THE WILDERNEvSS AND ITS PLACE IN FOREST 

 RECREATIONAL POLICY 



By Aldo Leopold 



U. S. Forest Service 



When the National Forests were created the first argument of those 

 opposing a national forest policy was that the forests would remain a 

 wilderness. Gififord Pinchot replied that on the contrary they would 

 be opened up and developed as producing forests, and that such devel- 

 opment would, in the long run, itself constitute the best assurance 

 that they would neither remain a wilderness by "bottling up" their 

 resources nor become one through devastation. At this time Pinchot 

 enunciated the doctrine of "highest use," and its criterion, "the greatest 

 good to the greatest number," which is and must remain the guiding 

 principle by which democracies handle their natural resources. 



Pinchot's promise of development has been made good. The process 

 must, of course, continue indefinitely. But it has already gone far 

 enough to raise the question of whether the policy of development 

 (construed in the narrower sense of industrial development) should 

 continue to govern in absolutely every instance, or whether the prin- 

 ciple of highest use does not itself demand that representative por- 

 tions of some forests be preserved as wilderness. 



That some such question actually exists, both in the minds of so:ne 

 foresters and of part of the public, seems to me to be plainly implied 

 in the recent trend of recreational use policies and in the tone of sport- 

 ing and outdoor magazines. Recreational plans are leaning toward 

 the segregation of certain areas from certain developments, so that 

 having been led into the wilderness, the people may have some wilder- 

 ness left to enjoy. Sporting magazines are groping toward some logi- 

 cal reconciliation between getting back to nature and preserving a little 

 nature to get back to. Lamentations over this or that favorite vaca- 

 tion ground being "spoiled by tourists" are becoming more and more 

 frequent. Very evidently we have here the old conflict between pres- 

 ervation and use, long since an issue with respect to tinber, water 

 power, and other purely economic resources, but just now coming to 

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