Protecting the Wilderness

Report Outline
Establishing the System
‘War on Wilderness’
Management Challenge
Special Focus

Establishing the System

Development vs. Environment Protection

There is wilderness and then there is Wilderness. According to the dictionary, wilderness is any uncultivated and uninhabited tract of land. Wilderness with a capital “W,” on the other hand, is something more. Some 82.3 million acres in the United States—about 3.5 percent of the total land area in the nation—are part of the National Wilderness Preservation System, which means they are protected from development. Under the terms of the Wilderness Act of 1964, which President Johnson signed into law 20 years ago on Sept. 3, 1964, no roads, dams or permanent structures may be built on these government-owned lands; motorized vehicles are forbidden; no timber may be cut. Lands in the wilderness system must be “administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness,” the 1964 law says. The statute defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

The United States was the first nation to preserve wilderness lands and the effort was a long and controversial one. But passage of the wilderness law in 1964 did not put an end to the controversy. Today, two decades later, the issues of how much and which land should be added to the wilderness system remain hotly contested. As in the past, the arguments basically follow a development vs. conservation pattern. Environmentalists say that putting lands into the National Wilderness Preservation System is one of the few ways to stop timber, minerals, oil and gas developers from destroying ecosystems, wildlife habitats, watersheds and the other environmental qualities of undeveloped wilderness areas. Development interests, on the other hand, argue that legislation setting aside wilderness areas closes—or “locks up”—land forever without taking into consideration current economic conditions or the nation's future resource needs.

Wilderness areas add up to “a very sizable amount of land being set aside which does lock up the land base,” said Scott Shotwell, vice president for congressional relations with the National Forest Products Association. Shotwell said that protecting wilderness forests from development has added to the enormous problems of the timber industry at a time when high interest rates have held down housing construction. And, Shotwell said, “when the demand comes back for housing, then there's going to be a problem because the land base [for timber] may not be there.”