Keeping Wilderness WILD!
Read Wilderness Watch’s blog.
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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…
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Wilderness for its own sake
by Roy (Monte) High Over the years I’ve heard numerous people disparage the designation of wilderness areas by speaking on behalf of people with disabilities. They say that wilderness areas are unfair to the disabled because there are no…
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Ending La Luz run safeguards wilderness
By Kevin Proescholdt The recent decision by Forest Service District Ranger Crystal Powell to deny the permit to run the La Luz Trail Run race through the Sandia Mountain Wilderness may be understandably unpopular with some runners and race…
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Wilderness and the Value of Doing Nothing
by Dana Johnson Along the high-elevation, wind-swept ridges of the West, a long-lived, gnarly-branched pine is in trouble. A species of stone pine known for its high stress tolerance and adaptability, whitebark pine is slow-growing and can live between…
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Wilderness: Is it all about us?
by George NickasA while back I received an email from the founders of a recently established organization that was created out of a concern for the “wilderness visitor.” They wrote to challenge Wilderness Watch’s long-time insistence that the fundamental…
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Thirty by Thirty and Half Earth: Promises and Pitfalls
by Howie Wolke In 2016, legendary ecologist Edward O. Wilson published Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. In this remarkable book, Wilson documents the ongoing anthropogenic planet-wide biological meltdown, the greatest extinction event since a meteor crashed into…
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A Legal Win for the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness and a Call to Protect Wolves and Wilderness in Idaho
by Dana Johnson You might recall that in January 2016, the U.S. Forest Service authorized Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG) to make 120 helicopter landings in the River of No Return Wilderness to place radio telemetry collars…
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What’s All the Buzz in the Boundary Waters?
by Dana Johnson The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) is located within the Superior National Forest in Minnesota and stretches over 115 miles along the Minnesota-Ontario border. The Wilderness, along with Canada’s adjoining Quetico Provincial Park, protects a…
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Let’s Protect our Nation’s Largest Wilderness Study Area
by Kevin Proescholdt At the end of October, Wilderness Watch filed a formal objection to the new Final Land Management Plan for the Chugach National Forest in response to the Forest Service’s seemingly intentional disregard for protecting the 2 million-acre…
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Degrading the Wave
By Gary Macfarlane The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently released a draft environmental assessment for public input on its proposal to increase visitor use in fragile areas of the Paria Canyon-Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness in Arizona, most specifically the…
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Hell No to Helicopters in Hellsgate
by Cindy Tuell They say the idea of Wilderness needs no defense, but that Wilderness just needs defenders. For the past five years Wilderness Watch has worked to defend Wilderness areas in the Tonto National Forest from two agencies…
Photo: Joseph Battell Wilderness, Vermont by Dawn Serra