Senator MAGNUSON. Mr. Robinson. STATEMENT OF E. ALLEN ROBINSON, MERCER ISLAND, WASH. Mr. ROBINSON. Mr. Chairman, my name is E. Allen Robinson; I reside on Mercer Island. I am appearing here on behalf of myself and my family, and several of our friends who enjoy the out of doors, in support of this wilderness bill. I have submitted copies of this for your reference. Senator MAGNUSON. It will be put in the record in full. (The statement referred to follows:) STATEMENT OF E. ALLEN ROBINSON, MERCER ISLAND, WASH. My name is E. Allen Robinson, and I reside at 2462 72d Avenue SE., Mercer Island, Wash. I have lived in Seattle and the nearby area for the past 13 years. I wish to encourage passage of the wilderness bill, S. 1123, on behalf of myself, my family, our many friends who enjoy the out of doors as we do and, most of all, if I may be so bold, on behalf of future generations of U.S. citizens who will have to live in a country much more populated than we do now. We here in Washington State are particularly fortunate in living within a few hours' driving and walking distance of some wonderful potential wilderness areas. I can appreciate this fact particularly because I was born and raised in the city where you, Mr. Chairman, and your colleagues will someday soon, I hope, pass this legislation to give all of us in this country the assurance that these wilderness areas will be preserved. Like many families in our country, mine lives in a suburban section that is part of an exploding metropolitan area. In our neighborhood each year the sounds of the powersaw and the bulldozer announce the relentless march of population pressure. We are barely able to retain a few small areas for local parks and recreation, and these are obtained only by dint of great effort and cajolery of our county planning commission. Over and above these urbanized area recreation needs, we also have the weekend and the vacation-time needs for getting away to relatively isolated areas where we can see this land of ours in its natural state. Camping and hiking in such areas is a stimulating experience for young and old alike. My 7-year-old son's recent complaint, "Now we don't have any more place to build camps," as wooded vacant lots in our neighborhood were cleared for home building, sharpens my concern that we protect fully the wilderness areas where he and other children to come may have their rightful childhood experience of pioneering fantasy. I am aware that the provisions of the proposed wilderness bill permit multiple use of the national forests. For example, if we had a Forest Service wilderness area in Washington, as we do not now have, and would not have even with the passage of the wilderness bill, all of the following could or would be authorized under certain terms: fishing, hunting, mining, prospecting, soil conservation, watershed protection, water storage and development, grazing, game refuge maintenance, ecological and other study, hiking, camping, and other recreation, insect and disease control, fire control, and perhaps even motorboat use and airplane landing fields. Only logging, highway, and home construction and commercial development would be wholly excluded, since these are totally incompatible with wilderness. And even some of these would be permitted in some of the areas-national parks particularly. I am particularly impressed with and I heartily endorse the wording of section 1(b) of the bill which recognizes the preservation of wilderness areas as a desirable policy of our Federal Government. Whoever drafted the last two lines of this subsection has my heartfelt thanks. The visit to a wilderness area is a wonderful way to preserve and restore one's health, both physical and mental, and from several personal experiences I and my wife can testify that carrying 40-pound packs for a week's vacation up and down wilderness area trails is a sure way to preserve and restore a slim waistline. We have achieved the same cure by carrying our 30-pound wiggling daughter in a papoose-type pack on shorter walks in areas suitable for wilderness designation where the sights, sounds, and smells delight even a preschool youngster. Mr. ROBINSON. I will skip over the main points, and I would just like to add two points that haven't been brought out very much, if at all, previously. I was able to attend yesterday morning but not in the afternoon. One point I think is the health problem of which Dr. Spickard spoke on earlier this morning. We have found in our family, and we have two small children, ages 7 and 3, that even they can go out in this wilderness area that is so called inaccessible by some people. We have found that they enjoy that more than anything else in our recreation. We hope it will continue that way. We have also found, incidentally, a nice byproduct, and that is we can keep our waistlines down by getting out on the trails occasionally. I would heartily recommend that to some of these people who have rather growing waistlines who testified against it. There are two points also that I would like to say in view of my experience as an economic research worker for the past 20 years. I do not have any definite figures on this, but I am left vague and unconvinced by the opponents of this legislation, namely, the amount of jobs which will be created or preserved by having access to these wilderness areas. Yesterday Mr. Kreager made the point they were going to have so much more population in the State of Washington in the future and that therefore we must have some jobs. I submit as a simple economic principle that we have to have jobs first and the population follow the jobs, not the cart before the horse, as I think he had it. Secondly, I would like to say that in terms of the actual cost of bringing out this timber that is in these areas which are now in wilderness, that I think a careful appraisal of what those costs would be would result in a finding that most of them woud be too inaccessible, too costly to develop, unless the Forest Service provided the complete cost of access roads all the way up to the timber. I don't claim to be any forest economist, but I have had contact with some of these and I seriously doubt whether these timberlands which would be involved in these wilderness areas could be obtained at very much less cost, or slightly more than they can get timber now in their own land. In the course of my work I have to read a considerable amount on these areas in the Northwest, and I have, as a matter of course, always collected annual reports from the large corporations here who are working in this area; and I notice in the last report just coming in the last month or so for 1958 that quite a few arguments are given that they are getting more and more production out of their own timber stands, and I have seen no statement whatever in any of these reports in opposition to any legislation such as proposed here. I think if this was a real problem to these companies that they might say something in their annual reports to their stockholders. As an example, let me just quote one brief paragraph from the Crown Zellerbach Corp.'s report for 1958. The corporation's program for increasing the wood yield from its timber resources was expanded. Prelogging and thinning were accelerated in 1958. Removal of smaller trees by these advanced logging practices resulted in less timber breakage during falling, provided greater log yields, and encouraged growth in the remaining timber. An increased prelogging and thinning program to upgrade our young forests is being experimented with for the future. This can be found in many of these other reports. There is another point made here by the Georgia-Pacific Corp. for its annual report for 1958, and I quote: Substantial changes which are being made in Georgia-Pacific manufacturing facilities to increase utilization of timber harvested are also affecting our forestry operations. Better recovery from each log used, new products manufactured from previously discarded waste, and utilization of portions of the tree that formerly were left in the woods, all have the effect of increasing the quantity of raw material available, as well as enhancing the value of the manufactured output. Lastly, I would like to just indicate that I don't have available yet, I don't think it is out yet, the Puget Sound Pulp & Timber Co.'s annual report for 1958. But you gentlemen know, it is located up in Bellingham. They have a very nice color picture on the cover of this report of their operation on the waterfront there, and they state in the report as follows: Our greatest single method of conserving timber resources is by using chips purchased from company-owned and other sawmills. As a way of using sawmill waste, this is a relatively recent development. Two-thirds of last year's production of Puget Pulp was from purchased chips. Five years ago it was less than one-fourth, and prior to 1948 purchased chips were not used at all. Our cover picture shows several barge loads of purchased chips tied up to the company dock, and rafts of pulp logs in the foreground. Every bargeload of chips means that much sawmill waste put to productive use, and a correspond ing conservation of timber resources. Now I grant, gentlemen, there are many much larger companies, but I think these are the ones that have quite a bit of control on the present timberlands here, and they certainly are showing wisdom now in trying to conserve and cut their timber in a way it will conserve it for future use. (Senator Jackson resumed the chair.) Senator JACKSON. Thank you very much. Mr. Latz. Mr. Jones will follow him. STATEMENT OF ROBERT N. LATZ Mr. LATZ. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I would. just like to make a few statements here today. It has been suggested in the past that passage of the wilderness bill be postponed until the recommendations of the National Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission have been made. I would like to point out that the Commission was established to determine the recreational requirements of the country at the year 1978 and the year 2000; a long time from now. It is not concerned with the present recreation requirements except as they pertain to future requirements. On the other hand, the wilderness bill will protect what we have now. Postponement of action on the wilderness bill until the Commission has made its recommendations will only allow more time for our present wilderness to be nibbled away. I would like to point out that wilderness under the wilderness bill would be protected by law rather than by merely administrative action. Additions, modifications, or deletions would be subject to the review of Congress, making it more difficult to remove areas from the wilderness designation than is presently the case. It should be emphasized that under this bill any additions to the wilderness areas will come under the same close scrutiny as will any deletions. The wilderness bill is not a single-purpose bill. It gives, for the first time, legal recognition to the principle of multiple use in forest management. All of the following could or would be authorized under certain terms of the bill: Fishing, hunting, mining, prospecting, soil conservation, watershed protection, water storage and development, grazing, game refuge maintenance, ecological study, hiking, camping, and other recreation, insect and disease control, fire control, and, under some circumstances, even motorboat use and airplane landing fields. Only logging, highway, and home construction and commercial development would be excluded, since these are wholly incompatible with wilderness. This is true multiple use, not slash logging followed by whatever other use the land can then be put to. As more and more people discover the pleasure of outdoor recreation in our wild areas, it will become necessary to preserve more, not less, of our wilderness. Let's consider only one area, Olympic National Park. The National Park figures show that last year 200,000 persons used the trails of this 1 unit of our wilderness system; 45,300 of these hikers were in the backcountry overnight or longer, almost as many people as the total number of visitors to the park immediately after World War II. We can certainly expect the use of our wilderness to increase, and increase rapidly. The arguments against the wilderness bill have a familiar sound to them. I would like to quote from the book "Five Cities," by George Leighton: When in 1879 Cleveland proclaimed 13 forest reserves (what we now know as national forests) of 21 million acres, the rage of lumber and railroad men knew no bounds. The Seattle Chamber of Commerce hurried off a memorial to Congress: "The reservations are of no benefit to any legitimate object or policy, are of incalculable damage to the present inhabitants of this State. If they are allowed to stand not only will the mining industry be destroyed but the great railroad trunklines of the central West which are now heading for Puget Sound will be prevented from coming here. All the passes in the Cascade Mountains by which the railroads can reach the sound are embraced by these reservations." It appears that the people in 1897 took a somewhat exaggerated dim view of the consequences of the change in status of the federally held forest lands. I feel that 50 years from now the same will be said of the fears expressed by opponents of the wilderness bill today. I urge the immediate passage of the wilderness bill. Thank you. I would also like to submit for the record a letter from Joseph Hart, the president of the Hart Apothecary. Senator JACKSON. Without objection, it will be included at this point. (The document referred to follows:) Senator HENRY M. JACKSON, JOSEPH HART APOTHECARY, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, our forests have been gutted and our rivers are flooding worse than ever before; it is my opinion, and that of others, that future fisheries, hydroelectric power projects, watersheds, and flood control will depend heavily on an untouched forest as they are the green forests and less subject to rampant forest fires and fast water runoff. Even Mr. Bert Cole, State land commissioner, was in favor of opening watersheds in 1958-this opening would allow loggers in these areas but the wilderness areas as future semiwatersheds would not allow them, and the beauty would be spared. The areas that have been previously logged in the watersheds were declared responsible for the sudden muddiness in our tapwater for the first time since I could remember; in 1954. I have seen this logged-off area, against the wishes of the city, and this area is critically located in the watershed-contrary to reports published in one local paper. This is exemplary of what is happening to our "protected" resources. In the past, I have worked hard to help preserve the present boundaries of Olympic National Park in a bipartisan effort; and with the help of two Republican Congressmen and Senator "Scoop" Jackson, we have saved much national park acreage from the woodsman's axe. In the future, it is contemplated that the park will draw more money with tourist trade and become more valuable as a semiwatershed area than it could accomplish as a timber or mining area mainly because the forest has climaxed and the soil remains wet throughout most of the year. This fact is also applicable to the wilderness area. One can find the many acres that might be turned into suitably producing forest lands that previously were in forest and are idle in private hands such as abandoned homesteads or deciduous hillsides, the latter occurring because of poor logging practices. With ever-increasing populations, untouched areas will become of prime significance as a source of pure water and dependable streamflow for fisheries. An example, the tourist bureau of the State of Washington shows that the monetary gains would be less when reducing the Olympic National Park boundaries (for private enterprises) than to expand facilities and areas for tourists at present boundary lines. I feel this applies to the wilderness area of the North Central Cascades. Some animals and birds are becoming very scarce. Certain eagles, grizzlies, beavers, mountain sheep, etc., all could be allowed to roam and would be observed in their natural surroundings. I notified the local chamber of commerce that my stand is completely and vociferously against the text of the resolution opposing the passage of S. 4028, the National Wilderness Preservation Act, 1958 Congress. My voice was already in the wilderness, even though their own weekly paper, volume 42, October 28, 1958, page 3, under "Seattle Tourist Traffic," the chamber of commerce admits that tourism is increasing. The same people behind this opposition movement were against the expansion of the Olympic National Park, because of private, selfish interests. It's becoming harder to find places removed from people even in our great State. Do not forget the ever-increasing numbers of campers and hikers who are trying to avoid the deluxe facilities found in many parks. The lumber and mining interests seemingly have blindfolded everyone, espe cially in the chamber. I believe in a better future for the States of Washington and Oregon culturally, economically, and healthwise with the passage of this wilderness bill. One local newspaper has been vehemently against us in our last-ditch conservation efforts the other, nonpartisan. Time is not sufficient to obtain large petitions, but they could be drawn if this present wilderness bill fails. The wilderness can never be recovered. The Wilderness Act can always be repealed the forests, the mountains, the minerals, and the streams will still be there. Thank you. Senator JACKSON. Mr. Jones. CYRIL E. HART, President. STATEMENT OF JOHNELLIS JONES, SEATTLE, WASH. Mr. JONES. I am not a member of the Audubon Society, nor the Seattle Mountaineers, nor do I work for Weyerhaeuser, Crown Zellerback, or the grazing industry. I have nothing to gain financiallySenator JACKSON. Where do you work? Mr. JONES. I am an engineer with one of the large aircraft companies in the area. Senator JACKSON. One of the large aircraft companies. That's all right; go ahead. Mr. JONES. I have lost a day's wages to attend this hearing. I know there are a great many who feel as I do but could not or would not leave their jobs to attend an all-day or a 2-day hearing. As an engineer I am aware of the necessity for progress and development. I have been interested in conservation only in the last few months, but with due consideration I examined the facts presented |