Remembering Edgar Wayburn, famed advocate for Alaska wilderness

From the New York Times obituary: In announcing his death, the Sierra Club called Dr. Wayburn "the 20th-century John Muir," referring to its founder, who preserved the Yosemite Valley.

When President Bill Clinton awarded Dr. Wayburn the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999, he said Dr. Wayburn had "saved more of our wilderness than any other person alive."

Dr. Wayburn had central roles in protecting 104 million acres of Alaskan wilderness; establishing and enlarging Redwood National Park and Point Reyes National Seashore in California; and starting the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in and around San Francisco.

His methods were the old-fashioned ones of writing letters, raising money, commenting on environmental studies and attending public hearings. He was widely respected for the authority and persistence he brought to lobbying public officials, always softly, with a courtly Georgia accent.

Here's a 1988 profile of Wayburn by Craig Medred, the Daily News outdoors editor at the time.

Dr. Edgar Wayburn is 82 years old now, and he has spent more than 40 years charging windmills. He fought the damming of the Colorado River and won a partial victory. He fought to save the last giant redwoods of California and won a partial victory. He fought to bring national parks to Alaska and won a partial victory.

And always he has been losing the war.

Nobody needs to tell this to the patriarch of the Sierra Club. He knows. He lives in California where he can watch the seemingly unstoppable crush of humanity rolling across the countryside like a wave of lemmings charging toward the sea.

He remembers how his boyhood home in Georgia once sat on the edge of what could have been considered wilderness, and how that wilderness gave way to development.

The passage of time aged Wayburn into a whitehaired old man with a scruffy beard, but it aged the lands he loved even more. Across the breadth of America, the country changed from wilderness to frontier to subdivision to city. Vast stretches have now been paved over, and even where there is no pavement the land has been conquered.

Wayburn has fought long and hard to try to stop it. He is a man who has sometimes stood between the last vestiges of wild America and the blades of the bulldozers. He has lost more acres than he has won in this battle, but he has never given up.

He still walks with a bounce to his step, still talks about the environmental movement with passion and intelligence, still holds to the hope that mankind will recognize the limits of the ecosystem before it is too late.

We sat and talked about these things for a long time on Tuesday. It was a sunny day, and from the office where we sat, we could look out on the new homes and the roads rolling back into the foothills of the Chugach Mountains that were still wild when Wayburn first visited here 20 years ago.

Anchorage had no glass towers of commerce then. The Hillside was still country. The frontier started only a few miles out of town.

Oil and progress changed all that. The city grew and the frontier moved farther and farther away. It used to be that an Anchorage resident could drive to the frontier in a hour or less. Now you have to drive for hours and hike for more, or get in a plane and fly.

Men and women like Wayburn have tried to stop that change. For this, they have been labeled enemies of progress, as if development and progress were one and the same.

Wayburn's Sierra Club has been a particular target of animosity in Alaska. From the days of the bumper stickers threatening "Sierra Clubbers Kiss My Ax" to the present, the environmentalists rallying around Wayburn and his cause have been called every conceiveable name, some printable, most of them not.

And the sad thing is that Wayburn never really wanted anything very different from what the average Alaskan probably wants.

This man is no evil ogre. He is no self-serving elitist who wants to turn Alaska into a private playground with no concern as to whether it leaves Alaskans bankrupt or suffering.

What Wayburn wants is to hang onto a little piece of what American once was, to preserve for future generations the wild lands that can challenge the body and the spirit. The 82-year-old physician is himself is a testament to the value of such lands.

Years of stomping around the mountains and backcountry have kept him fit. He has grown hard of hearing, but is otherwise a testament to good health. He still hikes and backpacks. His stop here came on the way to a raft trip down the Fortymile River in the Interior.

Wayburn's active life makes Rep. Don Young look like a fool when he claims, as he has repeatedly, that Alaska wilderness locks out all but the young and strong.

If an 82-year-old man can go out and enjoy that wilderness learn and grown from it, as Wayburn would say who can't? Is wilderness really a "lockup" of Alaska's lands, or is this old greenie simply that much more of a man than Don Young?

Must recreation, like everything else, come easy? Is the ultimate pleasure to do nothing but sit like a vegetable while a piece of machinery ferries your carcass across the landscape?

Wayburn and I talked about these sort of things for a long time. We talked about the malaise of easy living that has settled over America, about why so many Americans prefer the easiest way in everything, about how they seem unwilling or unable to make minor sacrifices today for the good of tomorrow, about how they respond better to crisis than to reason.

We talked about the continuing swell of world population that threatens to overrun large parts of the globe, and the senseless, headlong waste of nonrenewable resources, and the huge changes Alaska has seen in the past two decades.

It was one of those depressing conversations destined to leave you questioning the wisdom of mankind. But not Wayburn. He could point to the tiniest changes in attitudes and extrapolate them into broad hopes for the future.

He was, he confessed, the eternal optimist.

When at last we parted, I went back to a desk to darkly ponder whether the human race is capable of the long-term vision and commitment needed to deal with the interrelated problems of population, pollution and climatic change.

And Edgar Wayburn ran away to the Fortymile to recharge himself with the wilderness, to get ready to charge another windmill.