Wilderness Watch believes that wilderness is defined by two primary characteristics. First, it is a place where nature is free to exist as it did in ages past, self-willed and untrammeled. Second, it is a place where humans are free to roam through nature in its wild condition, to experience a feeling of solitude and self-reliance found nowhere else.
For over 20 years, Wilderness Watch has confronted threats to wildness and solitude, such as helicopters and all-terrain vehicles; bulldozers and chainsaws; illegal buildings, commercial intrusions and other developments; predator control and other exploitation of native wildlife; excessive horse-packing and other livestock-related damage; and many other incursions that degrade wilderness. We educate, engage and encourage citizens and government agencies to stand up for our nation’s strong and unique wilderness heritage.
Please join us in ensuring that America's Wilderness remains full of mystery, adventure, and biological wealth.
“It is painfully clear to me…that a private, citizen’s organization is necessary if the spirit and letter of this landmark law [the Wilderness Act] is to be observed… I wholeheartedly offer my name and energy to your splendid efforts.” —Former Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, upon joining the Wilderness Watch board of directors
A few years ago, I led a group through the wilds of northern Alaska's Brooks Range during the early autumn caribou migration. I think that if I had fourteen lifetimes I'd never again experience anything quite so primeval, so simple and rudimentary, and so utterly and uncompromisingly wild. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this beheld my eye above all else. Maybe that trek—in one of the ultimate terrestrial wildernesses remaining on Earth—is my personal yardstick, my personal quintessence of what constitutes real wilderness among a lifetime of wilderness experience. The tundra was a rainbow of autumn pelage. Fresh snow engulfed the peaks and periodically the valleys, too. Animals were everywhere, thousands of them, moving across valleys, through passes, over divides, atop ridges. Wolves chased caribou. A grizzly on a carcass temporarily blocked our route through a narrow pass. It was a week I'll never forget, a week of an ancient world that elsewhere is rapidly receding into the frightening nature-deficit technophilia of the twenty-first century.
