Isle Royale Wilderness: A Silver Anniversary

 

Twenty-five years ago this October, President Gerald Ford signed a bill protecting most of Isle Royale National Park as wilderness. The work of dozens of Michigan men and women sent the bill to the desk of the only Michigan man to serve as President of the United States, assuring the crown jewel of Lake Superior would be permanently protected.

One of the activists was Doug Scott, later a national executive of both the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. But in 1967, when the battle to protect Isle Royale Wilderness began, Scott was a student in the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources. A native of Oregon, he had spent a week of the previous summer on the island with forestry professor Grant Sharpe.

"As a westerner who had felt deprived in the flat, urban immensity of the greater Detroit/Ann Arbor area, Isle Royale was a revelation to me - an 'eastern' area of incredible wilderness quality," Scott later remembered. "I fell in love with the wildness of the place, enhanced so greatly by its insular qualities and by the much-studied wolf-moose ecology, including my face-to-face encounter with a bull moose on the trail up from Siskiwit Lake."

Scott was disturbed in early 1967 to learn that the National Park Service had proposed a wilderness plan that failed to protect vital wild lands, including large swaths around visitor use areas Washington Harbor/Windego and at Moskey Basin/Rock Harbor, where future increments of park development could most easily eat away at the park's superb wilderness atmosphere. While tapping out his letter of protest in a U of M office, Scott was invited to join other downstate conservationists on a charter flight to Houghton, where the Park Service had scheduled its only hearing on the plan. Also on the plane were Rupert Cutler, the Assistant Executive Director of the Wilderness Society, Olga Madar, head of the United Auto Workers Conservation Department, and parks advocate Genevieve Gillette in urging wilderness protection for an additional 12,000 acres. A main concern was Park Service exclusion of large stretches of fragile, wild shorelines, including Siskiwit Bay, Malone Bay, and the entire peninsula between Tobin Harbor and Duncan Bay.

Chastened by the opposition and distracted by other priorities, the Park Service took its plan back to the drawing board. The proposal resurfaced in April 1971, when President Richard M. Nixon proposed wilderness designation for 120,588 acres of the island, 120,588 acres of the 134,000-acre island, making few improvements over their preliminary proposal and introducing several small but dangerous new exclusions. Again, the Park Service had employed a pinched interpretation of the Wilderness Act, angering advocates.

By now, Scott had gone on to Scott had gone on to The Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C., where he continued to lobby for Isle Royale wilderness protection. An on-the-ground lobby in the Upper Peninsula that included activists Barbara Clark, Bob and Peg Hansen, and Tom Bailey joined Scott and downstate environmental groups in calling for designation of 132,700 acres of wilderness on the island. The new Northern Michigan Wilderness Coalition helped organize letter-writing campaigns and meetings to demonstrate Upper Peninsula support for the wilderness designation.

Bailey, a high school student at the time and now the executive director of the Little Traverse Conservancy, remembered hearing Scott and Walt Pomeroy of the Michigan Student Environmental Confederation at a Marquette organizing meeting in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

"Doug delivered one of the most powerful and spellbinding presentations I had ever witnessed," Bailey said. "He talked about the need for change in the way we approach issues like wilderness designation for Isle Royale National Park. He talked about how individual citizens could get involved in that process, and he talked about how we can truly make a difference in the outcomes of state and federal land management programs."

Although northern Michigan legislators have often opposed wilderness legislation, U.S. Representative Philip Ruppe, a Republican, was open to the ideas of the conservationists and ultimately supported an expanded proposal. His legislative aide, Paul Hillegonds - later the Speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives - worked with them and with recreational boat owners who feared wilderness designation would prevent them from landing on key parts of the island and would require removal of existing docks. Behind the scenes, Park Superintendent Hugh Beattie quietly lobbied for expanded wilderness and was essential to the success of the effort, both Scott and Bailey said.

At the tender age of 17, Bailey flew to Washington in 1972 to testify before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on the bill. The hearing proved critical, for at it, subcommittee chair Senator Frank Church challenged the Park Service for its failure to implement the 1964 Wilderness Act as Congress had intended. Shortly afterward, Interior Assistant Secretary Nathaniel Reed ordered changes in the Park Service policy toward wilderness designations for parkland, helping clear the way for a revised Isle Royale bill.

Although obstacles remained, the support of home-district Congressman Ruppe and U.S. Senator Phil Hart of Michigan helped prepare the bill for its ultimate passage as part of an omnibus bill on the last day of the 1976 Congressional session. Ruppe rose on the House floor to say, "The preservation of Isle Royale is important to the people of northern Michigan. The measure before the House this afternoon guarantees that this beautiful island will be maintained for the pleasure and enjoyment of future generations." Ruppe also pointed out that the bill did not interfere with reasonable access by boaters. Today, 132,018 acres - more than 98.5% of the land of Isle Royale National Park - is preserved by law as wilderness, the strongest land protection our laws provide

When President Ford signed the bill on October 20, 1976, it was a milestone not only for the island, but also for democracy. Scott says it remains "a case-study in effective citizen advocacy, with the local leaders in the U.P. doing exactly the kind of grassroots organizing and action that is the key to conservation effectiveness." Bailey said Scott "had been right. Citizens can make a difference. In all the years since those days, I have never forgotten his inspiring speech, his passion for citizen activism, and his political ability."