Hello, everyone, and welcome to this event.
Figures in Environmental History.
It is being run through
Special Collections and University Archives
at Virginia Tech.
We have recently acquired the papers of Rupert Cutler.
This event is part of
the grant-funded project that
we have related to those papers.
We will be discussing the history and future of
environmentalism and their work in that subject.
Without further ado, I
would like to introduce Rupert Cutler,
who's a native of Detroit, Michigan.
He has a bachelor's degree in
wildlife management from the University of Michigan and
a PhD in resource development
from Michigan State University.
He has been the Editor of Virginia Wildlife,
the Managing Editor of National Wildlife,
Assistant Executive Director of the Wilderness Society,
Senior Vice President of the National Audubon Society,
and President of Defenders of Wildlife.
He was an assistant professor of
resource development and extension specialist in
natural resources policy at
Michigan State University from 1972-1977.
During the administration of President Jimmy Carter,
he was the Assistant Secretary
of Agriculture in charge of
the Forest Service and Soil Conservation Service.
Since 1991, Rupert has resided in Roanoke,
where he served as founding Executive Director of
the Explore Park and the Western Virginia Land Trust,
now the Blue Ridge Land Conservancy.
Since retiring in 1999,
he has served as President of
the Kiwanis Club of Roanoke,
member of the board of
directors of the Western Virginia Water Authority,
and member of the board of
trustees of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation.
He has served six years on Roanoke City Council.
He and his wife, Brenda McDaniel,
now live in Downtown Roanoke.
As you can see, he's had a very full life.
With no further ado,
I will hand it over to Rupe.
Bess, thank you very much.
Thank you for organizing this webinar
and for that kind introduction.
I'm pleased that my papers have
found a home at Virginia Tech.
You'll be hearing from three amigos tonight.
Bess, you can just go onto
the next slide there and follow our numbers.
Yeah.
There we are. There are the three amigos.
Jay, there you are
on the right and Ed Zahniser on the left.
Ed interned at the Wilderness Society.
You're getting ahead of me.
Sorry.
Ed interned at the Wilderness Society
in Washington while I was
Assistant Executive Director there in the 1960s.
You'll hear from Ed after you hear from Jay this evening.
I met Ed's distinguished father,
Howard Zahniser when I
was with National Wildlife Federation in
1963 before he died
tragically just before the Wilderness Act
was signed in 1964.
Jay, a fellow Roanoker asked
me for suggestions regarding his dissertation topic when
he was a graduate student at
Princeton and I suggested
the recent history of the wilderness system.
His dissertation on that topic became a wonderful book,
The Promise of Wilderness,
published by the University of Washington Press in 2012.
[LAUGHTER] That picture is 85 years old.
Because this webinar was advertised as a view of
environmental history through the lens
of the Rupert Cutler papers,
I will cover briefly the full extent of
my wilderness related experiences and employment.
My early days as seen here,
as well as those with the Wilderness Society in
the 1960s and the US Department of Agriculture in 1970s.
First, my beginnings.
As a twig is bent,
so grows the tree.
Why did I become
a professional environmental protection activist?
Well, the out-of-doors played a big part in my youth,
teenage, and early adult years.
My parents were avid travelers,
photographers, bird watchers and campers.
My engineer father and
my musician mother took
my brother and me on camping trips
to wilderness parks during World War II.
I was an enthusiastic boy scout.
Here's a photo of me in 1950
going to a National Scout Jamboree at Valley Forge.
My college years,
summer jobs introduced me to wilderness.
I was a kitchen boy at the Audubon camp in Maine 1951,
traveling by powerboat with camp director Carl Buckeye
through to uninhabited islands
in the Bay of Maine to Bay of Birds.
In 1952, I was offered
the position of fire control aid
by the US Forest Service and
hitchhiked from Detroit to Spokane and up to
the Sullivan Lake to
the Kaniksu National Forest and spent
two months on a lookout on Little Snowy Top on
the Canadian border on
the headwaters of the Priest and Salmo rivers,
which I think is a wilderness area today.
I'll never forget the view under
the full moon down upper
Priest Lake and Lake Cour d'Alene.
A great place to spend a couple of months.
Seeing the great gray owls and
the gray-crowned rosy finches and the other stuff,
the pipers and all the rest.
In 1963, I worked for the US Fish and Wildlife
Service as a stream guard
in the Kodiak Island region of Alaska,
living for two months by myself in
a tent camp on a bay in Katmai National Monument.
I was visited by hawk-owls, ptarmigans
and a wolverine came by as
I was taking a break from skinning birds.
I was collecting birds for Dr.
George McSutton at the University of Oklahoma,
and sitting on a drift wood log,
along came a wolverine and
looked at me and kept going and going.
Not to mention brown bears that I saw every day.
I graduated from the University of Michigan with a BS
in wildlife management in June 1955.
In 1958,
the Virginia Game Commission
Executive Director Chester Phelps
offered me the position of
Associate Editor of Virginia Wildlife Magazine.
Two years later, he promoted me to chief of
the education division of
the Virginia Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries.
Here's Chester and here is Governor Jay Lindsay Almond,
infamous for massive resistance to integration.
We remember those days,
sad days in Virginia
but anyway, I had a good time at the Game Commission.
Then in 1962, I moved to Washington DC
to edit the National Wildlife Federation's publications
and lobby on Capitol Hill.
Some of you will recognize
our late writer friend Mike Frome,
the furthest on the right of this picture,
and I'm sitting next to him.
This was a meeting of the Natural Resources Council of
all the gray head chief executive officers,
the conservation groups in Washington in 1963.
Our organizations were so small
that we had to coordinate our lobbying,
and one group would represent
several groups at a particular hearing and then
another representative would do the same in
other simultaneous legislative hearings.
That's 1963.
Then I heard President
John Kennedy advocate for the passage of
the National Wilderness bill at
the White House Conference on Conservation in
the State Department auditorium in 1963.
My wife and I stood all night long to go past
Kennedy's coffin in catafalque in the Capitol later.
I became Managing Editor of National Wildlife Magazine.
A highlight of that time was
working with Sigurd Olson of Ely,
Minnesota, on an article
advocating passage of the Wilderness Bill.
Then in 1965, Stewart Brandborg
asked me to join the Wilderness
Society staff in Washington.
My assignment was to organize grass roots citizens
committees wherever federal lands
offered opportunities for new wilderness areas,
and shepherd these local activists through
the lobbying process to win
passage of laws to
classify those roadless tracts of National Forest,
National Park, National Wildlife refuge lands as
units of the National Wilderness Preservation System.
So my beat was everywhere east of the Mississippi River.
My colleague, Cliff Meritt did
the same kind of work for the Wilderness Society in the west.
It was a great opportunity to work for
the Wilderness Society at that moment in time
because the Wilderness Act had just become
law and there were countless roadless areas across
the country qualified for
wilderness status if we could mount
successful political campaigns to give them
statutory protection as additions
to the Wilderness System.
Following the passage of
the so-called Parent Wilderness Act,
it was thought that each addition to
the wilderness system would require
the passage of a separate act of Congress.
Later on, they were bundled in one bill,
such as the Eastern Wilderness Act and
the state-by-state RARE II based legislation.
I went out to communities near
each potential new wilderness area throughout the east,
calling meetings of interested parties and
set them on a course to get
their areas into the Wilderness system.
One act of Congress at a time.
The distinguished Governing Council of
the Wilderness Society was a joy to work with.
Here is the gang down at Everglades.
Here is the same gang in Canyonlands a year later.
You can see Brandy on the right and then John Oakes and
George Marshall and Ernest Griffith
and Harvey Broome and on the right,
Eddy Hilliard from Denver.
They were a great bunch of folks to associate with.
Here our Executive Director
Stewart Brandborg with Harvey Broome and Eddy Hilliard.
Bess, change the slide, there we are.
Brandy on the left.
I think that was the superintendent of Canyonlands Park.
Then there's Harvey Broome
from Knoxville and Ed Hilliard.
They both died in 1970,
Harvey of a heart attack and Ed in
a mountain climbing accident. It was really tragic.
Lower right there's my buddy Clif Merritt and
my late wife Gladys and
Brandborg up at Baxter State Park in Maine.
Sig Olson of Ely, Minnesota.
The great defender of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area was
the stalwart Wilderness Society board member and
here is Sig with Gladys and Ernest Oberholtzer,
we called him Ober.
The guy on your right and he canoed all over the
Voyager country and with
the Indians back in the day.
The lower-left picture has Brandborg and Griffith
and Ober and Harvey Broome and Sig Olson.
Other figures I had
the pleasure to work with at this time was
Ernie Dickerman shown awaiting
a ferry boat to Cumberland Island, Georgia.
We hitchhiked over there and talked with
the Carnegie family who were in the process
of deciding whether to sell
Cumberland Island to the National Park Service,
which they eventually did
and it became a Wilderness area.
Ernie became a legend,
particularly in Western Virginia
with the Virginia Wilderness Committee.
Then on the right, Mardy Murie,
outside her home in Teton, Wyoming.
The first national forest primitive area to be
reclassified by Congress is the Statutory Wilderness.
The first addition to
the original or instant Wilderness system
was the San Rafael Wilderness
near Santa Barbara, California.
I met with local conservationists
there and helped draft a lobby for
the citizens' proposal and
win congressional approval of this legislation.
In 2018, I had the pleasure of
speaking in Santa Barbara to
the Los Padres Forest Watch group
on the 50th anniversary of the signing
of this landmark legislation into law.
Back East, my primary work region,
I helped to found
the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy,
that won wilderness status
for several backcountry areas on
the Monongahela National Forest and
the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy is still
going strong 53 years later.
One great example of
Wilderness Society staff fieldwork was
helping the North Jersey Conservation Foundation and
the New Jersey Audubon Society gain wilderness status for
the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge
near Morristown, New Jersey.
It became the first Department of the Interior property
to be included in
the National Wilderness Preservation System.
Every previously classified wilderness was in
a national forest administered
by the Department of Agriculture.
Mrs. Helen Fenske of Chatham Township, New Jersey,
called the Wilderness Society to ask for help to provide
the new Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge
with Wilderness status and protection and I responded,
that was my territory.
I helped local activists develop
their citizens' wilderness proposal for Great Swamp.
Stewart Brandborg and House Interior Committee
Chairman Wayne Aspinall had
some testy discussions regarding how and why
this little Eastern wetland should be
a unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System.
I helped the New Jersey folks lobby members of
the congressional committees who
considered and approved the legislation.
Helen Fenske and her friends had raised
enough money to buy the private land in the Great Swamp
and had gotten the Department of the Interior to agree to
accept the gift of the land as a wildlife refuge.
Then they realized that this refuge status
created by administrative action was not sufficient to
assure that the land could
not be transferred from Interior to
the Federal Aviation Administration for
an airport as state officials favored.
Statutory wilderness status
could provide permanent protection.
I spent several months working on
this project with Mrs.
Fenske and Congressman Peter Frelinghuysen.
His obituary, the congressman's obituary to show you how
important the folks in his district
thought this wilderness issue was, begins
"Peter HB Frelinghuysen junior,
one in a long line of family members to
represent New Jersey in Congress and
a leader in the successful fight to block an airport
proposed for the state's
Great Swamp Wildlife area, died, etc, etc. "
The first line of his obituary takes credit
for a Wilderness area at Great Swamp.
Helen Fenske called me repeatedly on
my home phone at all hours to
the point where my wife would pick up the phone
and say to me in an exasperated tone,
"It's that woman again."
Helen combined the energies of
the New Jersey Audubon Society and
many others state-level and local conservation groups
as well as educators,
concerned landowners, and area residents to
create an effective political force.
The House Interior Committee hearing on
the Great Swamp Wilderness was attended by dozens
of supportive witnesses from
major business corporations
and colleges and universities.
Crusty old chairman Wayne Aspinall of Colorado
clearly was surprised at
all the business community support,
as well as the broad support for Wilderness status for
such a small area in such an urbanized location.
Great Swamp was the first wilderness to
involve the closing of roads and
the removal of structures and utility lines to
allow nature to recover on the site.
Wilderness Staff President of
the House hearing on the Great Swap included Doug Scott.
This picture of me with Doug was taken in Seattle
just a few years ago when he
was with the Pew wilderness programs.
But he was essentially
my understudy at the Wilderness Society.
As many of you know he became head of
federal programs for the Sierra Club
for a long time and then
joined the Pew Wilderness Program.
We treasure our memory of
that Great Swamp hearing because
it set the precedent value for all our good work.
The first refuge wilderness.
The first wilderness of less than 5,000 acres.
The first wilderness to require so much restoration
of previously cleared land and construction.
It was the only spot of green other than
Central Park that you can see
from the Empire State Building.
As the Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service,
John Gottschalk was presenting
the Great Swamp Wilderness proposal.
Chairman Aspinall asked, "What's that?"
Waving at a white line excluded
from the proposed area and dividing it in half.
"That," replied the director,
"is the Meyer's Hill Road."
"Well", said the Chairman,
"I don't think you could have that."
At which point a man in the audience jumped up and said,
"Mr. Chairman if you don't
want that road, consider it gone."
He was a local selectman.
Terrific. The bill went to
the President's desk and was signed into law.
What was the local response to the designation?
One hundred percent positive.
There was a community-wide sigh of relief that
the so-called jet port was
not going to be built in their collective backyard.
Some 30 schools in the vicinity have
a place to conduct outdoor science education classes.
In September of 2018,
a ceremony to celebrate
the 50th anniversary of
the signing of the Wilderness Act
took place at Great Swamp,
and Secretary of the Interior,
Sally Jewel was the keynote speaker.
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson
signed the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.
My Wilderness Society colleague,
Harry Crandell, there on the right,
and I found ourselves in
the receiving line to
shake the president's hand afterward.
During the late 1960s,
many wilderness proposals were
being processed by the agencies,
conservation groups and committees of Congress.
Proposals came in for other refuges,
as well as nationals parks
and national forest roadless areas,
such as the Okefenokee refuge in Georgia,
Great Smokies National Park in
North Carolina and Tennessee,
which is still pending.
We still don't have a designated wilderness
in Smokies Park,
unfortunately, thanks to Jesse Helms and his successors.
Areas in the Ozarks in Mississippi.
Rich whole back-country in
the George Washington Forest in Virginia.
In the Northeast, I worked with local folks.
on wilderness proposal for the Moosehorn Refuge
in Northern Maine and
Monomoy Island on the elbow of
Cape Cod in Massachusetts, among others.
But deciding in 1969 that it would be
a good idea to have more formal education,
I resigned my Wilderness Society position and attended
grad school in the Department of Resource Development
at Michigan State University.
My PhD degree was awarded in June 1972 and I became
an Assistant Professor of Resource Development
and the Michigan Cooperative Extension Services,
Extension Specialist for Natural Resources.
Then when the former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter
was elected in 1976,
he delegated the task of recommending candidates
for the presidentially appointed positions,
that involved the natural environment,
to his friends on the Conservationists for
Carter Group in Atlanta and to the Sierra Club.
One of those positions was Assistant Secretary for
Conservation Research and Education
in the Department of Agriculture,
and the Forest Service fell under that person's purview.
Now, my first indication that I'd be
considered for that position came by
way of a call from
the Sierra Club leader in January of 1977.
I met Minnesota congressman Bob Berglan,
President Carter's nominee for Secretary of Agriculture.
Mr. Berglan said he'd call me in
a few days and a few days later,
he did call me to tell me I was his choice to
become the Assistant Secretary for
Conservation Research and Education,
that later was changed to
Assistant Secretary for
Natural Resources and Environment.
Between the time I moved into my office in
the Department of Agriculture and my
confirmation hearing by
the Senate Agriculture Committee,
which was kind of touch and go,
the agribusiness community wasn't
too enthusiastic about my nomination.
I was summoned to a meeting at
O'Hare Airport by wood products industry executives,
who grilled me on my views on national forest management.
They asked me where wood for
their mills was going to come from given
the litigation and administrative appeals
that had prevented many national forest timber sales.
I promised to address their concerns,
and I did so by eventually initiating
a nationwide program called
the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation, or RARE II.
It ran all the National Forest Roadless areas
through a process that compared
wilderness attributes with
opportunity costs of each area.
Bess, next slide.
I'd say my main contribution to
forestry policy was RARE II.
During a congressional hearing,
it showed the Forest Service to be
without good data on its roadless areas.
I directed Chief John McGuire to have
the Forest Service inventory every such area
in the entire National Forest System,
including Alaska and the Eastern forest,
which had not been inventoried in
the previous study called RARE I.
They used two scales,
WARS, Wilderness Attribute Rating System,
and DORS or Development Opportunity Rating System,
to evaluate and prioritize
each such area from Puerto Rico to Alaska.
Of the 62 million acres
of roadless areas found and evaluated,
the RARE II process recommended
15.4 million acres to be classified as wilderness.
Some of this land in
the Eastern national forests over
the course of time on a state-by-state basis.
Most of the RARE II recommendations
have been implemented by Congress.
The RARE II inventory of roadless areas
remains a work agenda
for wilderness groups across the country.
I'm proud of that. It's still,
in effect, a work in progress.
I nominated Max Peterson to
succeed John McGuire as Forest Service Chief.
There's Max and his wife.
Max is right on the left,
and Zane Smith, there with Max Peterson and his wife.
Zane headed the RARE II staff,
and Pete Sorenson was
my confidential assistant during that time.
There's Pete on the lower right.
Pete and I remember so well,
his holding up these signs in the back
of the auditorium saying,
"Time to go" when
the questions got too
hot and I didn't know how to answer them,
and he would say, "I'm sorry,
we have to get to our next appointment."
I can't let this time period go
by without mentioning the drafting and passage
with the leadership of President Jimmy Carter
of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act,
or ANILCA, which protected
about 100 million acres of
wilderness and parks in Alaska.
I participated in the White House team that drafted it.
I testified before Congressional committees with
Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus
in support of the passage of that law.
Now, you see to my left
is this same guy that's in this slide,
to my right here, Bob Herbst,
about 40 years later.
Bob Herbst was the Assistant Secretary
of the Interior for
Fish Wildlife and Parks when I was
Assistant Secretary of Agriculture
for the Forest Service.
Bob and I and his wife and my wife saw a lot of
each other and we still keep in touch.
If Fritz Mondale had become president,
Bob Herbst probably would have
become Secretary of the Interior.
I think that was the understanding that they had.
I escaped from my USDA office
in Washington from time to time,
including a horse backpack trip
into the Elkhorn Mountains near Helena,
Montana with my buddy
Clif Meritt from my Wilderness Society days.
Clif was a great friend.
Now, Doug Scott, [LAUGHTER] Chuck Clusen,
and Tom Barlow were
among friends who saw me off at the party
to bid me farewell from
the Department of Agriculture in August of 1980.
I guess we were feeling
no pain at that time. It looks that way.
After those days with
the Wilderness Society and the Department of Agriculture,
I became the Senior Vice President
of the National Audubon Society,
and then President of Defenders of Wildlife.
At Audubon, I worked with
President Russ Peterson, and
internationally known birder and author,
Roger Tory Peterson on the left.
Tiring of the Washington scene,
I moved to slower paced and comfortable Roanoke,
Virginia, where I've been
the founding executive director of
an outdoor living history park
and a regional land trust
and a member of the city council.
Since we're speaking of the Rupert Cutler papers,
I should let you know that
four years worth of my papers are in
the Jimmy Carter Presidential
Library Archives in Atlanta,
the years that I was in the Carter administration.
Early in the Trump administration,
the former assistant and
undersecretaries of Agriculture for
Natural Resources and Environment had dinner
together with the new man.
This was in 2017.
The Trump appointee, Jim Hubbard of Colorado,
he's in the middle of this picture.
No longer undersecretary.
It was fun to get together with all of my successors.
I was oldest in point of
time and you probably recognize many of these gentlemen.
Today, my wife, Brenda and I live in
a high-rise condo in Downtown Roanoke,
Virginia, and enjoy retirement.
I've had an enjoyable career that began and is ending
with efforts to protect
wildlife and the natural environment.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Rupe, for that lovely presentation.