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TIME Magazine, March 27, 1964, p. 54:

Call of the Wild
    ...Seventy-five years ago in the U.S. heartland, it was well-nigh inconceivable that vast wilderness areas such as California's 400-mile-long Sierra Nevada might one day be threatened. John Muir, a bewhiskered Scot with a passionate love for his adopted land, formed the Sierra Club in 1892 as a force to preserve Yosemite National Park, then only two years old, from encroaching sheepherders and cattlemen. Today, with factories turning rivers into running sores, with housing tracts creeping like eczema where once tall timber stood, the Sierra Club is more militant than ever in preaching and practicing Muir's exhortation: "To explore, enjoy and preserve the scenic resources of the U.S. and its forests, waters, wildlife, and wilderness." Its 24,000 members, ready to fight at the drop of a tree,... include such walkers and talkers as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Publisher Alfred Knopf, a band of Congressmen, and a paid representative who serves as a lobbyist in Washington. Such members have made the Sierra Club the most powerful citizen's conservation organization in the U.S.

    Vanishing Wilds. Its influence has grown steadily since David Brower became its executive director. Brower, 51, who runs a 30-man paid staff from San Francisco headquarters, enlists swarms of volunteers from every chapter to help in cranking out a massive barrage of preservation pamphlets. But the club's heaviest editorial weapon is a series of lavishly illustrated books designed to awaken the nation to the threat of vanishing wilds. Brower led and won the fight to save Colorado-Utah's Dinosaur National Monument from a proposed series of dams, teh greatest conservation battle since the establishment of the National Park System-- to which the Sierra Club has also been deeply committed.

    The club is engaged on every other conservation front from the seashore on New York's Fire Island to the threat of a hydroelectric project at Rampart Canyon on Alaska's Yukon River. This month in Las Vegas, Brower and fellow zealots took aim at yet another target: the proposed $500 million Bridge Canyon Dam on the lower Colorado River which threatens, say Sierra Clubbers, to back up water some 93 miles and inundate part of Grand Canyon National Park itself.

    The have not neglected California. At home, the club's most bitter battle currently rages over one of the state's biggest and oldest trees, the Sequoia sempervirens. The ever-living redwoods are all but dead: 83% of California's original stand has been cut, and, by U.S. Forest Service estimates, most of the state's 250,000 remaining acres of virgin redwood will be gone by 1980 at the present cutting rate. Even the famed 5,000-acre National Tribute Grove, set aside as a memorial for U.S. war dead after World War II, is soon to be breached by a freeway. The Last Redwoods, latest in the Sierra Club's handsome series of books, protests on behalf of conservationists: "It is somehow preposterous that we of this generation should have the power to reprieve or condemn a race which nature has perserved for more than 100,000,000 years."
 
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