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 374-1 and the U.S. Senate passed it 73-12, it’s clear that 60 years later the threats facing the Wilderness Act and America’s National Wilderness Preservation System are mounting.
As we mentioned previously, special interest groups—abetted by Congress—and even some supposed “wilderness” organizations, are slowly undoing the Wilderness Act. This undoing leads to a future where “Wilderness” becomes an arbitrary title.
Consider that half of the approximately 40 wilderness-related bills currently pending in Congress create special interest exceptions in proposed Wildernesses or amend the Wilderness Act. These exceptions allow motorized use, mechanized use, installations, and wildlife manipulation in designated Wilderness. Alternatively, these bills draw absurdly gerrymandered Wilderness boundaries so although a trail physically cuts through Wilderness, the trail itself is technically not Wilderness, and bikes can cruise through this loophole.
Wilderness Watch spent three days on the Hill the second week of September meeting with members of Congress who represent people in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington.
Together, with the John Muir Project and one of our own Wilderness Watch members, we educated Congress on a particularly problematic exception embedded into several bills proposing Wilderness. House Report 101-405, Appendix B, looks innocuous, but is a 1990 document that allows a broad array of activities into Wilderness that the Wilderness Act prohibits. This report permits activities such as stream poisoning, helicoptering into Wilderness to collar, transport, or remove wildlife, and building structures for wildlife. When courts have weighed in on these types of management activities, courts hold they violate the Wilderness Act and also degrade Wilderness character.
The Wilderness Watch member who came to these meetings with us put it an especially eloquent way when thinking about how we protect Wilderness and why we keep human interference out of Wilderness: Wilderness should look to the person who visits it the same way it looks to the 100th person after them, and the same to the 1,000th person after them. Special-interest exceptions, like House Report 101-405, Appendix B, would allow state agencies the leeway to conduct wilderness-degrading activities that interfere with wildlife and degrade their wild experiences.
Congress must understand the nuances of these innocent looking exceptions so it can keep America’s best idea alive. That is why Wilderness Watch spends time on the Hill.
