What future do we want for what remains of wild America, and to whom shall it be entrusted? This question boils at the heart of conservation polities, and nowhere more hotly than in the growing controversy over the magnificent North Cascades in Washington. The author of this report on the tangled struggle over the Cascades’ future is editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin Company, a director of the Sierra Club, and the author of ROADLESS AREA.

Sportsman, author, and conservationist, CLARK C. VAN FLEETis a native Californian who for more than four decades has roamed the forests and fished the streams of the West Coast. Like every true lover of wildlife, he is appalled by the carelessness with which politicians and government officials invade national parks and game sanctuaries which were thought to be inviolate. In the case he is describing, the Pentagon is to blame.