Connecting the Dots between the Big City and the Green TrailBy Jane Holtz Kay Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner and Creator of the Appalachia Trail. By Larry Anderson. Johns Hopkins, Maryland. 452 pages. Benton Mackaye, known (if barely now) for his role as powerbroker of the Appalachian Trail was a naturalist, as the word had it. Designer of the Appalachian Trail, the hiker's east coast mecca, he was a planner come to fame in the era of Clarence Stein, Lewis Mumford, Gifford Pinchot, and other forerunners of the environmental age.
Drawn to Shirley, Massachusetts, summers while wintering in New York City in his youth, MacKaye described himself as an "amphibian between urban and rural life." And, yet, the fascination of this soft-peddling prophet lies less in his "between"-ness than in his very contemporary fusion of urban and wild; natural and rural values so lacking in today's schismatic treatment of the landscape. If MacKaye had a peripatetic childhood, he was not slow to come to his chosen - created - mission; by 15, "geography, forestry, regional planning, and geotechnics" had inspired him. A half dozen years later, his travels from Shirley. Mass., to Harvard College had given him his holistic values: cities as cities, ("noisy streets, heaving crowds and egotistical policemen"); wilderness as wilderness, and suburbs as a "deplorable 'half-way' condition. Hence was born his mission to connect the "highwayless towns and wilderness way" that would become the Appalachian Trail. His parallel governmental forays, and leadership in creating the Wilderness Society and 1964 Wilderness Act were inventive and numerous. Anderson's book, though perhaps more detailed than the average reader would choose, provides fascinating glimpses of the rich period, the cast of planners and politicians, and their procedures. Whatever MacKaye's exact trade - sometime forester, sometime writer, sometime trail propagandist - his aspirations read like a coda for regional planning. Using the "weapons of salvage," as he put it, he sought to preserve a "balanced environment, townless highway, highwayless town, greenbelt, wilderness area, and regional city." Whatever today's distance from those dreams, at the least, the road he traveled--and enabled us to travel--should earn him a solid place in the creative canon. This article appeared in Architectural Record, February 2004.
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His slogan, "speak softly but carry a big map," said much of the man and more of the times. In a lifetime (1879-1975) that spanned the era of wilderness-definer Teddy Roosevelt and New Deal-builder Franklin Roosevelt, the emergence of the car culture, and the environmental movement, he hewed to his singular mission. The quiet, largely impoverished naturalist and guardian of the landscape, was a planner whose work and ideology not only framed a path for nature and human nature on this east coast mountain corridor, but made a profound mark on the American mindset. "A sort of nature god, a Yankee Pan," Lewis Mumford described him.