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Keeping Wilderness WILD – Blog Posts

A winter visit to Cumberland Island Wilderness

by Jerome Walker In February, the weather is usually perfect on Georgia’s coastal islands.  That’s one of the reasons why America’s  wealthiest men formed the exclusive Jekyll Island Club during the late 1800’s and turned that island into a Gilded Age playground.  Every winter they repaired to their “cottages” on Jekyll to hunt, fish, play…

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howie 05 03 13 201

So-Called Conservation Groups Betray Wilderness

By Howie Wolke This is the slightly amended written document that I worked from while giving my talk at the 50th Anniversary Wilderness Conference in Albuquerque this past October. My actual talk included some additions that I felt were important based upon what I’d already experienced at the conference and a few deletions due to the…

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Wilderness in the Eternity of the Future

By Ed Zahniser*Editor’s note: The following is reprinted from a speech Ed Zahniser gave this past May in Schenectady, NY. Ed Zahniser speaks at the Kelly Adirondack Center of Union College in Schenectady, NY, May 8, 2014. The Center includes the former home of Paul and Carolyn Schaefer and family. Photo: Dan Plumley, Adirondack Wild:…

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The evolution of Monte Dolack’s Commemorative Wilderness Poster

“The Peaceable Kingdom of Wilderness,” by internationally-acclaimed artist Monte Dolack, commemorates the Wilderness Act’s 50th anniversary and celebrates our 110 million-acre National Wilderness Preservation System, which spans ancient forests, vast arctic reaches, sweeping deserts, soaring mountains, remote coastal islands, and wild canoe country. Wilderness Poster thoughts“I worked through several ideas for this commissioned painting thinking about…

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Wilderness Advocate Polly Dyer Recognized with Honorary Doctorate

By Susan Morgan and John Miles On March 22, 2014 Polly Dyer received her honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA to recognize and celebrate her lifetime of conservation achievements. Four years ago, after Polly’s 90th birthday party, The North Cascades Conservation Council reported that three hours of speakers stories hadn’t…

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Cheering 50th Anniversary of Wilderness Act

By Michael Frome Early in my career, when I was writing travel articles for various magazines and newspapers, I found myself reading the travel section of The New York Times every Sunday. The attraction for me was not in the stories about going places, but in a column called “Conservation,” in which the writer, John B. Oakes,…

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Of Wolves and Wilderness

By George Nickas “One of the most insidious invasions of wilderness is via predator control.” – Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac Right before the holidays last December, an anonymous caller alerted Wilderness Watch that the Forest Service (FS) had approved the use of one of its cabins deep in the Frank Church-River of No Return…

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Wolves and Isle Royale: Manipulated Zoo or Wild Wilderness?

by Kevin Proescholdt Pressure has been mounting on the National Park Service to “save” the wolves on Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park and Wilderness.  Wolf numbers on the Lake Superior island have dropped, proponents of manipulation proclaim, and the decades of in-breeding have flattened the population’s genetic diversity.  We should transplant wolves from the mainland…

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A Brief History of Quid Pro Quo Wilderness

Janine Blaeloch,Board member, Wilderness WatchDirector, Western Lands Project Beginning in the late 1990s, a new kind of land deal materialized in Congress that would present a huge challenge to grassroots public land activists and wilderness advocates and create a significant schism in the environmental movement. Quid pro quo wilderness, as it came to be called, was carried…

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Seeing What All the Dam Fuss Is About

By Jerome Walker and Marcia Williams After reading “A Dam Dilemma” in the Missoula Independent in mid-July, we decided to hike up to the Fred Burr Dam in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Montana to see what all the fuss was about. One of us is 74 years old and the other is from New York, had only…

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Wilderness: What and Why

By Howie Wolke 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…

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