then that government can’t buy and manage every bit of land that needs conserving, and it hasn’t. To finish the job, all of us have to learn more about what it means to have a personal land ethic, to treat the land with love and respect, not solely as an economic resource, but, as Leopold put it, as a community to which we belong — to have Wil Dilg’s conservation heart beating in every breast.
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