Celebrating Earth Day: Ansel Adams’ fight to protect California’s coastline

It was the spring of 1981, and Ansel Adams was deeply concerned about the fate of the California coast. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and newly-minted Secretary of the Interior James Watt had just announced plans to develop thousands of miles of California coastline—and many more miles of the interior, including potentially the National Parks themselves—for oil, gas, and coal drilling. Still energetic at the age of 79, Ansel dashed off a letter to his friend Bill Turnage, Executive Director of the Wilderness Society, with ideas about how to defend the nation’s pristine wilderness. “There is little time to lose,” he wrote. “The dragons are loose!”

Having spent nearly seven decades using his camera to capture the beauty of the American wilderness and campaign for its protection, Ansel turned to fighting for conservation with a new weapon: the pen. His letter to Bill sparked thousands more. In newspapers from coast to coast, Adams’ words appeared, condemning the Reagan Administration’s lack of care for conservation and urging his fellow citizens to join the fight. As Ansel wrote to the editors of the San Jose Mercury News, “If we lose the essential qualities of our environment, no political philosophy and no effort for defense will have validity… We are fighting for our life and the future of our descendants. We must stand up and be counted!” He concluded with a phrase he’d turn to again and again as he encouraged Americans to defend conservation: “A letter a day (from a million people) might keep Watt away!”

A million people writing a letter a day became Ansel’s goal as he worked to oppose Watt’s destructive aims. To raise awareness of the cause, he wrote to members of Congress and the Senate on both sides of the aisle, spoke to countless reporters (he was even interviewed by Playboy), and wrote dozens of Letters to the Editor, which appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and more. His campaign attracted the attention of Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who wrote to him gratefully: “please stay mad!”

The campaign worked, garnering so much attention that Watt denounced him to the press, claiming: “Ansel Adams never took a picture with a human being in it in his life.” (Watt, evidently, never visited the National Portrait Gallery, where Ansel’s portrait of President Jimmy Carter hangs.) In the end, Ansel outlasted Watt, who resigned in 1983—just months after Ansel met with President Reagan to discuss the importance of conservation. We’ll leave the question of causality to historians, but Ansel certainly celebrated Watt’s departure as a victory.