A Wyoming Girl Scout who learned to love the outdoors long before becoming a jurist has weighed in on such critical national questions as whether loggers should fell marbled murrelets’ nesting trees, whether wilderness should be valued, and whether Led Zeppelin ripped off the opening notes of “Stairway to Heaven” from an American band.
That’s a sampling of issues handled by Margaret McKeown, a Casper native, UW alum and judge on the California-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
She also serves as the chair of the Teton Science Schools’ Murie Ranch Committee, a group that oversees the collection of cabins in Grand Teton National Park considered the birthplace of the country’s 112 million-acre system of forever-preserved wilderness lands.
Those wild, unaltered places have repeatedly rejuvenated McKeown when she needed it most — like after she refereed pop-cult squabbles over whether Ian Fleming pirated the screen persona of 007 and whether Trekkies stole from Dr. Seuss.
“As life gets more compressed and busier, I think I appreciate more and more that there are these areas which are primarily untrammeled,” McKeown said in an interview. She made her remarks as the Murie Ranch — an outpost that seeks to educate folks about the spiritual renewal available in the natural world — celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Wilderness Act.
“I remember as a kid going to a fish and wildlife camp down by Laramie and working on beaver dams and tagging fish and that has stuck with me my whole life.”
Margaret McKeown
The landmark legislation has preserved federal lands of “primeval character and influence” that contain “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.”
Just the type of refuge one might need after opining on how the doctrine of laches, willful infringement, deliberate piracy, fair use and other legal principles might apply to courtroom bickering among novelists, musicians, screenwriters and TV promoters.
“I remember as a kid going to a fish and wildlife camp down by Laramie and working on beaver dams and tagging fish and that has stuck with me my whole life,” McKeown said. “That really inspired me to have a sense of how important place can be and how important solitude can be.”
Serendipity in Moose
McKeown, whose wilderness travels have taken her as far as the slopes of Tibet’s Shishapangma, stumbled upon the Murie Ranch just south of Grand Teton National Park headquarters in Moose during a winter outing. The ranch was for years the home of Olaus and Mardy Murie, two parents of the modern conservation movement.
“I snowshoed in and I just did not know [about] the Murie Ranch,” she said. A staffer emerged from a snow-covered cabin, briefed her and kick-started McKeown’s “trying to figure out who the Muries were and what they meant.”
The couple was key to the preservation of 2 million acres of national forest in Wyoming, including the Bridger, Teton, Washakie and North Absaroka wilderness areas. That’s what was protected by the 1964 Wilderness Act, a measure that grew out of years of conservation confabs at the Murie Ranch in the 1960s.
Mardy Murie cajoled attendees, and Christmastime visitors to her home, with cookies, a recipe for which McKeown included in her free 2020 book “The Nineteenth Amendment Centennial Cookbook.”
Congressionally designated wilderness areas are tracts of federal land that are roadless, undeveloped and preserved. Permanent “installations” and settlements are prohibited. Mechanized travel and motors are not allowed. Wilderness areas are “where the hand of man has not set foot,” Sierra Club’s David Brower once said. The Teton Science Schools’ annual Spirit of Conservation Award and celebration recently heralded the 60th anniversary of the Wilderness Act.
“We recognize, of course, the Natives were there longer than the Wilderness Act, and were using the land in a very productive way,” McKeown said. “But we also know that absent the protection that Congress gave it, that we might not have these approximate 112 million acres [nationwide] that we have now.”
As McKeown researched Wilderness Act history, she discovered a person who urged the Muries to preserve the ranch as the environmental campus it serves as today.
“Someone showed me a letter from [the late U.S. Supreme Court] Justice [William O.] Douglas to the Muries, saying that they should give this homestead to The National Park Service in honor of conservation heritage and as a spiritual place to enjoy nature,” McKeown said on the Judgment Calls podcast. “I thought it was pretty interesting that Justice Douglas was in touch with these humble conservationists from Wyoming.”
McKeown probed further. An activist, Douglas “ran a one-man lobby shop from his chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court,” according to the podcast. He strayed from the bench, for example, to arrange hikes on the 185-mile-long C&O Canal to promote its conservation as a park.
“The story just unfolded that Justice Douglas had a life on the bench, and then he had a completely separate life out in the wilderness promoting the environment,” she said on the podcast. “It just seemed that this was a story worth telling.”
McKeown published “Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas, Public Advocate, and Conservation Champion” in 2022.
“It all really started in that serendipity moment of snowshoeing into the Murie Ranch and also then realizing everyone should know about this,” she said.
Murie magic
At the Teton Science Schools and Murie Ranch, students can gain environmental awareness, including about wilderness, the Wilderness Act and the Muries’ biological and conservation work. McKeown sat recently in Olaus and Mardy Murie’s log cabin to reflect on the genesis of wilderness preservation and how conservation should be taught to the next generation.
“If Wyoming school children all came, even briefly, to be inspired by the Murie magic … they would take that experience with them for a long time,” she said.
That experience could become important given the challenges to wilderness preservation today.
“We’re seeing weather patterns change … receding glaciers,” she said. “We’re also seeing wildlife patterns changing. There’s a number of unseen impacts and that’s what many of the scientists and biologists, the wildlife experts are looking at now.”
There’s also a crush of people on Planet Earth and more demands for access to open spaces, including by using now-prohibited mechanization like bicycles to travel into wilderness areas. Mountaineering faces a reckoning as managers and politicians wrangle with how to regard necessary fixed anchors.
Regardless of deeply held beliefs regarding the sanctity of nature, whether one should be allowed to paddle but not pedal, judges can’t impose those convictions on others. They don’t make the law, she said.
Justice Douglas may have wished he could have. In a lawsuit pitting the Sierra Club against Disney’s proposed Mineral King ski area, he wrote a minority opinion touting the rights of nature.
“He wrote in his dissent … that it’s not just the people, but you’ve got the rights of the river, the mountain and other natural beauty,” she said. “He was an early advocate of this idea.”
“In Washington State … one of the towns essentially wrote into their local legislation the right of orcas — to speak for their preservation and their conservation,” she said. “I think there’s definitely much more interest in this concept than there had been.”
Although she’s able to doff her judicial robe and leave the vaulted chambers of San Francisco’s 1905 Beaux Arts California federal courthouse for a romp in the woods, it’s not her remit to snoop on the marbled murrelet and confirm whether it lays one egg at a time only on the broad branches of an old-growth conifer.
“We don’t really research these issues beyond the record presented to us,” she said. Judges aren’t required to have the birding skills of James Bond, the American ornithologist whose name Fleming borrowed for his hero, before deciding the fate of a seabird that has, as she wrote, “secretive nesting habits in tall trees … camouflaged feather patterns and high velocity flight.”
Instead, the opinion she authored in the murrelet’s favor landed on “adequacy of the notice of intent to sue,” “actual injury,” “proximate causation” and other legal constructs. No murrelets were seen during the writing of that opinion.
“I feel like I’ve been privileged in my exposure to the outdoors,” McKeown said, but “we have to recognize that when cases come before us, whether it’s an environmental case or some other case … we’re looking at the record and we’re also looking at the law.
“I think there’s no doubt that a diverse life experience provides a richer bench,” she said. “But in the end, we don’t get to wave our magic wand.”
112 million acres
To date, Congress has protected about 112 million acres of public land as wilderness. The Murie Ranch displayed a pen President Lyndon Johnson used to sign the Wilderness Act when McKeown and others recently celebrated the act’s 60th year. President Johnson gave the plume to Mardy Murie after he used it.
“I think that [pen], plus actually seeing the physical wooden sign that said Wilderness’s Home, really brought home what a special place we have,” she said. At the Murie Ranch, “I’m always learning something new.”
Head-clearing wilderness might steel future jurists as they opine on legal spats involving spy novelists, children’s book authors, TV producers and rock stars. Reading McKeown reveals they could use it.
Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s “Stairway” “has a different ascending line that is played concurrently with the descending chromatic line, and a distinct sequence of pitches in the arpeggios,” none of which is present in the American band Spirit’s song Taurus, McKeown wrote; Ian Fleming did not double cross a collaborating screenwriter and rip off the on-screen persona of “Bond. James Bond” and Star Trek promoters did not go where no man had gone before, boldly or otherwise, when they used Theodor Geisel’s characters to promote their TV show.
“[I] feel like it would be great to be a kid again and be in their school or to be out on their field education trips,” McKeown said of Teton Science Schools students. “We want to inspire, and that’s our mission, and that’s why I’ve been so committed.”
Great Photography, and I really appreciate the text. Perspective of judges rarely get presented outside of the opinions delivered.
A great story, Angus, and really wonderful photography.
Thank you, Angus. Good to review some of the details. I recently brought Mardy’s Crybaby Cookies recipe home with me to make during the holidays.
Another wonderful story, Angus. Thank you.
A wonderful and inspiring story. Thank you.
Keep federal lands in PUBLIC HANDS.