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For Lee
Elected to Congress in 1954 as a liberal Democrat from an increasingly conservative part of the country, he found in Washington a “big tent on the environment” and became rightly celebrated as a visionary statesman of the modern conservation movement. His legacy as Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to ‘69 is marked by such accomplishments as the creation of four national parks, six national monuments, eight seashores and lakeshores, twenty historic sites and fifty wildlife refuges. He changed the way we think about conservation and the value of public land by freeing us from the idea that it’s only purpose lay in what could be extracted from it.
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He got his answer the following year when President James Monroe wrote: “The hunter or savage state requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life . . . and must yield to it.”
There was a continent to be redeemed from the wilderness, and the Indians’ way of life had to be sacrificed. Thus the policy of forced removal was established, and the Five Civilized Tribes were sent, with scant civility and, in the end, scant humanity, on a thousand-mile “trail of tears” to Oklahoma.
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