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Eagle cap Wilderness, Oregon by Leon Werdinger

Please, no diamonds for the Wilderness Act’s 60th anniversary

The 1964 Wilderness Act celebrates its 60th anniversary on September 3rd. Diamonds are a gift for a 60th wedding anniversary and presumably represent strength, but from a humanitarian lens diamonds have evolved to represent consumption and exploitation. This duality resonates with the 1964 Wilderness Act’s diamond anniversary and provides an opportunity to reflect on where we are now and what the National Wilderness Preservation System—Wilderness—faces moving forward.

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Yosemite Wilderness by René Voss

Is the National Park Service serious about Wilderness?

When one thinks of wild landscapes in the U.S., national park areas come quickly to mind. Yet, as we celebrate 60 years of the Wilderness Act this year, wild places in too many of even our most iconic parks have been left behind and left vulnerable. Deserving areas suitable for wilderness designation in parks from Acadia to Yellowstone and 13 areas in Alaska have not been protected under the Wilderness Act.

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Mountain bike by Eric Greenwood/USFS

Mountain bikers push to ride through Wilderness

The goal of the Wilderness Act, now celebrating its 60th birthday, was to set aside a small proportion of public land in America from human intrusion. Some places, the founders said, deserved to be free from motorized, mechanized and other intrusions to protect wildlife and wild lands. But now, a handful of mountain bikers have partnered with a senator from Utah to gut the Wilderness Act.

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Gros Ventre Wilderness, Wyoming by Howie Wolke

Wilderness at 60: A brief overview

On September 3, 1964, humanity’s unrelenting quest to tame, civilize, industrialize, and obliterate wild nature crashed into the Wilderness Act, signed into law by President Johnson on that momentous day. This visionary legislation—written primarily by the late Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society—created a federal policy to secure for the American people “an enduring resource of wilderness.” Under this law, Wilderness areas must remain “unimpaired” and be administered “for the preservation of their wilderness character.” Considering humanity’s history, this was a revolutionary moment.

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Wolf by Sam Parks

New Isle Royale wolves ironically diminish island’s wildness

A recent AP story about a new report on the “recovery” of wolves at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior quoted me as saying, “We have felt and still believe that the National Park Service should not have intervened and set up this artificial population of wolves.” Why this stick-in-the-mud quote from an organization that defends wolves and Wilderness across the country in an otherwise positive story about wolves thriving on Isle Royale?

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Sawtooth Wilderness, ID

The “Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act” is still an imminent threat to Wilderness

I recently wrote an op-ed calling the proposed “Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act” (PARC Act) an imminent threat to Wilderness. In response, members of the Access Fund, the group behind the bill, have been contacting individual publishers, pressuring them to pull the piece. They’ve (wrongly) called it misleading and “fake news,” and some have even resorted to publicly attacking the character of individual editors. Fortunately, to my knowledge, only one publication—Adventure Journal—has caved, and many climbers have contacted me privately thanking me for the piece

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BW Towboat

Wilderness Watch sues Forest Service for failure to control motorized towboats in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

Wilderness Watch has recently sued the U.S. Forest Service in federal district court over the agency’s decades of failures to control commercial motorized towboats in the fabled Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in Minnesota as required. We are now awaiting the judge’s ruling on our motion for a preliminary injunction.

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Franz

The “Protect America’s Rock Climbing Act” is an imminent threat to Wilderness

By Dana Johnson

 There are relentless pressures on the natural world at this moment, and right now, Congress has its attention on a bill that would compound those pressures in our most protected places. The boldly named “Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act” will allow climbers to drill permanent metal anchors into Wilderness mountainsides and cliffs, leaving visual evidence of human development and undoubtedly drawing more climbers to sensitive and remote locations.

 

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Howie Wolke

UT Wilderness: Keep it Wild!

by Howie Wolke

The Colorado Plateau of eastern and southern Utah is a unique landscape of colorful sedimentary rocks and mesas dissected by spectacular canyons of the Green and Colorado River systems. And, despite a long history of ranching, mining and the associated dirt road network fragmenting the outback, much of this spectacular realm remains roadless and wild.

 

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Franz 200x150

What is Wilderness Without its Wolves?

by Franz Camenzind

For millennia, wolves have occupied nearly all the lands now designated as Wilderness in the western US, with the exception of coastal California. Yet today, fewer than two score of the approximately 540 Wildernesses west of the 100th meridian (not including Alaska’s 48) can claim some number of wolves as residents and only a dozen or so harbor wolves in numbers sufficient to be considered sustainable—in either the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Central Idaho Wildlands or Montana’s Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem…

 

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