IN A LONDON nightclub in the early 1970s, the man who would become America’s foremost advocate for wilderness preservation was a little busy. He had an unfiltered cigarette in one hand, a vodka cocktail in the other, and a prostitute seated on either side. He’d been handsome in his youth, tall, with a passing resemblance to a roguish Jimmy Stewart. But after years of serious hard living he’d gone jowly, and before long would begin to look a little like a debauched Pablo Neruda. He took a drag, squinted through the smoke, and then said something to the effect of, All right girls, let’s get out of here.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I please introduce to you the man responsible for preserving more American wilderness than anyone else, and for whom the wilderness area at Point Reyes National Seashore is named: Congressman Phillip Burton.
He was in the U.K. for a weeklong NATO Alliance conference, part of his yearly European junket. He’d never let his wife Sala see him like this—he had too much respect for her for that—but to his colleagues, scenes like the above were par for the course. In fact, it might even be considered tame. He once took a junior staffer to the Playboy Club in London where they each picked up three women, took them to a country inn to throw a raucous party, drove back the next day, swapped the women out for new ones, and repeated the experience. When Burton asked the aide, who was twelve years his junior, if he wanted to go out again for a third night—after a Monday of long briefings and hearings—the younger man was forced to admit defeat.
“Phil, I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m going to bed.”
Burton was absolutely infamous. He was a force not just for nature, but of it. Ever since getting his start in local San Francisco politics he was known for tearing through obstacles and red tape with a ferocious intensity that terrified interns and delighted the underdogs he chose to fight for. He was ambitious and abrasive. He had daddy issues. Over the course of his impressive career, and in the years since, he was called many things, including the following: a wild man, an intolerable drunk, uncompromising, incorruptible, an indefatigable worker, a raging alcoholic, a philanderer, controversial, a brilliant tactician and strategist, an SOB, Machiavelli, Mephistopheles, and my personal favorite, “a blast furnace,” due to the vast quantities of fuel that he required to keep himself going. For Burton, “fuel” meant cigarettes, booze, food, sex and power.
“I spent thirty-two years in elective office, and I only met one absolute political genius. That was Phil Burton,” said the late senator Gaylord Nelson.
Burton was born in Cincinnati in 1926. His father went to medical school while his mother sold ads over the phone for church publications of the Catholic diocese, for twelve hours a day. The family moved to San Francisco in 1941, and Phil served in the Air Force during World War II. After that he became a lawyer, and joined any political cause he could find that aligned with his values. “Whenever a circle of people was hotly debating some issue, Burton was in the middle of it,” wrote John Jacobs in his Burton biography, A Rage for Justice.
Burton did care about justice, even if he did so especially when it served to elevate his own stature. On election night in November 1952, when the line outside a polling center in a black neighborhood was so long that many didn’t get a chance to vote before closing time, Burton wouldn’t allow it. “I’ll take care of this,” he said, and screamed at the (white) precinct workers until they agreed to keep the place open until everyone in line had a chance to cast their ballot, no matter how long it took.
He was elected to the California State Assembly in 1956, and to Congress in 1964. He considered running for Senate in 1969, but then decided against it, opting instead to campaign for House majority leader in 1976. He didn’t get it, however, much to his raging chagrin, and wound up as chairman of the House Interior Committee. It seemed like a strange choice for a man deeply interested in welfare, labor and civil liberties, and it isn’t clear exactly how the appointment came about. Some have speculated that Burton was pushed onto Interior as a way to neutralize him, to get him out of the way. But others weren’t so sure, and insisted he had sought out the “seemingly irrelevant” assignment himself. Said one colleague, “He chose Interior, because he could gain seniority there faster than any place else.”
In many ways, there could not have been a more unlikely champion of nature than this carousing, hard-drinking smokestack of a man. Burton liked to joke that the closest he came to be being outdoors was walking fifty yards into a forest by the side of the road to take a leak. He didn’t exercise, and colleagues worried about his health. They tried dragging him to the House gym but he just ended up sitting in the steam room, chain-smoking his beloved Chesterfields.
When someone suggested that Burton drive out to visit the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which he himself had worked to preserve, he replied, “Why the fuck would I want to do that?” before proceeding to stamp his cigarette out on the gravel.
There is a big difference between wilderness and Wilderness with a capital W, and while Burton may not have been very interested in the former, he took a great interest in the latter. With House leadership gone, he realized that environmentalism was his best chance to prove himself, and he turned conservation into an elaborate system of chits.
“I figured out the only thing that really lasts forever is parks,” Burton told the director of the Wilderness Society. “That’s my accomplishment.”
Burton was an ardent liberal, and while he didn’t care very much about experiencing nature himself, he understood that it mattered deeply to a lot of people. He was ruthless in trying to preserve it for them.
“We’ll pull the environmental community into the late twentieth century,” he said when he first took an interest in national parks. “We’ll do things no one else has ever thought possible.”
And he did—by any means necessary. In at least one instance, when Burton failed to get a piece of land included within a protected area, he instructed the mapmaker to draw it up with the land included anyway. If you’ve lost, why not just pretend that you’ve won and hope nobody notices? As independent journalist George Clyde discovered in 2012, at the time, official maps of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area showed Tomales Bay as being included, even though it wasn’t. Burton had managed to get Congress to pass a bill expanding the boundaries—a bill that refers to a map—before the map was even created. This was a common practice of Burton’s in what became known as the “park-barreling” era, and was essentially a way to get Congress to write him a blank check. During the peak of this era, from 1978 to 1980, Burton pushed through legislation for an astonishing number of parks, often without the park service’s input and even, in some cases, against its wishes. If there was a problem with including a piece of land, he would get it approved by Congress first and sort out the legality of it later. Bodies of water could be especially problematic, because of the jurisdiction of different agencies, the public’s right to fish, and other issues. When Clyde finally got his hands on the original map of the GGNRA, he was amazed to find this note written by the cartographer: “State tidelands suggested by P. Burton to be shown included in authorized boundary on all maps (even though we will most likely never acquire them).”
The park service had managed the bay for more than thirty years even though they weren’t supposed to, just because Burton refused to be defeated.
Another way to get around obstacles that stood in the way of preserving an area as official Wilderness, was to designate it as “potential wilderness” instead. This was the case with the wilderness area in Point Reyes, consideration for which had been on the table since the park was first established. Drakes Estero was not included in early maps of the proposed National Research Area, which would later be proposed as wilderness. This is probably due mostly to the fact that Drakes Estero is not as easily accessible by car as its smaller sibling, Estero de Limantour, except for the site of the oyster farm. While it enjoys a higher level of protection than a national park, a wilderness area’s stated purpose is still enjoyment by human beings—so long as they do not trammel it, and do not “remain.”
Spiritually and practically, what “wilderness” means or entails is somewhat open to interpretation. How wild is wild? There is now no such thing as a place wholly untouched by humankind. There are fields of litter on Mount Everest and plastic bags stuck on thorn bushes in the remote Pakistani desert and rubber ducks trapped in the arctic ice and satellite images of everywhere. Even the landscapes that romantic adventurers like John Muir encountered were not unpeopled, they were just undestroyed. As we lose more species to extinction, through pollution, hunting and fishing, or climate change, how intact does an ecosystem need to be in order to still count? Legally, however, wilderness does have a definition, even if it is rather nebulously poetic. It is: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The law says Wilderness with a capital W must be “roadless,” but that has been taken to mean roads not maintained by mechanical means. One of the biggest criticisms of the Wilderness Act is how vastly open to interpretation it can be.
The idea of “potential wilderness” was first used by Congress in 1976, the year that the Point Reyes Wilderness Act was passed. It was very much in Burton’s style. Doesn’t qualify as wilderness? Doesn’t matter. All of that could be sorted out. An area could be designated as “potential” wilderness if it was close to wilderness in character, but possessed some marring factor such as a road, a structure, visible pipes or power lines. None of these belonged in true wilderness, it had been decided—except when they do. The thing is, the distinction is somewhat open to interpretation, and the rules can be bent if it is deemed necessary, or if it is considered beneficial to visitors. Obviously, national parks can have all kinds of amenities, even restaurants and hotels. But with a wilderness area the rules are stricter. Wilderness areas do not allow motorized or even “mechanized” vehicles of any kind, including bicycles. However, inside the Sawtooth Wilderness in Sawtooth National Forest in Idaho, for example, there is a river, and motorboats are allowed to ferry tourists upstream. There are also a number of what is known as “wilderness inholdings”—islands of private land parcels within wilderness, which must be allowed motorized access. There are even roads that go “through” the wilderness area of Point Reyes, so that visitors may access trails and beaches.
Looking at the proposed wilderness maps of Drakes Estero created in the 1970s, it is clear that someone was thinking about the future of the oyster farm. For one, the land on which the oyster farm sat is not included in the wilderness area in any of the maps, that much is clear. How much of the water directly near to the oyster farm was to be included was a little more confusing. In some maps, the wilderness area is shown to end abruptly in a straight line, leaving out the last portion of the inlet where Johnson Oyster Company launched its boats, like cutting the fingertip off of a glove. In others, made the same year, the boundary extends all the way to the shoreline. This is what the final map of the “potential wilderness” in Drakes Estero looked like. Of course, not all of the oyster farm was on land. Charlie Johnson had put about a million feet of redwood timber into the lagoon on which to hang his oysters, and the farming part of the farm all took place on the water.
All of the bodies of water in Point Reyes National Seashore were designated as potential wilderness in 1976, including Estero de Limantour, Abbotts Lagoon, and the tidelands of the beaches. This was due in part to the need to work out agreements with the Department of Fish and Game, and to remove some other “non-conforming” characteristics, like power lines. In the years that followed, they all were given full wilderness status, except for the majority of the upper part of Drakes Estero where the oyster farm operated.
Now, what was supposed to come next differs depending on who you talk to. Former congressman Pete McCloskey, who is retired from politics and now tends an olive farm in Yolo County with his wife, has come out and said that the intention was always to have the oyster farm stay in operation. He’s written letters on the farm’s behalf, and I visited him in the summer of 2014 to talk about it. He was very active for an eighty-six-year-old, mucking around the farm in old jeans and a pair of rubber boots, although I had to shout pretty loudly to be heard. He had told other reporters in the past that he was “dismayed” by efforts to remove the oyster farm, although when he talked to me he was a little fuzzy on the details. He started out by telling me that the oyster farm was owned by a nice Mexican family, and kept referring to it as Johnson Oyster. None of this is surprising. McCloskey has done a lot in his life, including coauthoring the Endangered Species Act. He can’t be expected to remember everything.
But as I was sitting down with him in his living room to discuss the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, his wife Helen, an attractive blond woman some fifteen years his junior, also dressed in jeans and rubber boots, leaned her head in through the sliding glass door and shouted:
“Don’t listen to him! Drakes Bay Oyster is being funded by the Koch brothers!”
He waved his hand towards her as if swatting a fly, and smiled.
“I guess you could say that we have a little disagreement in this house.”
McCloskey uses the presence of the ranches in the pastoral zone to support the notion that the oyster farm was intended to stay. Others disagree with him, pointing to the fact that “potential wilderness” was never meant to be a permanent designation. Rather, parks were instructed to “steadily remove” any non-conforming uses, according to House testimony, until the area could qualify as full wilderness.
The funny thing is, it’s unlikely that Phil Burton would have cared either way about the oyster farm. In a sense, it is even rather fitting that a man of his appetites would have a wilderness area named after him that included within it an operation to produce aphrodisiac shellfish. Then again, if he saw the “potential wilderness” designation as being weaker or less of a legacy, then maybe not.
In 1983, when he was fifty-six, Burton was in a San Francisco hotel room with his wife when he started having chest pains.
“Jesus, Sala, I don’t feel good,” he said to her.
A few moments later he collapsed, and was pronounced dead at the hospital, the cause of death later listed as an abdominal aneurysm and severe heart disease. To honor him, in 1985 Congress passed Public Law 99-68, which reads as follows:
“In recognition of Congressman Phillip Burton’s dedication to the protection of the Nation’s outstanding natural, scenic, and cultural resources and his leadership in establishing units of the National Park System and preserving their integrity against threats to these resources and specifically his tireless efforts which led to the enactment of the California Wilderness Act of 1984, the designated wilderness area of Point Reyes National Seashore, California as established pursuant to law, shall henceforth be known as the ‘Phillip Burton Wilderness.’”