Professor Emeritus Fights to Preserve Virginia Wilderness

Acre by Acre

Rangy and fit, Jim Murray looks the part of a man who has led a 40-year crusade for Virginia’s wilderness. And this Brahmin in buffalo plaid knows the inner qualities it takes for success as well: “Patience and toughness, I’d say.”

President of the Virginia Wilderness Committee in 1970 and again from 1999 until last summer, Murray, professor emeritus of biology at U.Va., has helped the committee’s 250 members add public land to the National Wilderness Preservation System by passing a bill through Congress every 10 years or so.

Among their victories? The 1975 Eastern Wilderness Areas Act, adding 200,000 acres; the 1984 Virginia Wilderness Act, adding two areas in the George Washington National Forest and eight in the Jefferson National Forest; and the 2000 Virginia Wilderness Act, adding, Murray says, “two splendid mountains”—Three Ridges and the Priest.

A hiker, hunter, mountain climber and birdwatcher inspired by Sierra Club founder John Muir, Murray is propelled into the wild by “the idea of solitude, of getting away from civilization and being by oneself in the natural world.” He’s felt the hunger since childhood, when, with his father, founder of the Virginia Society of Ornithology, he explored forests around Lexington. And there’s something a bit paradoxical, he knows, about this idyllic vision and the political hurly-burly required to preserve it.

“Mainly, it takes education and negotiation” to secure wilderness, Murray says. “There’s the opposition of ignorance—people’s misperceptions that they won’t be able to hunt in the wilderness or go there at all—and opposition by design, from people who fear they’ll lose timberland or the possibility of gas and oil leases or mineral extraction.”

Crucial, then, are skillful alliances. Bipartisan support helps greatly, and former U.S. Sen. John Warner (Law ’53), a Republican, and 9th District Rep. Rick Boucher (Law ’71), a Democrat, have long been staunch wilderness advocates. Murray’s own closest ally is his wife, Bess. The two met as lab partners at Oxford, and, from his University days as an ecological geneticist researching land snails to his current advocacy, the pair have shared a passion for environmental activism—and a 40-acre Charlottesville homestead graced with a herd of cows and an 1830s home built by Jefferson-era architect Thomas Blackburn.

It’s from that sanctum that they tirelessly continue raising consciousness of the “greening of America.” “Whenever one bill passes,” he says, “we’re ready with another.”

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This article an an excerpt form "Into the Wild," published by UVA Magazine