ice_on_chain

ice_on_chain
Originally uploaded by grynstar.

ferns

ferns baby
Originally uploaded by grynstar.

The loneliest law

I've always loved the idea of wilderness. Wild, raw lands untouched by humankind. It's our national love letter to the earth. Our way of saying, "Your beautiful. Your perfect just the way you are."

Why am I getting so mushy? Today is the 40th anniversary of that sweet sentiment. Lyndon Johnson institutionalized the idea of wilderness on September 3, 1964 with the signing of the Wilderness Act. It officiated what began as an indulgence by the Forest Service when they set aside the first wilderness area in the Gila National Forest in 1924. Once pen had finished kissing those seven pages of law there were 54 new Forest Service Wilderness Areas totalling 9.1 million acres and a mandate to review millions more acres of federal lands for wilderness potential. Today the National Wilderness Preservation System contains almost 105.8 million acres, almost half of which lies in Alaska. It's a mass of land if collected and concentrated in the State of California would only slightly outsize the farmland there.

According to Congress's definition, "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as 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 I first read those words it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. It was only much later when working as a substitute wilderness ranger did I truly begin to understand what wilderness really meant. After a week of cleaning camp fire rings, picking up trash, replacing signs, and clearing trails I began to feel that wilderness areas were more of a cheaply maintained amusement park rather than wildlife preserves. So, I investigated.

What I found, I found rather surprising. Simply put, the Wilderness Act has nothing to do with the protection of wildlife. In fact, the preservation of wildlife population or biodiversity is not even discussed in the purpose of the act at all. The language of the law only mentions wildlife once, and that is to alleviate states' concern that the act would affect their rights to manage wildlife and fish. Silly me, but I thought that wilderness laws should somehow at least mention something about maintaining the ecological functions and services from which we survive and prosper.

So, what does wilderness mean? The law sets forth four criteria: (1) It's not too burdened by the hand of humans, (2) It's a fun place in which to recreate, (3) It's at least 5,000 acres, and (4) there's something extra special about it. Well there you go, clear as day. Except that each of these criteria is extremely vague, and of course, are qualified with dozens of exceptions in the written law. And with that, Congress patted itself on the back, snipped the umbilical, and handed the federal land management agencies a glistening new screaming baby.

But this baby came with directions for care. It is those directions that would forever make it a bittersweet victory for environmentalists. The new wilderness areas were to be used for no commercial purpose and within whose boundaries the use of mechanized devices are forbidden except for the continuation of cattle production; mining; water project developments; fire, insect and disease prevention; commercial recreation activities, and the use of motorized vehicles. Not that these could be practiced anywhere, anytime, but under the regulatory discretion of the executive agencies.

Despite all these exceptions and the talk of wilderness as a haven for the natural world, what I found was that the Act was written to give people a place where they could simply get away. When it comes right down to it, that's really what this act is all about. There is no protection of wildlife, no preservation of the natural world, no written requirement for trees or birds or wolves - just a mandate for lonely spaces. A place where we can define what we are by what we aren't. A home to the misanthropist in us all.

-m