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A CENTURY OF WILDERNESS ACTIVISM

Presented by 
Bruce Hamilton, National Conservation Director, Sierra Club

7th World Wilderness Congress, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
November, 2001


INTRODUCTION - THE ORIGINS OF WILDERNESS IN THE UNITED STATES

Most Western scholars will say that the idea of permanently protecting wild country as national parks and wilderness areas was born in the United States. After all, that's where the first official national government designated national park - Yellowstone - and the first designated national wilderness areas were established. 

The very idea of needing to designate and protect wild country through legislation must seem very odd and foreign to most indigenous cultures unfamiliar with nations and national governments. To them, wilderness was just a part of their daily lives - their environment and home -- and it required no protection. 

The idea of protecting nature from development through government action grew up in the United States because we had a culture clash of immense proportions. Right as the Industrial Revolution was making it possible to exploit wild untamed country at a record pace, an intellectual movement grew up that caught the imagination of the American people and some key influential leaders that nature was something to be revered and preserved rather than tamed and exploited. 

By the middle of the 1800s the United States was a young country with rapidly developing coastal states, and an interior that was mostly remote and undeveloped. The interior lands were bought (such as the Louisiana Purchase) or won in wars (such as the American Southwest). After their annexation, the federal government had in mind handing them over to private use - farming, mining, logging, grazing - as rapidly as possible. There was no thought given to retaining wild lands in public ownership. 

When Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872 the primary purpose was to promote the tourism industry for the railroads. While it was recognized as a scenic wonder, the Congress noted that there was no harm in designating the area as a national park and putting it off limits to development because it "had no pecuniary value" and if some profit-making scheme could be devised in the future "we could always undo the act." Now how's that for a noble conservation vision?


THE ROLE OF JOHN MUIR AND THE SIERRA CLUB IN DEFENDING WILDERNESS

> SLIDE OF JOHN MUIR

But by 1890, a little-known Scottish immigrant with a love of wildness burst on the scene. This self-proclaimed tramp - John Muir - had hiked from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico and throughout the Sierra Nevada in California. An amateur inventor, naturalist, writer and geologist, Muir loved all things wild and could not stand to see them destroyed. He also wore his passion on his sleeve, knew how to find adventure, and had a great gift for words and placing them in key places at key times.

In 1889, at the urging of Robert Underwood Johnson (an editor of Century Magazine), Muir undertook a campaign to designate his beloved Yosemite as a national park. That same year Underwood and Muir discussed establishing some sort of conservation association that Muir would lead. 

> SLIDE OF YOSEMITE

In 1892, in San Francisco, California, the Sierra Club was founded, with Muir as its first President. He said the idea behind this new club was he was "hoping to do something for wildness and make the mountains glad." Muir all too quickly found out what the Club needed to do for the mountains, for, no sooner had Yosemite become a national park and it came under threat of dismemberment. Under pressure from timber, livestock, and mining interests, a bill was introduced in Congress to drastically reduce the park's dimensions. 

The bill died in committee, thanks in large part to the Sierra Club and John Muir, but this brief but important battle made it clear that no wild place was safe from development - even the national parks. As David Brower, the Club's first executive director, was fond of saying no environmental war is ever finally won, though any battle, when lost, is lost forever. Not a very comforting thought, but it is a recipe for full employment of environmentalists - we will never be obsolete.

> SLIDE OF ROOSEVELT AND MUIR

In his fight to protect wildness Muir knew he had to court people in power and effectively use the media to shape public opinion. He published his writings in the most influential newspapers and magazines of his era - the New York Tribune, American Journal of Science, Harper's Weekly, and Scribner's Monthly. This brought him great fame so that soon major writers and politicians were seeking out Muir. His most famous encounter was with President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, when the two tramped around Yosemite and even got caught in a snowstorm. Muir's love of wilderness was contagious as he hoped to "do some forest good in freely talking around the campfire" with the President. Roosevelt called the encounter "the grandest day of my life." Roosevelt's Presidency was a high water mark for land preservation. Through executive action he set aside millions of acres of forest reserves, national monuments, and national wildlife refuges.

By 1900, the moneychangers were back at the doors of the temple, this time trying to flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park to provide water and power for the City of San Francisco. For those of you unfamiliar with Hetch Hetchy, it was a twin to Yosemite Valley, with equally spectacular waterfalls, granite domes, and sheer rock walls. Muir and the Sierra Club waged a campaign for over a decade to stop this desecration of the national park, but after the 1906 earthquake, when the city burned to the ground and allegedly lacked an adequate water supply to fight the associated fires, the political momentum became too great to stop. 

The battle over Hetch Hetchy also clearly delineated a major chasm in conservation philosophy and politics. While John Muir staked out the clear and compelling case for preservation, Gifford Pinchot, a Pennsylvanian schooled in forestry in Europe, was establishing the case for utilitarian management of public lands. The vast forest reserves that Presidents Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt had established to protect them from timber barons were consolidated in the Agriculture Department under the Forest Service, with Gifford Pinchot as its first chief. To Pinchot, scientific management was essential and nature could not be left to its own devices. Each acre needed to produce "the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run." Pinchot and Muir clashed over Hetch Hetchy and ultimately Pinchot convinced Roosevelt to back the dam. 

Muir railed against the dam and invasion of the park, saying what use was the whole idea of national parks "inalienable for all time" if Yosemite could be sacrificed? "Dam Hetch Hetchy!" he declared. "As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man." 

President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the bill allowing Hetch Hetchy to be built in 1913. A year later, though the official cause was listed as a lung infection, Muir died and close associates said it was of a broken heart over Yosemite. He was 76.

But the ideals that Muir articulated so well, and the organization that he had built to defend the earth's wild places, outlived him. With the inspiration of John Muir, the leadership of Stephen Mather (who became the first National Park Service Director in 1916), and the profit motive of tourist oriented western railroads, the National Park System expanded rapidly into the 1930s. 

LEOPOLD AND MARSHALL AND THE EVOLUTION OF WILDERNESS

However, as the park system expanded, so did the developments within it. During this period two great wilderness advocates - both Forest Service employees - spoke out in alarm at the growing industrialization of the parks. Aldo Leopold complained in 1921 that "the parks are being networked with roads and trails as rapidly as possible" to promote tourism, and as a result wilderness was being lost. Bob Marshall, his contemporary, wrote in 1937 to the Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes that "the Park Service seems to have forgotten the primitive."

> SLIDE OF LEOPOLD

Leopold, while trained as a wildlife manager, was a brilliant and beautiful essayist. His "A Sand County Almanac" is a classic in world conservation literature and wilderness philosophy. In 1935 Leopold wrote: "This country has been swinging the hammer of development so long and so hard that it has forgotten the anvil of wilderness which gave value and significance to its labors. The momentum of our blows is so unprecedented that the remaining remnant of wilderness will be pounded into road-dust long before we find out its values."

Leopold argued against Pinchot's utilitarian philosophy, siding with Muir that some areas needed permanent protection from all development. His advocacy led to the establishment of the Gila Wilderness Area in 1924 - the nation's and the world's first official wilderness - though it was just an administrative temporary designation. Leopold's campaign finally caught the attention of the Forest Service's leadership and in 1929 the agency adopted "L-20" regulations, which called for the designation of "primitive areas" on the forests. But the regulations did not strictly prohibit any form of development or use, including logging and road-building, so no primitive area was completely safe and inviolate. 

> SLIDE OF ANSEL ADAMS

This steady loss of wildness lead Bob Marshall to remark, "Wilderness is melting away like some last snowbank on some south-facing mountainside during a hot afternoon in June. It is disappearing while most of those who care more for it than anything else in the world are trying desperately to rally and save it."

The steady loss of national forest wilderness led the Sierra Club and others to continue to campaign for more national parks. In 1938 and 1940, respectively, Olympic National Park and Kings Canyon National Park were established from Forest Service primitive areas. Noted wilderness photographer and Sierra Club leaders Ansel Adams took a portfolio of his wilderness shots back to Washington, D.C., where he showed them to Congress and the Administration to convince them of the need to preserve Kings Canyon. But also fearful that parks could be overdeveloped, they convinced the bills sponsor to designate Kings Canyon a "wilderness park."

> SLIDE OF BOB MARSHALL

Throughout the 1930s the greatest champion of wilderness was Bob Marshall. In his job at the Forest Service he convinced the agency to replace the flexible "L-20" regulations with new "U" regulations, which called for the designation of wilderness areas (over 100,000 acres) and wild areas (under 100,000 acres). And unlike the "L-20" lands, these new "U" designations prohibited logging and road building. 

THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY AND LEGISLATED "PERMANENT" WILDERNESS

Marshall, like Muir, also realized that to protect wilderness one needed to also build public support. So he joined with Leopold, Olaus and Mardy Murie, Howard Zahnizer, Dick Leonard, Sigurd Olson, Stewart Brandborg, his two brothers and other visionaries and established The Wilderness Society in 1935. 

The Wilderness Society joined forces with the Sierra Club and other conservation groups of the day to continue to fight for protection of wild places. But The Wilderness Society also became the nucleus of the think tank and center of activity devoted to developing the notion of permanent legislated protection for wilderness. 

> SLIDE OF ZAHNIZER

In 1934, Marshall had suggested the need for permanent legislative protection for wilderness. The idea lay dormant after Marshall's premature death in 1939, but resurfaced in 1951 at a Sierra Club national wilderness conference where Howard Zahnizer, the Executive Secretary of the Wilderness Society, floated the radical notion in a speech. However, it was not until 1956 that Zahnizer drafted a wilderness bill and had it introduced. And it would be eight years later, in 1964, before the bill would be signed into law following years of intense campaigning by conservation groups to overcome the opposition of miners, loggers, ranchers and other opponents. Surprisingly, the bill ultimately attracted broad bipartisan support and passed the Senate 78-8 and the House 373-1. The lopsided vote was a tribute to Howard Zahnizer and the conservation community who worked tirelessly to address all parties' concerns. Sadly, Zahnizer passed away just 4 months before the bill was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. 

The Wilderness Act not only established some wilderness areas. It also established a clear unambiguous national policy that to preserve wilderness for present and future generations was in the public interest. It also established a national standard for wilderness. Wilderness areas were defined as areas "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man"; lands of 5,000 acres or greater "without permanent improvements or human habitation." Logging and use of mechanized equipment was prohibited, but grazing (where established) was allowed to continue and hunting and fishing were allowed.

When the Wilderness Act passed it designated the first 9,140,000 acres of statutorily protected wilderness out of the existing national forest system of administratively protected areas. At the insistence of the main opponent of the bill, the new law also required that only Congress would be able to add lands to the system. While this provision was originally viewed as an insurmountable obstacle - after all it had taken 8 long years to pass the Wilderness Act - it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The reason is that this provision reserved a place for the Congress to regularly review agency decisions not to protect areas, and it set up a process whereby citizens could influence the final decision by lobbying Congress. 

Another extremely helpful provision which laid the foundation for the wilderness movement of the last 35 years was the requirement of a 10-year review of an additional 5 million acres of roadless wild land in the national forests, national parks, and national wildlife refuges. The law also demanded that as the agencies reviewed these lands and prepared recommendations for Congress on their status, they were to consult the public. This provision forced wilderness advocates to build up strong grassroots support for each area, which could then translate into a potent lobbying force when the agency recommendations returned to Congress. So when the agencies came back with greatly scaled back proposals for additional acreage in wilderness, citizens were ready to have Congress step in and up the ante. This drove the agencies crazy because citizens and Congressional staff were overriding agency recommendations and drawing new larger wilderness boundaries while removing lands from the timber base.

BUILDING A WILDERNESS ADVOCACY CITIZEN MOVEMENT

> SLIDE OF POPO AGIE WILDERNESS

But citizens refused to stop at the 5 million acres of primitive areas mandated by the 10-year review process. If Congress could step in and establish a wilderness area and not just follow the agency lead, then why not look at designating some areas that were completely overlooked by the agencies. There were easily 200 million acres of de facto wilderness on the public lands, why should Congress be restricted to only look at the 5 million acres deemed primitive and wild by the agencies? 

The first successful citizen-initiated wilderness proposal was the Lincoln-Scapegoat Wilderness in Montana in 1972. That victory set the stage for a flood of new proposals and new reviews over the next 30 years. 

Another extremely significant development was a Sierra Club lawsuit, decided in 1972, which required the Forest Service to prepare a detailed environmental impact statement to evaluate the wilderness potential of each and every roadless area before any development could proceed. This legal victory gave citizens a tool to stop development and organize support for wilderness before an area was destroyed by a bulldozer or a chainsaw. This legal victory ultimately led to two national comprehensive reviews of all roadless lands on the national forest system and the passage of dozens of wilderness bills covering millions of acres of wild lands.

Soon every federal land management agency was required by law to review the wilderness potential of their lands, to involve the public in that review, and to report back to Congress with recommendations. Before the wilderness debate was focused primarily on high alpine national forest primitive areas with very little development potential, but now there were wilderness reviews on national grasslands, desert lands, national park backcountry, seashores, and previously logged second growth forests in the eastern states. 

> SLIDE OF ALASKA

Perhaps the most ingenious stroke of wilderness politics was a provision in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act - a law whose primary purpose was to give Alaska native tribes certain ancestral lands and rights - requiring that the federal government look at establishing new parks, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas in Alaska and report back to Congress. This provision was championed by Dr. Edgar Wayburn of the Sierra Club, who realized that when the state of Alaska and the natives were carving up 375 million acres of federal lands in the state, it was important to make sure the public's interest in wild land preservation was also considered. 

In Alaska, for the first time conservationists had the opportunity to look at establishing wilderness areas that encompassed entire ecosystems and watersheds. In past wilderness disputes in the Lower 48 States, the debate was over whatever lands had not been developed -- all too often just the mountaintops or the canyon bottoms. While these wild remnants were highly scenic, they all too frequently were completely inadequate from the standpoint of protecting biological resources. Key habitat or watershed lands were often unsuitable for consideration as wilderness because they were too heavily developed and no longer met the wilderness criteria. 

The battle over, what came to be called, the Alaska National Interest Conservation Lands Act took 10 years, but when it was finally signed into law by President Jimmy Carter it doubled the size of the wilderness system, the park system, and the wildlife refuge system in a single day. The act established 55 million acres of wilderness, 32 million acres of new national parks, and 18.5 million acres of new national wildlife refuges. This was the single biggest land conservation victory in U.S. history. All told it established 104.3 million acres of new protected areas in one stroke of the pen. 

Today, the National Wilderness Preservation System includes nearly 105,800,000 acres in 644 areas in 44 states. It includes arctic tundra, tiny islands, high volcanoes, vast desert sand dunes, deep forests, snowcapped peaks, sunny beaches, wild rivers, fjords, lakes, swamps, and sandstone arches. But while this looks like the wilderness campaign is near to complete, in fact, our work has only just begun. There are at least 200 million additional acres of wildlands in need of defenders and deserving full statutory protection.

NEW CHALLENGES FOR A NEW GENERATION OF WILDERNESS ADVOCATES

> SLIDE OF GRIZZLY BEAR

ECOSYSTEM PROTECTION: For the first 100 million acres, with the notable exception of the Alaska Lands Act, wilderness bills have designated undeveloped wild lands without regard for ecosystem boundaries. The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act is a notable exception. This proposal would increase protection for 20 million acres of wild country in the Northern Rocky Mountains of the United States. In addition to designating 18 million acres of new wilderness, the proposal calls for a National Wildland Recovery System to restore almost 1 million acres where roading, logging, and mining have severely damaged vital ecosystem components such as wildlife corridors. NREPA also establishes special corridor management areas, where development is limited, but not prohibited, allow for biological connectivity between core reserves. This approach is a first for the United States as a legislative proposal, though this approach has been successfully pursued by private land conservancies on a much smaller scale. The leadership that The Wildlands Project is providing in articulating the case for ecosystem protection and providing the scientific justification to back it up has been invaluable in this process. 

ROADLESS AREA PROTECTION: In the United States, one of the biggest threats to wilderness and wildlife habitat is roads. Roads are built initially to access a timber sale or oil drilling site or stock water pond, but then quickly get taken over by off road vehicle enthusiasts, hunters, and other motorized users. The roads introduce alien plant and animal species and diseases, destroy habitat for sensitive species, lead to erosion and stream sedimentation, increase fire danger, and pave the way for more development. Roads are the number one cause of water quality degradation on the national forests. On the national forests of the USA there are over 380,000 miles of roads, so that as one looks at a map or flies over most forests they look like a plate of spaghetti with a twisted maze of roads dominating the landscape.

If one looks at the 190 million acres of national forests in the US, about half are already so crisscrossed with roads, mines, pipelines, clear cuts, and transmission lines that they cannot be considered for wilderness. Another 35 million acres of national forests are already protected as wilderness by Congress. What remains in the balance is 60 million acres of roadless undeveloped national forest that needs full protection, but is at risk. 

After decades of debate over the fate of these lands, in 1999 the Clinton Administration launched a national effort to determine their future. Over 600 local hearings were held and over 1 million comments in support of full protection were gathered by the Sierra Club and our allies. At the conclusion of the process, Clinton recommended protection for 58.5 million acres - all roadless lands over 5,000 acres in size. Unfortunately, with the election of George W. Bush the new administration has abandoned support for this vital initiative. Now development-oriented states such as Idaho are challenging the Clinton forest policy in court and the Bush Administration has refused to put up a defense. It will be a huge legal, administrative and legislative struggle over the next few years to keep the Bush Administration and the timber industry from destroying these wild forests. 

> SLIDE OF UTAH WILDERNESS

DESERT AND GRASSLAND WILDERNESS: To date most of the U.S. wilderness debate has been around wilderness on the national forests. The fate of wild non-forested deserts, "sky-islands" in the deserts, and grasslands is a wilderness protection chapter yet to be written. While the Sierra Club led a successful campaign to protect the California Desert - the single biggest park and wilderness bill for the Lower 48 states in our history - the fate of millions of acres of desert and grasslands from North Dakota to Utah is yet to be decided. Citizens are drafting proposals and organizing support for this next generation of wilderness, and we can expect Congressional action over the next two decades. 

The national grasslands pose a special problem and opportunity. Over 99 percent of the native prairie in the Great Plains of the United States has been plowed and fenced. After the dustbowl of the 1930s abandoned farmland that never should have been cultivated was returned to public ownership and managed by the Agriculture Department to restore its native grass cover. Today these national grasslands offer a chance to establish prairie wilderness, if we can overcome local opposition from entrenched interests, including ranchers and oil companies. These lands also may serve as core areas to restore native wildlife species such as bison, wolves, bighorn sheep, elk, black-footed ferrets and other species that have been driven out of the plains by civilization.

As each of these proposals are coming forward, wilderness advocates are looking not only at what is left that is still wild, but also what is needed for ecosystem protection and restoration and how can we "rewild" an area to recapture its wilderness qualities. 

ALASKA BIG WILDERNESS, ROUND TWO

> SLIDE OF ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

While some would say that the 104 million acres of Alaska that we protected through the Alaska Lands Act in 1980 was the resolution of the debate, conservationists see it as just the first round in a much longer fight. Already in 2001 there is a huge national fight over the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which oil companies and the Bush Administration see as the next big North American oil field, and conservationists regard as America's Serengeti and the biological heart of the North American Arctic Ocean coastal plain. Similarly, the Tongass National Forest in Southeastern Alaska is the United States' largest temperate rainforest, but under intense pressure from the timber industry. There are also tens of million of acres of Bureau of Land Management and Defense Department lands (including the National Petroleum Reserve - Alaska) in Alaska deserving full wilderness protection. It is easy to envision at least an additional 100 million acres of Alaska wilderness being added to the system over the next few decades. 

INTERNATIONAL WILDERNESS - THE RIGHT SORT OF GLOBALIZATION

Wilderness, the creatures that depend on it, and the watercourses that run through it, do not recognize international borders. While there are a small number of complementary preserves, such as Glacier National Park in Montana (USA) and Waterton National Park in Canada, there are many more cases where wild country and ecosystems are fragmented and have competing and contradictory management strategies across international borders. The Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) campaign is an attempt to tie together wilderness management for the entire Northern Rocky Mountains. Similarly, there are attempts to coordinate wilderness management around the Arctic, both on our border with Canada and our boundary with Russia.

Joint wilderness efforts with Mexico are equally important, but complicated by border security and immigration control concerns. As the Sierra Club has promoted wilderness areas along the Mexican border the Immigration and Naturalization Service and Border Patrol have raised objections, claiming they need to use motorized vehicles, erect fences, employ spotlights, and clear vegetation to keep a secure border. There is also less of a history of wilderness and parks protection in Mexico, and the industrialization of the border factory towns or maquiladoras, fueled by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has led to urbanization, destruction and widespread pollution of border wild areas. 

International cooperation will also be essential to help recover endangered species that depend on wilderness habitat that spans international boundaries. Grizzly bears, woodland caribou, Mexican wolves, jaguars, and ocelots are just a few of the species that will benefit from international wilderness cooperation. NAFTA has in many ways been a disaster for working families and the environment - especially along the U.S.-Mexican border. While the countries in North America have been quick to tear down trade barriers - all too frequently leads to environmental degradation - they have been slow in building up and investing in international environmental cooperation to preserve and restore our common continental wild heritage. 

Establishing international wilderness complexes along ecosystem boundaries and rewilding those areas that have been degraded, while establishing the necessary international agreements to make this all work as one unified system, will be a major challenge for the future. It will require us to be world citizens.

CONCLUSION

The wilderness idea is over 100 years old and the wilderness system has over 100 million acres preserved in perpetuity - but our work has only just begun. We need modern day John Muirs and Bob Marshalls to carry on where the present generation has left off. While we should be proud of our accomplishments and the wilderness heritage we have secured for present and future generations, if we don't continue to build on this progress we will leave our children a greatly diminished planet. Most wilderness areas are too small to support the full complement of native flora and fauna that should be restored to rewild our wilderness areas. Global warming is predicted to cause major shifts in flora and fauna, which could wipe out ecosystems that have endured for centuries. 

A new generation of wilderness advocates can lead the way to establish the next 200 million acres of wilderness, while simultaneously restoring the ecosystems around our existing wilderness areas. This is a future vision that would, as John Muir hoped, "make the mountains glad."