The founding of the Wilderness Society in 1935 marked the beginning of organized wilderness advocacy in the United States, a movement that culminated in the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the creation of a national system of wilderness areas. Conventional wisdom had long been that wilderness advocacy was hostile to the utilitarian conservation of federal foresters, who believed that the national forests should be developed for their timber and other resources, and yet four of the eight founders of the Wilderness Society were trained foresters who valued both wilderness protection and sustained yield forestry. How are we to make sense of this apparent paradox?

To find out, please join us as Paul Sutter, historian and author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement, revisits his classic history of modern wilderness advocacy twenty years after its publication.

Paul Sutter is a professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (2002) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (2015), and he is the co-author or co-editor of three other books on the environmental history of the American South. Paul is also the Series Editor for Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books, published by the University of Washington Press.

Recording is available on YouTube.