Wilderness Anniversaries

This year, 2024, is definitely Wilderness Anniversary year! We celebrate the SIXTIETH anniversary of the Wilderness Act, then more round numbers − a fiftieth, a fortieth, a thirtieth, a centennial − and still more. The 1964 Wilderness Act was the landmark legislation that brought us our National Preservation Wilderness System. It first brought the power of the law to preserving special natural places. The Act established 54 wilderness areas nationwide − all Forest Service areas that the agency had previously protected administratively. Thirteen of the new wildernesses were in California; no other state got that many. Next was Oregon with nine. Only one western state got no wilderness − Utah. Three states east of the Rockies got wilderness − Minnesota, New Hampshire and North Carolina.

On September 3, 1964, at the same time in the White House Rose Garden that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, he also signed the Land & Water Conservation bill that has provided significant funding for outdoor recreation facilities in countless American communities. Some say it brought more benefit to more people’s lives than the Wilderness Act.

But we applaud the bountiful benefits of Wilderness. A key 1964 bill provision provided for adding areas to the System, and the initial ten million acres in 54 areas in 13 states have now become 806 areas in 44 states plus Puerto Rico. Combined, the widely-spaced 806 wilderness areas would cover a chunk of land larger than California − their 111,889,002 acres compared to California’s 100 million. To give some perspective, however, note that the largest two of Alaska’s 48 wilderness areas cover more land than all California’s wilderness.

Fifty years ago . . . what happened in 1974?  Big events − establishment of California’s State Wilderness Preservation System (based on the federal act) with our first ever stand-alone state wilderness − the Sinkyone in northern California. Now we have a dozen state wildernesses including the state system's largest, the Anza-Borrego Wilderness, in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Also in 1974, the Farallon Wilderness was established, our state’s first National Wildlife Refuge System wilderness. We cheer its fiftieth anniversary.

Forty years ago, in 1984, came the California Wilderness Act, bringing California an additional three million acres in 27 areas, comprising alpine landscapes, foothill and coastal chaparral, and desert mountains. These were mostly Forest Service areas − like the Carson-Iceberg, Pine Creek, Sheep Mountain, and Dick Smith, but also two national park Wildernesses − Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon. There were additions to 13 existing wilderness areas, and the 1984 act also established the Mono Basin National Scenic Area and added the Tuolumne River to the National Wild & Scenic Rivers System.

And We also celebrate the THIRTIETH anniversary of the 1994 California Desert Protection Act, which brought California more individual wilderness areas than any other bill − 69 new ones including the Lower 48’s largest: the Death Valley Wilderness with three million acres plus. The detailed story of the years and tears fighting for the desert bill has been eloquently told in Frank Wheat’s book, California Desert Miracle; here is only a tiny summary. It started perhaps with FLPMA (the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act), considered the “organic act” for the Bureau of Land Management, first giving the Bureau a mandate to preserve its roadless lands and to inventory them for potential wilderness. BLM staff hardly knew how to go about this new mandate; first they had to define “roadless”. Fortunately, the committee report that went with FLPMA gave a clear direction: “The word ‘roadless’ refers to the absence of roads which have been improved and maintained by mechanical means; a way maintained solely by the passage of vehicles does not constitute a road.”

Many desert volunteers who worked with BLM to inventory roadless desert lands were alarmed by depredations by off-road vehicles. The first draft desert plan did set aside many areas as official “Wilderness Study Areas”, but with too many lands deemed unsuitable for wilderness, with plan amendments reducing the number of suitable areas, and with many areas approved for off-road vehicle use, activists were demoralized and considered the process a failure. The BLM attempt to sideline interest in a Mojave National Park (started by Peter and Joyce Burk) by designating the area as a National Scenic Area, added to their dissatisfaction. The notorious 1982 “Watt drops” (wilderness study areas released from consideration by Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt) also contributed to the urge for a legislative fix.

When Desert leaders Jim Dodson, Judy Anderson, and Elden Hughes came together on one desert trip, a legislative campaign began to jell. Jim and Judy had both served as Angeles Chapter chairs, while Jim had come to desert advocacy through concern over off-road vehicle proliferation and damage. After the California Wilderness Bill of 1984 passed, for which Senator Alan Cranston had worked, the three set out to interest the Senator in taking on the California desert as his next “big thing”.

At the California Wilderness Conference in fall of 1985, keynote speaker Senator Cranston announced that he was going to introduce a bill for the California desert. It was introduced in the spring of 1986, and eight and a half years later, on Halloween, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed it, with Jim, Judy, Elden, and Peter all present. Cranston was unable to get the bill passed before his retirement because a Republican Senate colleague was in opposition. The 1992 election of two California supporting senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, enabled its final passage.

Go to Frank Wheat’s book for all the excitement of those eight years.

But we get ahead of ourselves. Yes, 30^th, 40^th, and 60^th anniversaries matter, but we had wilderness well before that. We all know that these lands we proudly call our public lands were cared for and lived in for eons by Indigenous people across our continent. They irrigated, burned, and otherwise managed the lands, but their landscape modifications generally remained in harmony with natural ecosystems. The colonial settlers who thrust them aside and developed the land into farms, towns, and cities bent Nature to their will; they had no thought for the wildernemain they displaced. As cities and machines became dominant, so much of the land’s forest cover was destroyed that the federal government intervened: before the 19th century ended, forest reserves were set up; these became our national forests.

By the early 1920s, forester Aldo Leopold and others, noting the new prevalence of the automobile and roads rapidly proliferating, feared that no large chunks of land would remain without roads. They persuaded the Forest Service to draw lines around its largest roadless areas and call them wilderness, primitive, or wild, depending on size and condition. The first of those set-asides was the Gila Wilderness in southwest New Mexico in 1924.

So this year we celebrate the CENTENNIAL of the Forest Service's FIRST Wilderness: the Gila. I was in Silver City, New Mexico, this June for the agency's celebration: an outdoor park event with music, booths, and ceremonial speakers, two Indigenous tribal leaders, Forest Service officials, southwest New Mexico Congressman Gabe Vasquez, and New Mexico's senior Senator, Martin Heinrich.

After the Gila, the Forest Service proclaimed more wild areas during the ‘20s and ‘30s − some seventy in all. Environmentalists were reasonably satisfied with this. But, after the Second World War, new demand for timber to build houses put pressure on the Forest Service, and yielding to industry demands, they redrew boundaries of protected areas opening big expanses for timber cutting. Then the fragility of protections that depended on a bureaucrat’s whim became obvious; alarmed wilderness enthusiasts sought a lasting solution. Beginning in 1949, Sierra Club hosted a series of biennial wilderness conferences to determine what kind of national policy was needed. Here's a quote from the January 1956 Sierra Club Bulletin reviewing the 1955 conference:

“There is no question but that America's wilderness needs more than the administrative protection it receives now . . . We should have a national wilderness policy laid down by Congress. That policy should protect our wilderness from capricious administrative decisions, and from exploitation under the mining, mineral-leasing, and reclamation law . . . [and] should recognize that the value of wilderness cannot be measured in terms of dollars" (written by John R. Barnard).

That Bulletin also had an article by Howard Zahniser, executive director of The Wilderness Society and chief Wilderness Act author, entitled “What’s Behind the Wilderness Idea.” It has some often-seen Zahniser quotes, including, “We deeply need the humility to know ourselves as the dependent members of a great community of life . . .” Note also the next paragraph: “Paradoxically, the wilderness which thus teaches modern man his dependence on the whole community of life can also teach him a needed personal independence or ability to care for himself, to carry his own burdens, prepare his own food, furnish his own shelter . . . and . . . transport himself by walking . . . ” Zahniser envisioned a “vibrant vital culture . . . of people who . . . perpetually renew themselves in contact with the earth.”

Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey introduced the first wilderness bill in 1956 Opposition against the exclusion of cattle grazing surged, and subsequent bills omitted that politically unfeasible provision. Much of the groundwork that led to Congressional passage of the Act happened during the Kennedy administration which promoted wilderness as part of Kennedy's push for physical fitness: American citizens should have vast areas to roam in. Kennedy did not live to sign the bill; his successor Lyndon Johnson had that honor.

A centennial is a big deal, and it helps us remember that wilderness did NOT start in 1964, but the Sixtieth of the Wilderness Act remains vital to mark America’s first use of the law to saving nature from development − "in perpetuity".

Other wilderness bills of note:

Four years after the original 1964 Act, California got additional Forest Service wilderness. In 1968, we got the San Rafael and the San Gabriel Wildernesses. The following year, 1969, brought us the Ventana Wilderness as well as Lake Tahoe’s Desolation Wilderness. In 1972 came California’s first National Park Service wilderness, in Lassen Volcanic National Park. Additional small wilderness bills came in 1974, 1975, 1976, and 1978. In 1974, fifty years ago, we got our first Fish & Wildlife Service Wilderness − the Farallon Wilderness, off the coast near San Francisco. National park wilderness increased again in 1976 with the Phillip Burton Wilderness in Point Reyes National Seashore and the large Joshua Tree Wilderness with 595,364, acres. Subsequently, California shared two FWS wildernesses with Arizona: the 1990 Imperial Refuge and Havasu Wildernesses.

Then there was the 1992 Los Padres Condor Range and River Protection Act. 1999 brought Otay Wilderness on the Mexican border; 2006 saw the Northern California Coastal Wild Heritage Wilderness Act with new north coast wilderness. Still more wilderness came to California with omnibus bills in 2009 and in 2019. More to come.

Let’s not forget Nevada, our neighbor. In the original act, Nevada got one wilderness − the Jarbridge, (Nevada is now third in number of wilderness areas; with 72; Arizona, with 90, is second.)  After 1964, 25 years passed before Nevada got more wilderness when President Bush signed the Nevada Forest Service bill. Nevada saw rapid action after Harry Reid became Senator; we had the 2002 Clark County Act for southern Nevada, then eastern Nevada’s Lincoln County Bill in 2004, and the White Pine County 2006 Bill, north of Lincoln County. Those later bills all contained anti-environmental development provisions which prevented Sierra Club from fully supporting them, but we cherished their wilderness. Since then, Nevada had several smaller bills, plus massive national monuments: Gold Butte in 2009, Basin & Range in 2015, and now Avi Kwa Ame in 2023. Next − Bahsahwahbee, or Swamp Cedars.

For Nevada too, we say, more to come: And today, with concerns about a global biodiversity crisis and marked by extinction of too many species, we see that Wilderness is “necessary but not sufficient”. Sierra Club has joined the global “Thirty by Thirty” movement, seeking to conserve 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030, as a stepping stone, eventually to Half-Earth for Nature. Now we view Wilderness within a broader context: separate Wilderness Areas are core protection to be connected via broader 30 by 30 conserved areas, like national monuments, or national conservation areas, or even private biodiversity lands, that provide the essential habitat connectivity to boost the value of Wilderness. So let’s promote 30 by 30, with wilderness at its core. We can do it.