ers Ue bO Nt BU Lele TT PN 17 
The Champion of Wilderness Is Gone — Howard Zahniser, Executive 
Director and Editor of the Wilderness Society, died suddenly on May 5, 
1964. Although he had suffered from a heart condition for several years, 
he had carried on a strenuous schedule of wilderness preservation work to 
the very end. He was 58. Mr. Zahniser was the chief designer of the pro- 
posal for a national wilderness system and had fought for the bill for 
over a decade at Congressional hearings, by his speeches, and in articles. 
The Wilderness Bill, when it is finally enacted, will be a monument to 
his memory. 
The House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee held hearings on 
the bill in June and it is assumed that, once the Civil Rights Bill is voted 
upon, the Wilderness Bill and other conservation measures will come up 
for consideration. The so-called Dingell-Administration Bill is recom- 
mended by national conservation groups. Letters to your Representative 
in the House are needed now. 
Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore — we have said little about this 
measure in recent issues of THE AUDUBON BULLETIN, not from lack of 
interest on our part, but because the Civil Rights filibuster has delayed all 
outdoors legislation. Now that the log-jam has broken, the Senate version 
of the Indiana Dunes Lakeshore bill, S. 2249, seems on its way to passage. 
Hearings were completed on March 7. Our own Senator Paul Douglas, 
Senators Birch Bayh and Vance Hartke of Indiana, Senator Henry Jack- 
son, Chairman of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, and many 
other senators sponsored the bill. In its present form, the bill would set 
aside 11,732 acres of the finest dunes as a National Lakeshore. While the 
devastation wrought by the Bethlehem Steel and Midwest Steel Companies 
on their properties cannot be undone, great stretches of inland dunes and 
two splendid bathing beaches will be preserved. Indiana Dunes State 
Park will be part of the new Lakeshore. Everyone but the renegade 
Congressman Halleck of Indiana now supports dunes preservation. 
Passage by the Senate will not mean that victory has been won. The 
Save-the-Dunes Council says that the next strategy is to pave the way for 
the House Bill, HR 8927, supported by Secretary of the Interior Udall. 
Here, again. letters to your local congressman, c/o The House Office Build- 
ing, Washington 25, D. C., will be of immense value. 
“Soft” Detergent Available at Last — One of the most vexing problems 
for conservationists and Clean Streams Committees has been the popularity 
of chemical detergents. On the Illinois and other Midwestern rivers, great 
clouds of soapy foam billow up below dams and waterfalls, indicating con- 
tamination by a slippery, stubborn chemical. Ordinary detergents are not 
BIO-DEGRADABLE — that is. they are not broken down by bacterial 
action in streams and lakes, and they cannot be eliminated in sewage 
plants or septic fields. ‘“Hard’’ detergents are polluting rivers, poisoning 
the soil, even getting into underground water supplies. 
The big soap companies, alarmed by the problem, have developed 
“soft” chemicals which are BIO-DEGRADABLE — will break down into 
harmless compounds in surface waters. State laws have been passed (and 
more are coming) requiring that all detergents must be bio-degradable by 
a certain date. The big, unwieldy chemical plants of the large soap 
manufacturers are being converted to the “soft” chemical process, but the 
change-over will not be complete before December 31, 1965. 
A small soap manufacturer, Sunny Products Company of Logansport, 
Ind., has already come out with SUNNY-SOFT, a true bio-degradable 
detergent. Early registrants at the I. A. S. Annual Meeting in Joliet were 
