The founding of the Wilderness Society in 1935 marked the beginning of organized wilderness advocacy in the United States. Conventional wisdom had long been that federal foresters opposed setting preserving wilderness areas, and yet four of the eight founders of the Wilderness Society (Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, Benton MacKaye, and Bernard Frank) were trained foresters who valued both wilderness protection and sustained-yield forestry. Their efforts to fight the intrusion of automobiles and roads into wild areas led them to form the Wilderness Society. How are we to make sense of these apparent paradoxes?

Join Paul Sutter, a professor of environmental history at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (2002), will explore this and more in his talk. Paul is also an FHS board member.

Date/Time June 10 at 12:00 p.m. (EDT)

Virtual via Zoom

To register, visit https://foresthistory.org/events/.