Keeping Wilderness WILD!
Read Wilderness Watch’s blog.
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Wilderness Watch goes to Washington
A week after the Wilderness Act’s 60th Anniversary on September 3, Wilderness Watch was on Capitol Hill educating members of Congress and their staffers about the importance of the Wilderness Act. While the U.S. House passed the Wilderness Act…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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We Need Big Holistic Wilderness
by Howie Wolke Back in the 1980’s, Dave Foreman and I compiled The Big Outside, A Descriptive Inventory of the Remaining Big Wilderness Areas of the United States (Harmony Books, 1989). The primary purpose was to accurately depict the…
Photo: Joseph Battell Wilderness, Vermont by Dawn Serra