About Stewart Udall

Stewart Udall was the greatest Secretary of the Interior in United States history. During his service for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Stewart Udall was the driving force behind the creation of four national parks, six national monuments, eight national seashores and lakeshores, nine national recreation areas, 20 historic sites, and 56 wildlife refuges. He was the government’s primary advocate for the 1964 Wilderness Act, and he teamed up with his younger brother, Mo Udall, to help push the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act through Congress. After leaving the Administration, he worked tirelessly alongside Mo on all of the significant environmental and land protection statutes that became law in the 1970s and 1980s, including the Endangered Species Act. In all, Stewart Udall worked collaboratively with the Congress to add 3.85 million acres to the public domain.

Shortly after becoming Interior Secretary, Udall wrote The Quiet Crisis (1963) , his best-selling book on environmental attitudes in the United States. In the book, he wrote about the history of conservation in America, and the dangers of pollution, overuse of natural resources, and dwindling open spaces. Along with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, The Quiet Crisis is credited with creating a consciousness in the country that led to the modern environmental movement. 

Forty years before Al Gore raised public alarm about global climate change, Stewart Udall raised the warning that anthropogenic climate change could result in catastrophe: “We have ignored the vital fact that we are utterly dependent on natural cycles of a thin and fragile layer of living plants and animals which exist where conditions of air, water, and solid earth combine to favor life, and which our scientists call the biosphere. These cycles can, of course, be seriously disrupted by our industrial and agricultural activities. Combustion in the furnaces and engines that power our industrial system produces such vast quantities of carbon dioxide that the foliage of the earth and the plankton of the sea may not be able to convert it back to carbon and oxygen. In turn, this may alter the heat-absorption capacity of the atmosphere and cause the earth’s climate to grow warmer, melting the polar ice and raising the level of the seas.” (1976: Agenda for Tomorrow by Stewart Udall, 1968, p. 104.)

After he retired from government service in 1969, Udall spent another 30 years as a private citizen working on behalf of conservation and environmental protection, including advocating solutions against global climate change decades before the topic reached public consciousness.

In his environmental biography of Stewart Udall (see below), Scott Einberger identified 3 major accomplishments that Udall made — really themes that provide lessons for us today:

1.  “Udall’s accomplishments in the realm of working successfully with people of differing opinions and beliefs for the common good serve as a model for “working together” and bipartisanship. The significance of this cannot be overstated in a day and age when partisan politics seem to rule supreme, particularly in the areas of environmental and climate-change mitigation laws.”

2. “Udall’s proposals and recommendations, specifically in regard to energy conservation and oil-addiction solutions, are still relevant and deserve more than just thought and consideration today. Increases in high-speed passenger trains, bicycle paths in cities, and solar panels on rooftops nationwide, to list just three of Udall’s recommendations, could all lead to major decreases in our use of dirty fossil fuels.”

3. “Stewart Udall’s writings, sayings, and doings teach us to take the long view of things. In his 1976: Agenda for Tomorrow, Udall provided blueprints for how the country could create both a life-giving and life-sustaining environment during its third century of existence. In the book, he wrote about the threats posed by global warming twenty-five years before it became a common household term… Udall recommended being proactive in solving problems rather than letting things get to the brink of catastrophe. He also believed in making decisions based not on what is best for today but what is best for tomorrow, next week, next year, the next generation, and the generation after that.”

In 2010, Congress voted  to change the name of the US Department of the Interior Building in downtown Washington, DC, to the Stewart Lee Udall Department of the Interior Building.

Finally, it should be noted that Udall’s extended family also deserves environmental accolades. Stewart’s brother, the late Morris Udall, represented Southern Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives for thirty years. The two worked together on many environmental initiatives. Their work together dominated environmental reform for three decades.