by Kevin Proescholdt
Wilderness Watch recently asked the National Park Service to develop a new alternative in the planning for grizzly bear recovery in the North Cascades of Washington State. Our suggested proposal would both benefit grizzlies and protect designated Wilderness, something that none of the existing alternatives in the NPS’s current plan do.
by George Nickas
Bill Worf, Wilderness Watch’s founder, liked to tell the story of when shortly after the Wilderness Act passed in 1964, engineers at the Forest Service Development and Technology Center expressed their interest in developing a “silent” chainsaw. Their rationale was that if the newly passed wilderness bill prohibited noisy machines, a really well muffled chainsaw would pass muster since only the operator would hear it. Bill told them not to bother—the Wilderness Act didn’t ban motorized equipment simply because it made noise…
by Dana Johnson
In a major blow to conservation efforts in Alaska, including efforts to protect over 56 million acres of Wilderness in the state, the U.S. Supreme Court held that John Sturgeon, a moose hunter, can “rev up his hovercraft in search of moose” on the Nation River—a river that flows through the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve in Alaska.
by George Nickas and Kevin Proescholdt
Now that the 116th Congress has convened, the good news is no longer will the likes of Rob Bishop (R-UT) and Tom McClintock (R-CA) set the agenda and tone for wilderness and public lands legislation in the People’s House. Largely gone from public debate will be the tidal wave of terrible legislation that threatened to undo a half-century of Wilderness protection.
By Kevin Proescholdt
Wilderness Watch recently objected to a Forest Service decision to allow permanent seismic monitoring stations in the Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington state. If this decision doesn’t change, the Forest Service would fail to protect and preserve Glacier Peak’s wilderness conditions consistent with the 1964 Wilderness Act. Beyond Glacier Peak, any Wilderness—including those surrounding seismically-active Yellowstone National Park or elsewhere—would be damaged by the installation and servicing of any kind of permanent monitoring stations.
By Franz Camenzind
There is a lot being said about wilderness these days: some misrepresentations and a lot of confusion as to what wilderness is, legally and ecologically. First, wilderness designation is the best land protection law our nation has.
By Kevin Proescholdt
On April 14th, wilderness legend Stewart M. “Brandy” Brandborg broke camp one last time from his home in Hamilton, Montana, and headed over the Divide. He was 93.
Brandy was a giant in the wilderness movement, and the last surviving architect of the 1964 Wilderness Act..
By Franz Camenzind
Isle Royale is both a National Park (1940) and a designated Wilderness Area (1976)…As a Wilderness, its clear purpose is to protect the area so as to preserve its natural conditions in a manner that generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature; where humanity’s preservationist’s footprint leaves at most, only a faint impression.
Guest post by Christopher Neill
Ten years ago I got out of an MBL pickup truck and waked away from the only road for 300 miles into North America’s greatest wilderness. Across spongy tundra alive with the tinkling of Smith’s longspurs. Upstream along a braided river channel I shared with harlequin ducks, common mergansers and red-throated loons. Then up a jumbled talus slope with a view to the other side of glacial U-shaped valley through air so clear that the distant tops of unnamed Brooks Range mountains looked like you could toss a rock to the Dall sheep high up on their slopes.
By George Nickas, Executive Director, Wilderness Watch
Montana’s designated wildernesses are the pride of our state. We might fight like hell over whether to designate this area or that one as new wilderness, but the Bob Marshall, Scapegoat, Selway-Bitterroot, Absaroka-Beartooth, and our other protected wildernesses are sacred to Montanans of all stripes. That is, apparently, all stripes except Rep. Greg Gianforte, who just voted to effectively repeal the Wilderness Act and open places like “the Bob” to endless forms of habitat manipulation, predator control, road building, and…”
By Kevin Proescholdt
Congressmen Rick Nolan and Tom Emmer, among others, have made various claims recently suggesting that the 1978 Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act opened the Superior National Forest outside of the BWCAW in northern Minnesota to mining. Some variations of this story even talk about a “secret deal” or a “nod and a handshake.”
