Arthur Carhart: Wilderness Prophet

by Tom Wolf

Arthur Carhart (1892 -1978), America's first champion of wilderness, the first Forest Service landscape architect, and the most popular conservation writer of mid-century America, won none of the titan status of his contemporary Aldo Leopold. A political maverick, he refused to side with any major advocacy group and none has made him its saint. Carhart was a grassroots thinker in a top-down era. Arthur Carhart , the first biography of this Republican environmentalist and major American thinker, writer, and activist, reveals the currency of his ideas. Tom Wolf elucidates Carhart 's vision of conservation as "a job for all of us," with citizens, municipal authorities, and national leaders all responsible for the environmental effects of their decisions. Carhart loved the local and decried interest groups - from stockmens' associations to wilderness lobbies - as cliques attempting blanket control. He pressured land management agencies to base decisions on local ecology and local partnerships. A lifelong wilderness advocate who proposed the first wilderness preserve at Trappers Lake, Colorado, in 1919, Carhart chose to oppose the Wilderness Act, heartsick at its compromises with lobbies. Because he shifted his stance and changed his views in response to new information, Carhart is not an easy subject for a biography. Wolf traces Carhart's twists and turns to show a man whose voice was distinctive and contrary, who spoke from a passionate concern for the land and couldn't be counted on for anything else. Readers of American history and outdoor writing will enjoy this portrait of a historic era in conservation politics and the man who so often eschewed politics in favor of the land and people he loved.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 2008

Reviews

[Rachel Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Flat Tops Wilderness Area in Northwest Colorado is one of my favorite places on earth, a gorgeous landscape with wildflowers, trees, rock faces, plateaus, lakes and subalpine tundras. Every time I hike there I experience, despite my complete lack of spirituality, a sense of something beyond myself, a grand admiration for the remoteness and a feeling of belonging and connectedness. It's hard to explain unless you've been there or to a similar wilderness site in the west. Ever since I learned a few years ago about Arthur Carhart's involvement in keeping the Flat Tops wild, I'd been wanting to learn more about who he was as a person, a Forest Service landscape architect and a conservation activist; ever since I learned about him, I can't help but think about him when I've been to Trappers Lake.

Carhart was a young, ambitious, stubborn, determined man when he was assigned to survey Trappers Lake in the late summer of 1919. His superiors in the Forest Service sent him to determine the best place and method for installing a road all the way around the lake, for auto-tourism and so summer cabins, commercial sites and a marina could be built. As biographer Tom Wolf writes: "No one has ever completely succeeded in understanding what happened to him there." But something spiritual did happen to Carhart there, whether in the form of some apocryphal storytelling from old trappers and fishermen or not, and Carhart returned to his work with a newfound appreciation for wilderness and a commitment to keeping Trappers Lake pristine and undeveloped.

The legacy of Arthur Carhart seems to stop there in many retellings of this story, but as it turns out Carhart was not the conservation hero people necessarily want him to be. Yes, he was instrumental in changing the way people thought about Trappers Lake in particular, and other recreation sites such as the San Isabel forest and Superior in northern Minnesota. But Carhart soon became disillusioned with the "burocracy" and lack of progress in the Forest Service, and that mindset became a theme for his whole life, entering jobs with high hopes, partnering with outdoor-minded organizations, only to become disappointed when change was slow to happen or when politics got in the way of the ways he wanted to combine wilderness with recreation. And this seems to be theme of both Carhart's life and of Wolf's interpretation of it: Carhart was always a middle-of-the-road populist, wanting nothing to do with politics, able to see nuance and opinions from multiple sides, the common man who only wanted the best recreation opportunities for the American people and screw special interests and federal bureaucracy.

As a biography, I found Wolf's book to be an immensely helpful insight into Carhart's life, considering not much exists elsewhere in this much detail—lots of nature-related websites have info about him, but only the barebones that I mentioned in the paragraph above. So Wolf's detail was fascinating and surprisingly readable about all of Carhart's career changes and huge amount of correspondence detailing his opinions on federal recreation related issues, especially with rivalries between the Forest Service and the Park Service. At times, though, I found it too detailed, with Wolf presumably wanting to supply the reader with every bit of information about key players (who I felt like I was supposed to already know about) and agency names and private companies and even genealogical histories. The timeline jumped around a lot too, and it got especially confusing when Wolf would bring up something that happened to Carhart later in his life, but then would revert back to the 1920s and 30s in the height of Carhart's landscape architect career. The book felt more like a straight listing of events that happened and a reprinting of letters from those events, rather than a cohesive and compelling biography about Carhart's life. I understand that some details are unknown for various reasons, but it's clear that Carhart was a prolific writer in more ways than one, and lots of his correspondence does remain—I would guess that more personal, more opininated, and less clinical material exists that Wolf didn't use. (I do appreciate Wolf's footnote in one chapter, though: "“I quote long passages to give readers direct access to Carhart’s words about wilderness. Many of these sources are out of print or inaccessible. They appear here as a convenience to ordinary readers who may wish to ponder the original texts.”)

So while I do feel like I learned a ton about Carhart's life, politics and goals in the recreation industry, I also feel like I learned nothing at all because the book didn't give me a helpful glimpse into a full portrait of Carhart as a human being, beyond the letters to and from his superiors and work colleagues. Something felt missing in this biography, and I think Carhart's life could be written about better by someone else, if only they could sift through all the correspondence and information too.