From personal experience I know that, with the President's support, U.S. federal political appointees can help save the biosphere. But I've also learned that, without the help of private environmental groups throughout the political process, from the nomination of candidates for elective office through the legislative program-authorization and budget-appropriation processes, government officials’ hands are tied in this regard.

Initiatives taken by nongovernmental environmental organizations (NGOs) have been and will be critical to the success of the biodiversity conservation movement. When I was President Carter's point person on forestry and soil conservation policy (Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment, from 1977 to 1980) I saw to it that the National Forest Management Act of 1976 was interpreted to require protection of National Forest biodiversity. With the President's support I initiated the second roadless area review and evaluation of the 191-million-acre National Forest System (RARE II) which identified some 3,000 National Forest wilderness-protection opportunities throughout that system in forests from Puerto Rico to Alaska. The result: President Carter asked Congress to double (from 12 million acres to 24 million acres) the amount of National Forest System land in the National Wilderness Preservation System, and Congress eventually adopted most of those recommendations. But without the help of the environmental NGO community throughout the Forest Service administered RARE II inventory and evaluation phases and the follow-on legislative process, those executive-branch efforts would have been fruitless. The NGOs took the recommendations made by the Carter Administration, modified them, and won from the Congress statutory protection for millions of acres of intact ecosystems (e.g., Allin, 1982; Roth, 1984).