ABSTRACT
New roads are threatened in wilderness areas, but now not like “Mr. Rockefeller’s Roads”, but instead, roads to cut into the wilderness, not for understanding or for succor, but for exploitation. It was the age when “the wilderness” was no longer a given fact of life but was starting to disappear—and “Mr. Junior,” as he would later be called by his road-builders in Maine, was determined to leave a legacy for others to enjoy. We see millions of acres of public lands jeopardized by an administration that, even though it calls itself “conservative,” does not seem to have the faintest interest in conservation of the sort that the truly conservative Rockefellers believed in. Not everyone agreed with his philosophy—and soon he found himself caught between the purists who wanted Acadia National Park, formed with land assembled by Rockefeller and other summer residents, to remain untouched by change, and his own idea that proper intervention would, preserve preservation.
