Wilderness Act

The Wilderness Act of 1964 (Public Law 88-577) created the legal definition of Wilderness in the United States , and protected some 9 million acres (36,000 km&²) of federal land. The result of a long effort to protect Federal Wilderness , the Wilderness Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3 , 1964 .

The Wilderness Act is well known for its succinct and poetic definition of wilderness:

...an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

When Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964, it created our National Wilderness Preservation System. The initial statutory wilderness areas, designated in the Act, comprised 9.1 million acres (37,000 km&²) of national forest wilderness areas previously protected by administrative orders.

Today, the Wilderness System comprises over 106 million acres (429,000 km&²) involving federal lands administered by four agencies, as shown on this table.

The National Wilderness Preservation System: Area Administered by each Federal Agency (July 2004)
Agency	Wilderness area	Percent of agency land designated wilderness
National Park Service	43,616,250 acres (176,508 km&²)	56%
U.S. Forest Service	34,867,591 acres (141,104 km&²)	18%
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service	20,699,108 acres (83,766 km&²)	22%
Bureau of Land Management	6,512,227 acres (26,354 km&²)	2%
Total	105,695,176 acres (427,733 km&²)	17%
*DATA SOURCES*
''Table from The Enduring Wilderness: Protecting Our Natural Heritage through the Wilderness Act (Fulcrum Publishing, 2004). Wilderness area by agency from www.wilderness.net. For consistency, all data used for percentage calculation are from Federal Land Management Agencies: Background on Land and Resource Management (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, RL30867, February 2001)''

The most important thing about the Wilderness Act is that when Congress designates each wilderness area, it includes a very specific boundary line—in statutory law. While it is hard to pass legislation (our founder fathers designed it that way), once a wilderness area has been added to the System, its protection and boundary can only be altered by another act of Congress. That places a heavy burden on anyone who, all through the future, may propose some change.

The basics of the program set out in the Wilderness Act are straightforward:

The lands protected as wilderness are areas of our public lands.

Wilderness designation is a protective overlay Congress applies
to selected portions of national forests, parks, wildlife refuges,
and other public lands.

Within wilderness areas, we strive to restrain human influences
so that ecosystems can change over time in their own way, free,
as much as possible, from human manipulation. In these areas,
as the Wilderness Act puts it, “the earth and its community
of life are untrammeled by man”—untrammeled meaning
the forces of nature operate unrestrained and unaltered.

Wilderness areas serve multiple uses. But the law limits uses
to those consistent with the Wilderness Act mandate that each
wilderness area be administered to preserve the “wilderness
character of the area.” For example, these areas protect
watersheds and clean-water supplies vital to downstream municipalities
and agriculture, as well as habitats supporting diverse wildlife,
including endangered species, while logging and oil and gas drilling
are prohibited.

Along with many other uses and values for the American people,
wilderness areas are popular for diverse kinds of outdoor recreation—but
without motorized or mechanical vehicles or equipment. Wilderness
is the haven of quiet beyond the end of the road, the wild sanctuary
we meet on its own terms by leaving the machinery of twenty-first-century
life behind. The wild popularity of wilderness recreation shows
how hungry Americans are for just such sanctuaries.

This is not all the wilderness that Americans will choose to preserve on their public lands. Congress considers additional proposals every year, some recommended by federal agencies and many proposed by grassroots conservation and sportsmen’s organizations.

This fall Congress is actively working on bipartisan bills to designate new wilderness areas in Washington State, California, Virginia, Idaho, and New Hampshire. Grassroots coalitions are working with local congressional delegations on legislative proposals for additional wilderness areas in many other states, including Vermont, southern Arizona, national grasslands in South Dakota, Rocky Mountain peaks of Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. To its credit, the U.S. Forest Service has recommended new wilderness designations (which citizen groups may propose to expand) in some of these places and others.

Wherever there are public lands with fragile wilderness qualities, local citizen groups are working to secure the strongest protection we can give such lands, which is wilderness protection by act of Congress. These grassroots efforts are backed by national organizations, including the Campaign for America’s Wilderness , the Wilderness Support Center (part of The Wilderness Society), the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and many others.

SOURCE

This article is adapted from The Enduring Wilderness: Protecting Our Natural Heritage through the Wilderness Act, a Campaign for America's Wilderness book by Doug Scott published in August 2004 by Fulcrum Publishing.

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Wilderness Act