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Show eee THE STORY BEHIND THE SCENERY America’s crusade to save our dwindling wilderness has been a century-long struggle By Alexandra L. Woodruff What do the following numbers have in common: 5.7, 2.5, 3.2, and 9.1? Congress approved the law. Put a million behind each one of these figures and you have just some of the numbers that have been thrown around in the Utah wilderness debate. Some still debate whether wilderness has For the permanent good of the whole people...” The almost decade long struggle never diminished Zahniser's resolve. He continued to lobby for the law until his vision was realized. a place in the beehive state, but most seem to be debating on numerical terms by asking, “How much?” over. The calculations have been expanded, redefined and refined many times “With the enactment of this measure we shall cease to be in any sense a rearguard delaying ‘inevitable’ destruction of all wilderness, but shall become a new vanguard with But the wilderness movement didn't start with this modern-day number crunching; its origins go back to the beginning of the last century by people looking to protect land from human development. The early wilderness movement has evolved into a modern political cause that goes a lot deeper than the numbers and figures on the surface. Seeds of Wilderness The first concept of wilderness sprung up in the early government had already established the National Park landscapes in their natural form. The Forest Service was lands were subject to timber cutting, mining and grazing. reasonable hopes that some areas of wilderness will be preserved in perpetuity,” Zahniser testified in 1963 to the U.S. Senate. law. 1920s. At the time, the federal Service to preserve selected also in place, but these public Aldo Leopold, a forester and Finally on September 3, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into Congress ratified the legislation “to establish a National Wilderness Preservation System for the permanent good of the whole people, and for other purposes.” The new law would “assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and Let's make a concerted effort for a positive program that will establish an enduring system of areas where we can be at peace and not forever feel that wilderness is a battleground. Howard Zahniser a Suet ee Mine RE ee : 2 & e ts protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.” Federal public lands would finally have the legislative protection from development and extractive industries. Congress now had the right to keep pristine land 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.” The law also grandfathered in over 9 million acres of wilderness in the Forest Service ecologist, was one of the the first to see the intrinsic value of protecting these lands in a state unadulterated by humans. In New Mexico, he observed the destruction of the area now known as the Gila National Forest. After much lobbying within the Forest Service, he was able to set aside close to 600,000 acres for “wilderness recreation.” Leopold started a trend that eventually designated around 14 million acres of Forest Service land as “primitive.” The problem with the new preserves was they were governed solely by an administrative designation, which had no legal recourse if someone changed or violated it. All the designations could be wiped out if a new administration or staff took over. As a result, logging, mining, roads and grazing slowly chipped at these prototype wilderness lands. When the Wilderness Act finally passed by Congress in the 1960s only 9 million of the original 14 million acres qualified as wilderness. Even back in the 1930s activists felt an urgency to protect pristine land from human development. “The universe of the wilderness, all over the United States, is vanishing with appalling System. The Act allowed Congress to create wilderness in National Parks, National Forests Marshall wrote in a 1937 Nature Magazine article. In the early 30s Bob Marshall was the chief forester of the Office of Indian Affairs. This position gave him the political connection to lobby the wilderness concept to the executive and on USS. Fish and Wildlife Service Wildlife Refuges. Remarkably, lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management were not covered when the bill was passed in the 1960s. “There was not the same interest in recreating in the desert; more arid areas were being used primarily for extractive purposes for cattle ranching and mineral development and basically you didn't have the same public outcry for protection of these types of lands at that point in time. In other words most of the focus was on forested, scenic types of landscape and not desert landscapes,” explained Bob Keiter, director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land Resources and the Environment at the University of Utah. It was not until 1976 that Congress passed the Federal Land Policy Management Act, which gave Congress the authority to establish wilderness on BLM lands. The bill also called the agency to inventory its land to determine what areas would qualify as branch. He knew the lands could not be managed by the political fancies of the current wilderness. administration. “Wilderness areas obviously require a continuing policy. Under the present system a single unsympathetic administration could at any time wipe out our remaining primitive expanses. In order to escape the whims of politics, which might make the president of the Utah's Road to Wilderness : The BLM inventory was the catalyst for the wilderness movement in Utah that the state is still trying to resolve. The BLM's initial inventory found 2.5 million acres; Utah rapidity. It is melting away like some last snow bank on some south-facing mountainside during a hot afternoon in June. It is disappearing while most of those who care more for it than anything else in the world are trying desperately to rally and save it,” wrote Robert American Automobile Association the next Secretary of the Interior and Henry Ford the next Secretary of Agriculture, the areas selected by the Wilderness Planning Board should be set aside by an Act of Congress, just as National Parks are today set aside. environmentalists challenged the agency and it agreed to a new number: 3.2 million acres. This would give them-as close an approximation to permanence as could be realized in a world of shifting desires,” Marshall wrote to Franklin Roosevelt's Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes. Marshall realized he needed more support to force the issue into a movement. So in 1935 he founded the Wilderness Society with Leopold and other notable environmentalists like Olaus and Mardy Murie. The group gave momentum to the movement, which aimed . at legislatively protecting public lands from human intrusion. Just four years after the group's formation Marshall passed away leaving the group to find new blood to carry on the paign. Howard Zahniser was able to pick up where the movement had left off. “Let's make a concerted effort for a positive program that will establish an enduring system of areas where we can be at peace and not forever feel that the wilderness is a battleground,” Zahniser said. As the executive director of the Wilderness Society, Zahniser teamed up with the Society's Director, Olaus Murie, to begin conceptualizing the first wilderness bill. Zahniser came up with the first draft in the mid-1950s and lobbied for almost eight years before 6 a " Se RE Le CO Ee ee TO SS ES CSE SE SE PO This land is currently being protected as Wilderness Study Areas, which means the land should be kept in its untrammeled form by the BLM until it is designated wilderness. WSASs act as interim protection for the land until a law is passed to designate it otherwise. Because this is an administrative protection, the agency does not have to manage the land under wilderness guidelines. during this interim period. It simply has to make sure that impacts do not increase After the BLM's inventory, Utah environmentalists decided to conduct their own survey of BLM lands. ‘They found the initial inventory ignored thousands of acres of wilderness. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, inconjunction with the Utah Wilderness Coalition _found an additional 2.5 million acres to add to the wilderness tallies. This forced the BLM to go back into the field and re-inventory. Again, the BLM agreed with the numbers. This extra acreage has not yet been designated as WSAs and is currently undergoing a public process to determine if they should receive the interim protection. In the early 90s, Utah environmentalists were still not satisfied with the acreage, so they decided to conduct a more comprehensive study of BLM public lands. “When they first did this work there was a small community; they didn't have th Ee ee POE CEE SHES OSE ROU EE Se S eee Re SSS ER ORE HS ERSTE DOR SERS SS Re De ee |