50 Years of Wilderness

"If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."
                   — President Lyndon Baines Johnson, signing the Wilderness Act of 1964 into law.

Elizabeth Kolbert, an environmental writer, says in the current National Geographic magazine: "Some 30 proposed wilderness areas now await approval from a gridlocked Congress. None of the proposals would have made it even that far without broad local support. There would be no better way to celebrate the Wilderness Act's golden anniversary than for Washington to approve them."

Read her article 50 Years of Wilderness here.

Please take the time to write your Congressional members and ask them for protection now before they are degraded by competing uses.

Let us hear from you -- what does Wilderness mean to you?

National Wilderness Month

President Obama has declared September National Wilderness Month, and in 2014, we also celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of The Wilderness Act. In his proclamation
President Obama called on Americans to “reflect on our rich tradition of stewardship, which has preserved the wild and scenic places we enjoy today, and renew our commitment to advancing our country’s legacy of conservation in our own time.”

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, MN

Read the proclamation here.

The Idea of Wilderness

Wilderness: Our Enduring American Legacy

Hiking in the John Muir Wilderness

A new publication from The Wilderness Society celebrates the role of wilderness in shaping our national character, highlights the significance of wilderness in America and calls on Congress to protect more wild places.

"Changes unforeseen by the authors of the Wilderness Act five decades ago ... make the resource of wilderness even more essential to our nation's future."

 More than two dozen locally-crafted, home-grown bills to protect new wilderness areas are still pending before the House and Senate; many have been stalled on Capitol Hill for years due to political partisanship and ideological disputes. To honor the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, The Wilderness Society is calling on

Eagletail Mountains Wilderness in Arizona

Congress to renew its commitment to protecting wilderness by passing legislation to protect our wild legacy. The report highlights Hermosa Creek in Colorado, Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, and Maine’s Coastal Islands among other priority areas.

You can view this special report here. 

Distance to Nearest Road

The USGS Geographic Analysis and Monitoring program developed a national high resolution dataset that gives the distance to the nearest road every 30 meters (square) across the conterminous 48 states. These roadless areas are clustered mostly in the west around mountain ranges and deserts, with a few in the east ( the bayous of southern Louisiana, northern Minnesota, etc.).

The dark green signifies the areas farthest from roads and much of it overlaps with federally designated wilderness areas. Designated wilderness comprises only about 5% of the continental United States, and this map shows how special these areas are. (Click on the map to enlarge it.)

What are your favorite roadless areas?

View the complete publication (Fact Sheet, 2005, Watts, RD, RW Compton, JH McCammon, CL Rich, and SM Wright. Distance to the nearest road in the conterminous United States. Fort Collins, CO: USGS)

Ten Wilderness Facts

1. There are 757 wilderness areas in the National Wilderness Preservation System.
2. The state with the most wilderness areas is California (149).
3. These states have no federally designated wilderness: CT, DE, IA, KS, MD and RI
4. While the Forest Service manages more wilderness areas, the National Park Service manages more acres of wilderness.
5. The newest wilderness is the Elkhorn Ridge Wilderness (CA), designated in January of 2011.
6. Yellowstone National Park (WY) contains no federally designated wilderness.
7. The Appalachian National Scenic Trail travels through 21 designated wildernesses.
8. Pt. Reyes National Seashore (CA) has more than twice as much designated wilderness than all of the other National Seashores combined.
9. Half of all wilderness areas are within a day's drive of America's 30 largest cities.
10. In addition to federally designated wilderness areas, seven states have state wilderness systems: AK, CA, MD, MI, MS, NY and WI.

Let's Celebrate Wilderness! 4

Howard Zahniser

The founders of the Wilderness Society knew that the the early wilderness areas didn't have adequate protections as it was relatively easy to reverse the administrative acts that created them. They knew that it would take stronger legal action on the federal level and began to craft legislation to accomplish this. Howard Zahniser became the executive director of The Wilderness Society in 1945 and went on to write 66 drafts of the Wilderness Act. The Act went through 18 Congressional hearings between 1956 and 1964, opposed by such industry giants as the American Mining Association, the American Pulpwood Association and the National Cattleman's Association.

President John F. Kennedy endorsed the wilderness bill in 1961, and the Senate approved the Zahniser drafted bill that year, but the House radically altered their version of the bill and it died in committee that year. Howard Zahniser worked with the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee chair Wayne Aspinall (D-CO), one of the chief opponents of the bill, and other House representatives and eventually agreed to enough concessions to get The Wilderness Act of 1964 through both the House and Senate.

President Lyndon Johnson hands the pen he used to sign
the Wilderness Act of 1964 to Alice Zahniser. Also pictured
are Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, Senator Frank Church
Mardy Muire, and Rep. Wayne Aspinall, among others.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Act on September 3, 1964. Unfortunately, Howard Zahniser, who worked so hard to make the Act reality, didn't get to see it finally enacted; he died in May of 1964 at the age of 58. President Johnson gave the pen he used to sign the act to Alice Zahniser, Howard's wife.

The Wilderness Act established the United States' National Wilderness Preservation System which permanently protects these federal public lands for future generations for both people and wildlife. There have been more than 100 separate Wilderness bills signed into law since 1964, designating approximately 107,500,000 acres of land as Wilderness. This is about 4.82% of the country, however, a little more than 50% of this Wilderness is in Alaska. The smallest Wilderness Area is Pelican Island, FL, at about 5 acres, and the largest is Wrangell-St Elias in Alaska at 9,078,675 acres.

Let's Celebrate Wilderness! 3

Aldo Leopold was the first to use the word wilderness to describe the areas he wanted to be preserved in the National Forests. He worked in the Forest Service where he was tasked with killing predators hated by local ranchers. He came to respect these animals and promoted an ecologic ethic that replaced the 'dominance of man' thinking that came to the United States with the settlers, with an approach that recognized that the balance of nature required predators for a healthy forest. His efforts resulted in the world's first designated Wilderness, the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico's Gila National Forest.

Aldo Leopold

Leopold famously wrote in an essay, "Of what avail are 40 freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" In 1935, he helped to found The Wilderness Society (along with Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKay, Bob Marshall, and Harvey Broome) which is dedicated to expanding, protecting and promoting a wilderness land ethic.

Shortly after his death in 1948, a collection of his essays were published as "A Sand Country Almanac." This book has been published in twelve languages and continues to be an important reference for modern conservationists.

More on the history of Wilderness next week.

Let's Celebrate Wilderness! 2

Thomas Moran's
 "Tower Creek, Yellowstone"

In 1872, Yellowstone was designated a "public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the American people." Note that the National Park Service wasn't created until 1916, and so, in these early years, Yellowstone wasn't afforded much protection. But the creation of the park was important as it planted the idea that lands could be set aside by the government even if the idea of actual protection lagged behind.

John Muir in 1872

In the 1870s, John Muir began writing about the importance of nature and was published in many magazines. His letters, essays and books were read widely, and were an influence on the thinking about preserving natural areas. In 1874, John Wesley Powell wrote a series of articles that generated public interest in the Grand Canyon.

The "Indian Wars" came to and end with the sad battle at Wounded Knee in 1890, and John Muir creates the Sierra Club in 1892 to enlist public and governmental support for the idea of preserving natural areas. Frederick Jackson Turner read a paper at the the American Historical Meeting in Chicago declaring that "the frontier is dead" in 1893. At the close of the century, Gifford Pinchot is appointed as Chief of the Division of Forestry for the country, which later became the National Forest Service, as the government began conservation of natural resources.

The next 50 years, 1900 - 1950, saw an increasingly ardent movement growing around the protection of natural places. The growth of the railroad opened up access to the western part of the country, including the Santa Fe which brought tourists to the Grand Canyon. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt set aside the first National Wildlife Refuge at Pelican Island in Florida. The use of the Executive Order by sitting Presidents has been invaluable in protecting public lands.

Grand Canyon from Powell Point

Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon in 1930 and wrote,
 "The Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond comparison—beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world... Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see." 
 In 1906, the passage of the Antiquities Act allows Presidents to establish National Monuments and Devil's Tower becomes the nation's first followed by Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908.

In 1913, a major conservation fight is lost when a dam is allowed at Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite. This loss boosts the determination of the environmental movement to increase their efforts for protection. Between 1920 and 1929, Arthur Carhart, Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard and others advance the idea of national wilderness preservation through their writings and appearances around the country.

Stay tuned -- more on the history of Wilderness next week.

Let's Celebrate Wilderness!

2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, signed into law by President Johnson on September 3rd, 1964. Wilderness Volunteers is planning a year long celebration of the Act, and is a sponsor of Wilderness 50th, a coalition of federal agencies, non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and other wilderness user groups whose purpose is to raise awareness of this important piece of legislation and the need for Wilderness. We'll be blogging and tweeting about Wilderness weekly, and look forward to reading your comments about the role Wilderness plays in your life.

Frederick Law Olmsted

The Act was first drafted in 1949, but the idea to set aside special areas to protect them from the degradations of logging, mining, agriculture and development began with the beginnings of the environmental movement in the late 1800s. Frederick LawOlmstead pushed for protection of Yosemite Valley in 1864, and is widely held as first to advocate the idea of placing certain scenic natural areas under government protection. He is believed to be the start of the national conversation that got folks to start thinking about how quickly the US was being exploited. Around this same time, George P. Marsh publishes Man and Nature, warning citizens to stop the devastation of natural resources.

Santana

In 1867, a Kiowa Nation Chief, Satanta, recognized the effects of encroaching civilization and voiced opposition to construction of the Union Pacific Railroad at a council held at Fort Larned, Kansas. While Native Americans didn't have much sway at the time and went on to suffer greatly at the hands of the new country, their plight was noticed by the fledgling environmental movement.

More on the history leading to the Wilderness Act next week.