ABSTRACT
W hile activists in Oregon and Maine as well as across the country were addressing the pollution crisis in urban waters, others began defending rural rivers from dams and other forms of engineering. Groups such as the Izaak Walton League, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society drew popular support as they focused public concern on the nation's remaining free-flowing rivers. 1 These campaigns were inspired by a different form of appreciation for water resources and directed by a different form of activism. Like efforts to create the pastoral city, wild-river preservation was predicated on a sense of well-being gained from communion with nature, and like the clean-waters campaigns, wild-river preservation emphasized the sense of freedom, authenticity, and permanence derived from nature. But here these ideas were modernized to accommodate a new set of recreational and wilderness values. Where the pastoral landscape was utilitarian, social, and humanized, the wilderness landscape was spiritual, personal, and purely natural. The story of wild-river preservation represents the environmental imagination in transition from an older pastoral inspiration that stressed the harmonious interaction of folk, work, and nature to a newer wilderness concept that saw nature in nonutilitarian terms, as a place entirely separate from human artifice.
