Remembering Polly Dyer: New exhibit profiles a Cascades champion
The ‘American Alps’ were in peril. One of the world’s largest mining companies had designs on excavating within the jagged wilderness known as the North Cascades. A band of conservationists, including the cheerfully tenacious Polly Dyer, had other ideas. Dyer’s living room became a sort of academy for envelope-stuffing, stamp-licking activists who advanced a budding movement of middle-class professionals with the leisure time to defend the natural world. With crucial help from U.S. Senator Henry M. Jackson, they won protection…