Fighting for forests

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Arthur Carhart: Wilderness Prophet Tom Wolf University Press of Colorado, 2008. A fiery conservationist who came of age in the late 1910s, Arthur Carhart had a penchant for highlighting the contradictions in the environmental movement, not to mention the conflicts of interest at the U.S. Forest Service, which employed him at a young age. The disheartening part of reading Wilderness Prophet, Tom Wolf's new biography, is realizing that the problems Carhart shed light on nine decades ago are still damaging our nation's public lands. Carhart is credited with proposing one of the nation's first wilderness areas, at Trappers Lake in northwest Colorado in 1919. The original idea didn't come to fruition, but the lake received increased protection and spurred Carhart to promote watershed-wide wilderness management to the Forest Service. He battled for sound planning throughout his Forest Service career and against the frantic road-building, timber-harvesting mindset of the agency. "The very future of the nation could fall into decadence, fail, even die, if we do not give the consideration we must to the water wealth and the soil wealth so closely linked to it," Carhart wrote in 1951....