ship shApe 187
lion acres of National Forest land in Washington State under the umbrella
of the Wilderness Act. As chairman of the Interior Committee, Scoop had
shepherded the act through the Senate in 1964. Tom Pelly, a Republican
from Seattle, was one of its champions in the House. The act set aside 9.1
million acres across the nation—land “where the earth and its commu-
nity of life are untrammeled by man; where man himself is a visitor who
does not remain.”
With another 52 million acres designated for further consideration,
what remains to this day is the contentiousness of deciding which road-
less tracts should stay open to logging, mining and grazing and which
merit protection from encroaching urbanization. The Roadless Area Re-
view & Evaluation process—“RARE”—rarely failed to provoke contro-
versy. Timber companies, oil and gas interests, miners and ranchers, off-
roaders and snowmobilers squared off with conservationists. One critic
lamented that environmentalists had gained control of the debate over
public-lands policy, parlaying the Wilderness Act “into a vehicle for in-
definite expansion of a system of ecological museums—and few in Con-
gress seem to mind.... [S]omething far more potent than an unadorned
conservation ethic is at work, with more serious implications. That some-
thing is partly a romance, partly a morality play. The romance is with the
notion that land is sacred to the degree it escapes human touch. The mo-
rality play involves the conviction that economic pursuits are vulgar.”^13
Gorton is of the strong conviction that economic pursuits are not vul-
gar. Loggers, miners and irrigators loved having him in their corner. To
Earth First!, the environmental equivalent of the Viet Cong, he was the
enemy incarnate. Pragmatic environmentalists, however, welcomed Gor-
ton warily as a collaborator whenever the planets were in alignment and
concede that he helped them achieve some major victories. One is the
Washington State Wilderness Act of 1984.
Led by Senator Evans, a hiker since boyhood, the Washington delega-
tion produced a bipartisan plan that protected a million acres—a com-
promise, to be sure, and one that hardly ended the debate, but a victory
nevertheless for earth and man. Evans, Pritchard and Lowry, who found
common cause as conservationists, wanted more; Gorton and Spokane
Democrat Tom Foley less. Sid Morrison, the Republican congressman
from the Yakima Valley, helped broker a pivotal compromise for Eastern
Washington. “[A]fter five intense hours, the delegation emerged from
Foley’s office, arm-in-arm and smiling.”
Evans and Gorton pushed the bill through the Senate. Scoop, sadly,
wasn’t there to help celebrate its passage on the Third of July. The bulk of