Appalachia, Winter/Spring 2008
Forty years later, an imperfect but noble document presses humans to practice restraint.
All of us have a different idea of what wilderness is or what it means to be “wild.” For some, wilderness is an urban park; for others, wilderness means big, untouched by human hands, and potentially dangerous. We all have different feelings about whether or not wild places are exciting, beautiful, or just plain scary. The poet Robert Service may have best summed up one view when he wrote in “The Call of the Wild,”
Let us probe the silent places
let us seek what luck betides us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There’s a whisper on the night-wind,
there’s a star a-gleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling … let us go.”
But Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows recognized a different spirit when he “saw clearly that he was an animal of tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden plot. For others the asperities, the stubborn endurance, or the clash of actual conflict that went with Nature in the rough; he must be wise, must keep to the pleasant places in which lines were laid and which held adventure enough, in their own way, to last for a lifetime."
Most of us have a little of Mole and at least a little of Robert Service in our souls. Wilderness is both beloved and frightening. Whatever our views, Henry David Thoreau may have summed it up best when he wrote, “Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling."
Wild is defined as unsettled country; living in a state of nature, untamed, uncontrolled; not cultivated. It can also mean visionary, as in a “wild idea.” From the idea that wildness was both rapidly disappearing as more and more land became cultivated and manipulated for human gain—and that it was worth saving as an integral part of humanity’s needs—came the wild idea that America should set aside land strictly for the purpose of protecting wildness. This idea became the 1964 Wilderness Act and led to the creation of the National Wilderness Preservation System. Today, there are almost 108 million acres of federally designated wilderness throughout the United States. That’s about 4.7 percent of the United States. The largest federal Wilderness, Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska, makes up 9,078, 000 acres; the smallest, Pelican Island in Florida, is a humble 6 acres.
It took eight years for the Wilderness Act to be signed into law. It went through numerous drafts, rewrites, and changes before President Lyndon B. Johnson, surrounded by numerous wilderness champions including Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and wilderness advocate Mardy Murie, put his name to it on that September 3. The main author of the act and charter member of the Wilderness Society, Howard Zahniser, died the year it became law. According to Doug Scott’s book The Enduring Wilderness (Fulcrum, 2004), Zahniser bemoaned, “I am no bill drafter. If I had to do this again, I would much prefer to state all this in iambic rhyming couplets or even in a sequence of sonnets, than attempt to do this in bill language.” According to his son, Zahniser was influenced by Blake, Dante, and Thoreau. One can easily see a The Wilderness Act has preserved places of natural wonder, such as Maroon Peaks in poet’s vision and the romantic philosophers in the idea of setting aside land to be wild and “untrammeled.” When it passed, there were those, just like today, who said the Wilderness Act was elitist and impractical.
Recently a friend asked me if he and I were just living in the past. He had been told that the Wilderness Act was, after all, 40 years old. It was put to him: isn’t the idea of designated wilderness outmoded? Don’t we need a new vision? Don’t we need to keep up with the times? It seemed to me that the question really asks, Shouldn’t we recognize that more and more people want to use the same amount of land? Shouldn’t we make it easy for them? Shouldn’t we use chainsaws and helicopters because we have them and because they make sense? And shouldn’t we use every bit of land that we can to meet our ever-increasing energy needs, to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels and foreign dependence?
I tried to assure my friend that he and I were in the right—that we had to protect these values, that we had to protect what the Wilderness Act stood for. But I hung up the phone, stared out the window at a grey late winter New England day, and began to pace the room, wondering….
REBECCA ORESKES of Milan, New Hampshire, is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Wilderness and is a former chair of the U.S. Forest Service’s Wilderness Advisory Group. When not hiking or gardening, she works for the White Mountain National Forest.
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