This is a perfectly characteristic picture of Clif Merritt, out in the field (here, in Montana) working to help prepare a citizen proposal for protection of a wilderness area.
Clif, now 89, played a central role in shaping the modern wilderness movement in the crucial years following the enactment of the Wilderness Act in 1964. In recognition of that role, The Wilderness Society last month presented Clif with its highest honor, the Bob Marshall Award. "Through your remarkable career," said Brenda Davis, chair of the Society's Governing Council, "you have done much to advance [Bob Marshall's] vision of enduring wilderness and a movement to make it real."
When the Wilderness Act became law, it opened the promise of lasting, statutory protection for wilderness areas. Obtaining that protection for each additional area within our federal lands would require approval by Congress. The new law instructed the federal land managing agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service to conduct literally hundreds of studies of potential wilderness areas on a ten-year schedule, each study leading to a presidential recommendation to Congress.
The challenge to the wilderness movement was immense. Leaders of the national organizations addressed to this work, notably The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club, recognized the need to quickly build a true grassroots movement, decentralizing their efforts and enlisting people in every state, drawing together coalitions of citizen organizations.
Clif Merritt had been a long-experienced outdoorsman in his native Montana, where he had helped found the Montana Wilderness Association in 1958. In 1964, Clif was hired by the executive director of The Wilderness Society, Stewart Brandborg, to focus on the grassroots organizing challenge from the Society's new Western Field Office which he established in Denver.
In many cases, the federal agencies chose not to recommend important wild lands that local citizen groups felt should be protected as wilderness. Clif helped citizen groups across the West develop their own proposals, coaching them to conduct their own field work, giving them a high degree of credibility when it became necessary to challenge agency recommendations. One highlight was the citizen challenge — including in a precedent-setting lawsuit — that blocked Forest Service plans to exclude the East Meadow Creek area on the fallacious argument that evidence of some past logging and old roads disqualified the area from even being considered. Thanks to a sustained citizen campaign, this entire area is now part of the congressionally-designated Eagles Nest Wilderness in Colorado.
Even as so much work was needed to respond to these agency studies, Clif's was a leading voice calling attention to the far larger area of roadless federal lands not directly addressed in the Wilderness Act — the de facto wilderness (now commonly referred to as "roadless areas") on federal lands administered by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Clif took a central role in helping citizen groups appeal to their own congressional delegations to apply the protection offered by the Wilderness Act to these areas, often in the face of threats of road-building and development. Thanks to a classic grassroots campaign in which Clif was intimately involved, the first citizen-initiated wilderness area was protected by an act of Congress in 1972 — the 240,000-acre Scapegoat Wilderness in Montana.
To most effectively build the wilderness movement across the West, Clif recruited and led a talented corps of professional organizers. At a time when staff support for volunteer activists was far more limited than today, these organizers helped shape many state and local citizen organizations now effectively working for wilderness. While the list of pioneering grassroots organizers Clif led is too long to name here, they are exemplified by Bill Cunningham (Montana), Jim Eaton (California), Joe Walicki (Oregon), and Roger Scholl (Nevada). Others have taken national leadership roles, including Dave Foreman (now head of the Rewilding Institute), Bart Koehler (now with the Society's Wilderness Support Center), Randy Snodgrass (American Rivers), and Tim Mahoney (now leading the legislative staff of the Campaign for America's Wilderness).
With a unique quiet, slow-speaking intensity, Clif Merritt helped shape America's grassroots-focused wilderness movement. As the award citation emphasized, he shaped "a new generation of grassroots leaders who grounded the poetry and majesty of the Wilderness Act in the land. They and their lineage are an incalculable gift and unending legacy to our movement. With profound heart and wisdom you have illuminated the path of conservation, and we are most deeply in your debt."
