Two brothers from a tiny Mormon town in eastern Arizona did more to protect American land than almost any family in the nation’s history. One ran the Interior Department through the most productive conservation decade since the New Deal. The other spent thirty years in the House and authored the law that locked away more wilderness in a single stroke than any act of Congress before or since. Their last name is now attached to a federal foundation, a courthouse, and a generation of environmental policy.
This is the story of Stewart and Morris Udall, the conservation brothers, and how the two of them quietly built much of the legal architecture that still protects America’s public lands. We tell it as part of our Environmental Heroes Series, the same project that profiles Rachel Carson and the figures who shaped the modern movement.
Stewart Udall: The Man Who Ran Interior
Stewart Lee Udall was born on January 31, 1920, in St. Johns, Arizona, a rural Mormon town his own grandfather had helped settle. His father, Levi Udall, served on the Arizona Supreme Court. Public service was the family business.
He interrupted his studies at the University of Arizona twice, first for a Mormon mission, then to fly as an Air Force gunner over Europe in World War II. He came home, finished his law degree in 1948, and opened a Tucson practice with his younger brother Morris. In 1954 he won a seat in the U.S. House, where he spent six years focused on public lands and natural resources.
117 public lands destinations are under threat. Get the free briefing that 27,000+ people use to stay informed and take action.
Then came the appointment that defined him. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy named him Secretary of the Interior, a job he would hold through the entire Kennedy and Johnson administrations, from 1961 to 1969.
Eight Years That Reshaped The Map
It is hard to overstate what the Interior Department accomplished on Udall’s watch. During his eight years, more than sixty units were added to the National Park System, including Canyonlands National Park in Utah, North Cascades National Park in Washington, Redwood National Park in California, and a string of new national seashores, lakeshores, and recreation areas. He also helped push through the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965, the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, and major clean air and water legislation.
This was the era of Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification campaign and the wave of bipartisan environmental lawmaking that would run right into the Nixon years. Udall was the executive-branch engine behind much of it. Ken Salazar, who held the same office under President Obama, called him “one of the greatest secretaries of the Interior in my lifetime.”
The Quiet Crisis
In 1963, while serving as a sitting cabinet secretary, Udall published The Quiet Crisis, a history of the American relationship with the land that became a bestseller. Its argument was that the country’s apparent prosperity masked a slow, largely unnoticed degradation of its air, water, soil, and wild places.
The timing was decisive. “The Quiet Crisis” appeared one year after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and the two books are often credited together with launching the modern environmental movement. One came from a scientist on the outside, the other from a cabinet officer on the inside. Together they made conservation a national subject.
“If you want inner peace, find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.”
Stewart Udall, The Quiet Crisis
The Fight For The Downwinders
Udall’s most remarkable second act was turning his legal skills against the government he had served. In the 1970s and 1980s he took up the cause of people poisoned by the nation’s nuclear program: Navajo uranium miners dying of lung cancer, and the “downwinders” of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona who had lived beneath the radioactive fallout of above-ground weapons testing in the 1950s and early 1960s.
He sued the federal government on their behalf. The courts largely deflected the claims on sovereign-immunity grounds, but the litigation produced a record that Congress could not ignore. In 1990 lawmakers passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which set up a fund to compensate thousands of affected Americans. Udall helped write and lobby for the law. It was a rare thing: a former cabinet secretary spending his later years holding his own former government to account.
He never stopped warning about the next crisis. In one of his last published pieces, “A Letter to My Grandchildren,” Udall wrote about climate change with the same plainness he had brought to “The Quiet Crisis” decades earlier: “The carbon in the atmosphere is increasing every day and little is being done to slow this insidious trend.” He died at his home near Santa Fe on March 20, 2010, at the age of 90.
Morris “Mo” Udall: The Conscience Of The House
Morris King Udall, known to everyone as Mo, was born in St. Johns on June 15, 1922, two years after his brother. He flew as a gunner in the Pacific during World War II, earning the Air Medal, then took his University of Arizona law degree into practice alongside Stewart in Tucson. He was 6-foot-5, missing one eye from a childhood accident, and famous for a wit so disarming that even his opponents quoted him.
When Stewart left Congress in 1961 to run Interior, Mo won the special election to replace him. He held Arizona’s seat for the next thirty years, from 1961 to 1991, building a reputation as a reformer who took on both the seniority system of the old House barons and the environmental fights nobody else wanted.
I’ve been through legislation creating a dozen national parks, and there’s always the same pattern. When you first propose a park, and you visit the area and present the case to the local people, they threaten to hang you. You go back in five years and they think it’s the greatest thing that ever happened.
Morris Udall
The 1976 Run For President
In 1976, Mo Udall ran for the Democratic presidential nomination as the standard-bearer of the party’s liberal, reform wing. He finished second in a long string of primaries, repeatedly the bridesmaid to the eventual nominee, Jimmy Carter. Udall took the losing with characteristic humor, joking that the voters had spoken, “the bastards.” He never reached the White House, but the campaign raised his national profile and, fittingly, put him in position to do his most lasting work alongside the man who beat him.
The Alaska Lands Act
Mo Udall’s monument is the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, known as ANILCA, signed by President Jimmy Carter in December 1980. As chairman of the House Interior Committee, Udall steered the bill through years of brutal opposition from Alaska’s congressional delegation and the resource industries.
The result protected roughly 157 million acres of Alaskan land. It more than doubled the size of the national park system and tripled the national wilderness preservation system in a single law, creating or expanding places like Wrangell-St. Elias, Gates of the Arctic, and Kenai Fjords. It remains the single largest expansion of protected land in American history.
Udall recalled his aim simply: to protect “the most spectacular of the many large tracts of wilderness in Alaska, from despoilment.” He also spent years championing clean air, clean water, and strip-mining reform. In 1986 the National Wildlife Federation named him its Conservationist of the Year.
The Final Years And A Lasting Legacy
Mo Udall was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1979, even as he was fighting the Alaska battle. He served until ill health forced his resignation from Congress in May 1991. When he left, The Washington Post’s David Broder wrote that “the legacy he left is imposing and enduring,” ranging from “strip mining and Alaskan wilderness legislation to the reform of archaic committee and floor procedures.” In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died on December 12, 1998.
In 1992, Congress created the Udall Foundation, a federal agency honoring both brothers. It funds scholarships for students pursuing careers in the environment, tribal public policy, and Native American health care, and runs a respected office that mediates environmental disputes between federal agencies and the public. Each year it sends dozens of college students into the fields the Udalls cared about most.
Between them, two brothers from St. Johns, Arizona, helped write the Wilderness Act, run the most productive Interior Department of the century, and protect 157 million acres of Alaska. As Wendell Berry put it, “the Earth is what we all have in common.” The Udalls spent their lives acting on that idea, and the country is measurably wilder for it. For more on how their era stacks up, see our ranking of the greatest conservation presidents.
About The People Behind More Than Just Parks
You should probably know that this does not come out of thin air. We love America’s public lands, and my sons Will and Jim have spent their entire adult lives bringing these places to life through their films.
Will and Jim have worked with the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior, the USDA, and the U.S. Forest Service for years, creating films about important places and issues. Their work has been featured in publications around the world, and a few people outside our immediate family even call them experts on the national parks.
In 2018, having spent a lifetime teaching history, I joined More Than Just Parks to help tell the stories behind these remarkable places.
