Robert Sterling Yard

One of the greatest of The Wilderness Society’s leaders, Robert Sterling Yard may have also been one of its most unexpected. Yard’s career as a champion of American wilderness began only in his 50s. Yet both in his eyes and the eyes of others, this late-found passion came to define him.

Born in 1861 in Haverstraw, New York, “Bob” Yard attended Princeton before beginning a career as a journalist, editor, and publisher in New York City. Like so many Americans, Yard found his love for the outdoors through a friend— Stephen Mather, then a fellow reporter, who would become the founding director of the National Park Service.

In 1915, Mather, the newly named Assistant Secretary of the Interior, asked Yard to join him in Washington as an advocate for national parks. Yard accepted—leaving behind his successful New York career. As his wife Mary Belle wrote later, “Mr. Yard thought it over and decided if he could make the country love the wilderness and see the beauty of Nature and know how to read the handwriting of God in these beautiful parks he would feel that his life had been worthwhile.”

Founder of The Wilderness Society and protector of our national parks

Though far from an experienced wilderness explorer, Yard plunged into his new role with both enthusiasm and humility. Attending a conference that first year, this quintessential New Yorker named his home park as “Central Park.” As he told the conference, “the qualifications for the mountains, as I well know, lies inside of one, lies in the soul, and not in one's accomplishments. So it is that I, treader of dusty city streets, boldly claim common kinship with you of the plains, the mountains, and the glaciers,"

Yard’s next bold move was to head to Europe, to figure out why Americans visited wild lands across the Atlantic instead of their own Rocky Mountains. The Alps failed to impress Yard, who insisted on America’s “supremacy in world scenery” and set out to make his compatriots agree.

From 1915 to 1916, Yard compiled a “National Parks Portfolio,” full of his passionate writing about America’s wild places. The “Portfolio” was distributed to every member of Congress, and Yard’s writings spread across the country, exciting new interest in the country’s parks. This publicity campaign was essential to the victory of 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill that created the National Park Service.

“The American people is waking rapidly to the magnitude of its scenic possession,” Yard declared. He himself played a vital role in this national awakening. Yet he also challenged Americans to value the National Parks for more than their aesthetics. As he wrote in his “Book of the National Parks,” to appreciate a landscape fully was to find within it a record of history: “to see in the carved and colorful depths of the Grand Canyon not only the stupendous abyss whose terrible beauty grips the soul, but also to-day’s chapter in a thrilling story of creation whose beginning lay untold centuries back in the ages.”

At the same time, Yard insisted on the practical value of public lands. He testified in a 1916 hearing regarding the National Park Service bill, “Our national parks constitute an economic asset that we have entirely overlooked.”

It was a practical matter, the strained National Park Service budget, that caused Yard to leave the government in 1919. Though leaving his official Park role, he deepened his commitment to increasing citizen involvement in America’s wild places, first by founding the National Parks Association in 1919. And rather than let his 58 years get in his way, he simply dismissed them—insisting for decades to come that he was 48.

His biological age of 74, then, was clearly not an obstacle to his role as a co-founder of The Wilderness Society in 1935. Yard handled almost all of the day-to-day work of the young Wilderness Society. He built the group’s membership—“spreading abroad, through every member, the intense need of wilderness salvation.”

He connected with other conservation groups and let loose a seemingly endless flow of letter-writing. He also served as the first editor and a prolific writer for The Living Wilderness, the ancestor of today’s Wilderness magazine. Yard pulled together two issues of the magazine while bedridden with pneumonia at the age of 84, in what would be the last months of his life. His caretakers physically restrained him from crawling out of bed and back into his office. He died that year, in 1945. The Wilderness Society needed two new staff to take over Yard’s duties.

In The Living Wilderness in 1936, Yard admired a forest rising from the decay of the trees that had come before it. “The spirit of this forest is American,” he wrote. “It moves indomitably up against all obstructions.” Those who knew him might have said the same thing about Yard himself.

Sources

Albright, John. “Robert Sterling Yard.” National Park Service: The First 75 Years. Eastern National Park & Monument Association, 1990. http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/sontag/sontagt.htm.

Fox, Stephen. “We Want No Straddlers.” Wilderness 48.167 (1984): 5-19.

Taylor, Bethany. “Robert Sterling Yard: Bringing People to Wilderness.” http://www.wilderness.net/index.cfm?fuse=feature0209&print=yes.

Yard, Robert Sterling. The Book of the National Parks. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919. http://books.google.com/books?id=NlBIAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Book+of+the+National+Parks+robert+sterling+yard&source=gbs_book_other_versions_r&cad=7.