After nearly a decade of Congressional debate, and nearly 70 rewrites, the Wilderness Act was enacted into law in 1964.
The motivation for the bill was simple.
In the years following World War II, roadbuilding, logging, and mechanized travel had invaded public lands, degrading habitats, silting streams, and ultimately transforming the primitive character of all but the most remote backcountry areas.
“To assure that an increasing population” . . . “does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition,” Congress intervened.
The law that followed remains the country’s most potent land protection tool.
Today, over 800 areas in national parks, wildlife refuges, forests, and public lands have been protected by the Wilderness Act.
From the 9-million-acre wilderness of Wrangell St. Elias in Alaska to the 5-acre wilderness of Pelican Island in Florida, the National Wilderness Preservation System shields prized habitats from the intrusions of development, manipulation, and commercial logging, providing invaluable refuge for sensitive species.
Millions of acres have yet to be designated as wilderness. Until Congress decides to act, agencies generally manage these lands to preserve their wilderness character or as if they were already designated as wilderness.
In policy and practice, this means swaths of habitat are protected from roadbuilding, off-road vehicle use, mountain biking, and development activities.
In keeping with its assault on wildlife and wildlands, the Trump administration now has its sights on those places, having opened comment periods that would set the stage for weakening these longstanding policies.
Should the agencies follow through, they are expected to strip protections from areas eligible for wilderness designation by eliminating or weakening longstanding policies, opening irreplaceable wild lands to the harms that inspired passage of the Wilderness Act.
Featured below are some of those areas, and the species that depend on them for their continued protection.
Desert National Wildlife Refuge
Covering six mountain ranges, Desert NWR protects nearly every habitat type that occurs in southern Nevada, sheltering the threatened Mojave desert tortoise and bighorn sheep. As the largest refuge in the lower 48, roughly 1.3 million acres are proposed as wilderness.
Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge
Home to sage grouse, pronghorn, and the pygmy rabbit, the Greater Hart-Sheldon ecosystem, anchored by its namesake refuges, protects one of the American west’s largest swaths of intact sagebrush steppe.
Both refuges contain proposed wilderness, totaling roughly 400,000-acres.
Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge
The Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, which includes the UL Bend National Wildlife Refuge, is the second largest in the contiguous United States, spanning an area of 1.1 million acres along the Missouri River in Montana.
With intact grasslands, the Refuge has the potential to restore one of the largest self-sustaining bison herds in the country. The roughly 160,000 acres currently proposed as wilderness form the core of that area.
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Unparalleled in size and its diversity of Alaskan wildlife, the Arctic Refuge stands apart. The porcupine caribou herd, Alaska’s largest, births its young in the Refuge. The Coastal Plain of the Arctic also supports the largest onshore concentration of denning polar bears in the country.
FWS has proposed roughly 12 million acres of proposed wilderness, largely situated within the area targeted by the Trump administration for oil and gas leasing.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Renowned the world over, Great Smoky Mountains is one of the most biodiverse units in the National Park System.
Despite it being threatened in the past by multiple roadbuilding projects, Congress has yet to bless Great Smoky Mountains with the full protections of the Wilderness Act.
Roughly 400,000 acres of cold high mountain streams, forested valleys, and ridgelines are recommended for designation as wilderness.
Big Cypress National Preserve
With only 120-230 adults remaining, Big Cypress is part of the core area relied on by the Florida panther and nested within a larger regional complex of public lands, including Everglades National Park.
Roughly 80,000 acres are eligible for designation under the Wilderness Act.
Rolling Back the Clock on Wilderness Protections
At its core, the Wilderness Act was designed to preserve the country’s last wild lands in their natural conditions. Too much heavy-handed management had resulted in a predictable pattern: federal agencies punctured roads through one-of-a-kind, intact landscapes. Logging followed. From there, off-road vehicle use penetrated the backcountry, spoiling wildlife habitat and the quiet and solitude so valued by hunters and hikers.
For areas with the potential to become wilderness, the policies at issue today have prevented agencies from backsliding into those practices.
Those safeguards are now vulnerable.
As the extinction crisis accelerates, driven largely by habitat loss, imperiled wildlife needs us to protect every remaining acre of roadless, undeveloped, and ORV-free habitat that remains.
Preserving the existing wilderness policies in their current state has been and remains an important step to that end.
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