Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail

Environmental History, Oct 2004 by Holmes, Steven J

Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail. By Larry Anderson. Creating the North American Landscape series. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xi 452 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth $45.00.

As an attempted encapsulation of Benton MacKaye's varied life and work, the subtitle of Larry Anderson's fascinating biography might be extended almost indefinitely: forester, socialist, journalist, ecologist, radical, visionary ... Unfortunately, a more judgmental historian might with some justification end the list with yet another word: "Failure." Virtually none of MacKaye's numerous plans and projects cnmc to fruition; he achieved no institutional prominence, published no writing of continuing influence, left no clear historical mark or legacy. Even the project with which his name is now most closely associated, the Appalachian Trail, was successful only after it was divested of much of MacKaye's original vision. And yet, as a person and as a thinker, MacKaye indisputably was one of the leading intellectual sources and stimulants in a variety of environmentally related fields throughout the twentieth century. As one colleague from the Tennessee Valley Authority, Earle Draper, said, "I can't put my fingers on anything defini te that he accomplished in the planning, but I know he had an effect.... You might say he was a contributing influence to the thinking of people in my division" (p. 257).

Benton MacKaye (the name rhymes with "high") was born in 1879 to a creative and sociable family-his father a playwright and theatrical producer, his mother an astute business partner and occasional literary critic, his four brothers and one sister active in artistic and intellectual circles. Initially based in New York City, the family moved around often during Benton's childhood (often as a result of mixed economic circumstances), but found an emotional center in a second home in rural Shirley, Massachusetts, which various members (especially Benton) would make their primary home at different periods of their lives. This stimulating and flexible family context was replicated throughout MacKaye's life in the various groupings of intellectuals, writers, radicals, government connections, artists, and fun-loving youth that surrounded him wherever he went, like the smoke from his omnipresent pipe.

After an eclectic undergraduate career at Harvard, MacKaye arranged for a typically independent course of advanced study in forestry, graduating to the mixture of Forest Service work and private consulting characteristic of the budding field. Various influences-including the Boston-area tradition of landscape architecture, the utilitarian philosophy of his brother James, the socialist and technical orientations of the government forester Raphael Zon (met on an assignment in New Hampshire), and his own observations of the settled Massachusetts countryside-helped MacKaye develop his vision of forestry in the service of society, a form of social and environmental engineering carried out by government institutions and/or small groups of committed individuals. MacKaye was working in the 19105 mainly in the Washington, D.C., offices of the Forest Service (but also the Labor Department), when his vision received its first printed expression in a report on a possible plan for government postwar "colonization" of northwestern forests (by soldiers and others), entitled Employment and Natural Resources (1919). With its maps, tables, visionary language, and integration of economic, environmental, social, recreational, and political concerns-as well as its praise at the hands of a very select few and total obscurity to everyone else-the report set the pattern for much of MacKaye's later productive work.

More prominently, MacKaye set out his ideas for the Appalachian Trail in a 1921 article (helpfully reprinted in its entirety) that conceived the trail as but one element in a larger complex of employment camps, transportation routes, and forest preserves whose overall goal was nothing less than protecting America from the growing evils of over-urbanization by providing a physical barrier to the growth and influence of the eastern metropolis, dispersing economic and industrial production in the rural countryside, supporting smaller-scale community life, and serving as a means of intellectual and physical escape from the city-indeed, as a vantage point from which the ordinary citizen might contemplate the radical restructuring of modern society.

Despite MacKaye's early leadership of the trail movement (itself a fascinating story of interlocking local, regional, and nationwide organizations and concerns), the purely recreational aspect proved to be the least common denominator upon which all parties could agree, and MacKaye's influence and ideas eventually waned. However, the project taught MacKaye further lessons on the integration of economic, social, and environmental concerns, which informed his work in the 1920s with the Regional Planning Association of America (which brought him into collaboration with the likes of Lewis Mumford, a lifelong friend and influence, and Sir Patrick Geddes), in the 1930s with the Tennessee Valley Authority and The Wilderness Society (where again he worked with and influenced better-known figures such as Aldo Leopold), and in the 19505 and later through private consulting and independent scholarship-in the course of which he finally coined a term to describe his life's work: "geotechnics," "the applied science of making the earth more habitable." MacKaye's later years were spent largely in Shirley, the homeland from which he could watch as his lifelong goals of environmental and social integration received increasing national attention in the 19605 and later. He died in 1975.