Editor's note: The Wilderness Act turned 50 this year, and throughout the year it's been applauded far and wide, and even the National Park Service marked the anniversary with a series of videos celebrating wilderness settings. This weekend the Act is being honored with a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that is being attended by Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis. But how has the National Park Service handled wilderness issues? Jim Walters, who spent nearly 40 years working for the agency, including serving as Wilderness Program Coordinator for the Intermountain Region from 1988 until he retired in 2003, says the agency has not rallied around the Act.
Has the National Park Service worked faithfully with The Wilderness Act?
After 50 years, you would expect that the National Park Service, which administers the largest inventory of wilderness in the world, would have the best wilderness management program in the world. But, you would be very wrong. The fact of the matter is that the Park Service never wanted to be part of the Wilderness Act (P.L. 88-577) and the National Wilderness Preservation System in the first place, and testified a number times before congressional committees that it did not need to be included because 'national park lands were already protected as wilderness.'
The problem was that this statement simply wasn't true, and the environmental community and members of the Congress knew it wasn't true. People like David Brower of the Sierra Club had observed for years that national parks were always subject to development from political influences like the one proposing to dam the Green River at Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument. Other developments were intended to improve the prospect that tourist dollars would flow into nearby communities. Developments proposed by the National Park Service itself were often misguided attempts to meet its dual mission of protecting and 'providing for the enjoyment' of park lands for future generations. And what better way to have the American public 'enjoy' the national parks than to build roads and visitor facilities in pristine areas where they were otherwise 'locked out.'
Because of the constant pressure to 'improve' national parks by developing them, the Congress pointedly and specifically identified the National Park Service as one of the four federal agencies responsible for implementing The Wilderness Act. The language of the Act is clear in telling the National Park Service that, regardless of how well it thought it might be protecting its public lands, it just wasn't doing enough and ordered it to meet the even higher standards for preservation prescribed in The Wilderness Act. The NPS didn't like this, and still doesn't.
Section 3 (c) of the Act states: 'Within ten years after the effective date of this Act the Secretary of the Interior shall review every roadless area of five thousand contiguous acres or more in the national parks, monuments and other units of the national park system...and shall report to the President his recommendations as to the suitability or non-suitability of each such area or island for preservation as wilderness.'
Section 4 (c) states: 'The purpose of this Act are hereby declared to be within and supplemental to the purposes for which national forests and units of the national park...are administered.'
Section 4 (3) (b) instructs: 'Except as otherwise provided in this Act, each agency administering any area designated as wilderness shall be responsible for preserving the wilderness character for the area and shall so administer such areas for such other purposes for which it may have been established as also to preserve its wilderness character.'
Sections 4 (c) states: 'Except as specifically provided for in this Act...there shall be no commercial enterprise and no permanent road within any wilderness area designated by this Act, and, except as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area for the purpose of this Act'¦there shall be no temporary road, no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, no landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation within any such area.'
But, in spite of the direct instructions of The Wilderness Act, the environmental eloquence for wilderness delivered by people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the wisdom of land stewards like Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall, and the tireless energy of people like Howard Zahniser and David Brower, who worked for decades to finally get The Wilderness Act passed, the National Park Service decided to basically ignore this landmark piece of environmental legislation. After 50 years, the NPS wilderness program today consists of whatever minimum attention it could pay to wilderness and the continuation of its historic belief that it was 'already protecting wilderness.' And, unless the public does something about it, the NPS will continue to ignore wilderness for another 50 years.
One result of NPS wilderness neglect is that the public has been cheated out of having the world-class management program in place which should have established national park wilderness areas as the very best of the very best protected lands on Earth. Instead, we are left with an anemic façade of a program which, for the past 50 years, has done as little as possible to actually preserve NPS wilderness beyond lip service, forming committees, producing policy statements and directives which are not enforced, and the production of the odd video or two. The NPS also likes to attend the occasional public events like the 50th Anniversary celebration in Albuquerque to proclaim how much the agency regards wilderness and tell everyone what a great job it is doing to preserve it.
Could better oversight by the Park Service have led to a larger, single piece of wilderness, instead of four smaller parcels, at Cumberland Island National Seashore?/NPS
But we've heard all this before. Some of you might remember that in 1994 the NPS participated in a celebration in Santa Fe marking the 30th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act. All of the wilderness 'who's who' were in attendance'¦both of the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture, the directors of the four federal agencies charged by the Wilderness Act with the preservation of America's wilderness (the NPS, the U.S Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service), representatives from prominent environmental groups, poets, entertainers, and dignitaries like former-Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and his son, then-Congressman Tom Udall. Everyone spoke glowingly (some even evangelically) about wilderness and its value to America.
In 1988, I had been transferred to the NPS regional office in Santa Fe and assigned responsibility for six different programs, including that of the Inter-Mountain Region's Wilderness Program Coordinator. But it didn't take long to realize that the reason I had been given the duties of the wilderness program coordinator was simple...nobody else was doing it, nobody wanted to do it, and nobody cared if anyone did it anyway. The historic attitude of the NPS was that wilderness just wasn't an important management issue to dedicate any time, funding, or manpower. In fact, it quickly became clear that the No. 1 threat to national park wilderness was'¦the National Park Service. Still, by 1994 I was glad to be part of an interagency steering committee putting together the 30th Anniversary celebration and hearing what I was hearing about the glories of wilderness from Washington office managers. Everyone had a swell time and we all went home happy. And then...nothing!
By the time I retired from a 40-year career with the National Park Service in 2004, it was more than obvious that the NPS had never been serious about applying either the letter, or spirit, of The Wilderness Act. And they weren't about to change just because they had someone like me reminding them that we were actually supposed to be preserving wilderness in keeping with this law, not just talking about it at conferences.
Ironically, wilderness, in one administrative category or the other, within 75 park areas, comprises almost 85 percent of the total land area administered by the NPS. The Wilderness Act, in addition to providing directions the agencies are supposed to follow if it has lands qualifying for the National Wilderness Preservation System, also prescribes management activities that are specifically prohibited within wilderness. All of which has been ignored by the NPS primarily because this agency does not like anyone, including the U.S. Congress, telling them what they can and cannot do with national park lands.
Should the National Park Service pushed for more, not less, wilderness in the Addition Lands of Big Cypress National Preserve/South Florida Wildlands Association
At the time I left the NPS, job announcements and the selection criteria to fill key management positions like superintendents, chief rangers, chief interpreters, etc., in wilderness parks most often never even mentioned the word 'wilderness.' The result was that people who knew nothing about wilderness, and some who were openly hostile to it, were selected to fill key positions in wilderness parks. It didn't really matter anyway, because the annual performance evaluations for these positions rarely mentioned wilderness in anything except the most ethereal terms. In short, you don't have to understand The Wilderness Act, or even like wilderness, to be a manager of an NPS wilderness park and still climb up the promotion ladder. Nobody gets in trouble in the National Park Service for ignoring wilderness; unless they get caught by the public.
Instead of having a robust program where wilderness preservation is integrated into all day-to-day and long-term management programs, today's NPS wilderness program consists of a thin façade of public relations gestures with an almost total lack of accountability, consistency, and continuity for the preservation of the resource itself. Chief among these shortcomings is the failure of most wilderness parks to have a comprehensive Wilderness Management Plan which spells out how wilderness is supposed to be preserved. A wilderness plan serves as a contract between the public and the NPS as how wilderness is to be preserved as well as identify who is responsible for this program. These plans provide the continuity for wilderness preservation through the turmoil of NPS staff changes and political trends. Without one, the preservation of wilderness is driven only by the whims of individual managers...both of which change often.
The public, especially the environmental community, is doing itself and wilderness a great disservice by not addressing this historic animosity towards The Wilderness Act and demanding from the NPS the answer to a basic question: After 50 years, what evidence can the NPS provide to show that national park wilderness resources have been protected in keeping with the requirements of The Wilderness Act and that wilderness is being protected differently from the other backcountry resources?
You will find that there is very little evidence to convict the NPS of the crime of actually protecting wilderness. Most of what they have is interpretive fluff intended to fool the public into believing that the agency is serious about wilderness while it continues to do things that fly directly in the face of the Wilderness Act. Sadly, evidence of the failings of the National Park Service in preserving wilderness is plentiful. During the 50-year-period since The Wilderness Act was passed the NPS has:
* Failed to complete the basic inventories and studies of lands suitable for wilderness
* Failed to fulfill the requirements of wilderness legislation by submitting the legal descriptions of its wilderness resources to the Congress
* Failed to abide by its own policies by not having approved wilderness management plans in parks which provide for the accountability, consistency and continuity of its wilderness program
* Failed to monitor whether or not wilderness is actually being protected on national park lands
* Failed to apply minimum requirement assessments for management activities conducted within wilderness
* Failed to provide more than a token administrative organization responsible for wilderness preservation at the park, regional, and Washington level offices
* Failed to account for the tens of thousands of dollars and man-hours spent sending NPS staff to wilderness training (which, ironically, is excellent) when it requires no quantifiable data showing that this training has benefitted park wilderness.
So, for the past 50 years, most of the National Park Service wilderness areas have none of the protections afforded by The Wilderness Act because the NPS does not make any significant effort to distinguish wilderness from its other backcountry areas. Wilderness continues to be treated as just another area of the park. The historic attitude towards The Wilderness Act has manifest itself in countless abuses of the Act itself:
In most wilderness parks, the use of motorized equipment and aircraft (especially helicopters), to conduct management activities has become basically routine. The decision to helicopter NPS archaeologist into and out of Bandelier National Monument because the superintendent decided that the 'the archaeologist's time was too valuable to be spent walking in and out of wilderness' (which is only about 23,000 acres) is not unusual. When the staff at Olympic National Park decided that the historic trail shelters in the park wilderness needed to be replaced (a questionable decision) and the only way they could do this was by building artificial shelters in the park maintenance yard and helicoptering these structures into the wilderness, the project continued even though the park was advised that this action violated both The Wilderness Act and NPS management policies. This project was only stopped when local environmental groups sued the Park Service. The judge hearing this case quickly ruled against the NPS.
Horn Island in the Gulf Islands Wilderness is abundant with brilliant white sand dunes covered with fragrant rosemary shrubs/NPS, Gail Bishop.The wilderness of Gulf Islands National Seashore arguably exists as the worst administered wilderness in the National Park System through the misuse of personal water craft and motorboats. The superintendent at Devils Postpile National Monument didn't even realize she had designated wilderness within the monument. The designated wilderness at Cumberland Island National Seashore was legislatively divided into four small separate units because the NPS had failed to control the authorized and unauthorized motor vehicle use on the island. The Colorado River Corridor within Grand Canyon National Park, a potential wilderness area, has been essentially hijacked by the concession tour operators using motorized watercraft. Researchers and park managers routinely use helicopters to access the recommended wilderness areas of Yellowstone National Park.
However, most of the wilderness abuses within the NPS are not reported at all due to fear of retribution by park managers. So, NPS wilderness continues to die a slow death from neglect and the thousand cuts resulting from management actions which are specifically prohibited by the Act, or those that do not meet a reasonable test for being the 'minimum requirement.' This comes not from the threat of giant oil and gas companies or the timber and mining industry attempting to raid national park lands, but from the continued indifference of the NPS towards The Wilderness Act. The dilution of wilderness values within parks has become the norm and the negligence of wilderness by the NPS has provided fodder for those opposing further additions to the National Wilderness Preservation System. After all, why do we need more wildernesses if we aren't even taking care of what we have?
Today, as we lament the fact that over the past four decades 50 percent of the Earth's wildlife has disappeared, The Wilderness Act stands as one of our last and best hopes for protecting our remaining ecosystems. The Wilderness Act exists as one of the world's great pieces of environmental legislation and deserves to be celebrated. It also deserves much better than the institutional neglect it has been afforded by the National Park Service.
Comments
EC, as anyone who reads me knows, I love the great lodges built by the railroads, i.e., the "front country" Kurt is talking about. However, I also love pure, untrammeled wilderness, and yes, believe that the Park Service should protect that, too. What concerns me is the growing notion that the nation has no need of both--either the front country or the backcountry if it is called a national park. In the 1980s, backcountry visitation in Yosemite was 50,000 annually--no small number, especially given the fact that in 1900 only 5,000 people saw the entire park. Yellowstone itself did not reach 50,000 total visitors annually until 1915.
Numbers are not what make a democracy. Choice is. If I lose the choice to enjoy pure wilderness, American democracy is eroded--or at least so once we thought. Right now, we could use a few more choices in the political arena, since the current choices seem to believe that wilderness is frivolous if it stands in the way of their pet bureaucracies.
Think of it this way. When wilderness is gone, the United States of America is gone, since it is wilderness that makes us unique. We have space to dream over; most other nations have lost that. Fine, pile millions of visitors into the front country, but we need the backcountry, too. Any other nation can have a democracy. Ours comes with the wonder of vacant land.
At least, so once we thought. How did we stop thinking that way--and why? Many of us still think it, to be sure, but I scratch my head every day when I see the environmental community lead the retreat from wilderness as if somehow it is now a sin. Must we have Ebola to prove to Africa that we care? Must we give up wilderness to prove to the world that we care? Care about what? Being just like them, it would appear. That is not America; it is rather something sinister, and we had better figure it out before we lose it all.
Excellent comment, Dr. Runte.
May I submit that the sinister agenda behind the retreat from wilderness is very simple? It's something called MONEY.
Here's a link to a related article written by the son of David Brower, Kenneth Brower, for Outside Magazine, entitled, "Leave Wilderness Alone"
Along with an excerpt:
<<For eight years starting in 1955, my father and his closest colleague, Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society, worked together toward passage of the Wilderness Act. Zahniser was the bill’s author, and my father occasionally joined him at his favorite table at the Cosmos Club, in Washington, D.C., to help polish the language. My siblings and I got regular progress reports, and we were witness to the long, hard march of the legislation into law. My old man was the fieriest environmental evangelist of his generation, and he brought that evangelism home, practicing his powers of persuasion on us—as if those needed honing. During hikes in the Sierra Nevada, at the dinner table, and on the road, he drummed the poetry and logic of the wilderness idea into us. And he talked wilderness politics. One lesson, repeated often, had to do with the asymmetric warfare between exploiters and preservationists. “They only have to win once,” he would say. “We have to win every time.”
The price of wilderness is eternal vigilance by the people who love it.>>
Alfred (to whom I owe an apology for comments made sometime back),
I have no interest in destroying all the wilderness that exists. I just don't think you have to go as far as the Wilderness Act to establish its preservation. I don't lament the NPS reluctance going back 50 years to not endorse Wilderness management. Our parks would have far fewer visitors and far less support if that had been the case. Gary may like that but I don't.
Should the backcountry areas of Yellowstone or Yosemite (and others) be protected? Absolutely. But that can be done without the unyielding constraints of Wilderness designation.
While I can understand the comments, I lean with Dr. Runte. NPS did the required studies and endorsed legislative proposals...but probably not as strongly as some would have liked. In many respects this was because the Organic Act and its following management policies made backcountry management regimes much like established Wilderness would have accomplished. So we did not have as much concern as those who manage and support USFS and BLM lands where multiple use is part of the agency mandate.
I agree that there should be services for those who are unwilling or unable to get into park backcountry; but that has been managed carefully in trying to determine what services were needed to let people see and get a "feel" for a park (roads, facilities) versus keeping those levels lower and away from impacting resources when facilities are available adjacent to a park. That was a major reason why Mission 66 funding was used to buy out facilities within the boundaries of Rocky Mountain National Park since Estes Park and Grand Lake and other adjacent areas could handle a lot of folks.
But such actions do not "save" the rest of the very systems such parks were established to showcase and preserve for "future generations". Established Wilderness is protected from public development pressure in that it would take Congressional action to make a majoar developmental change. For a number of years there was a lot of local pressure to establish a second version of Trail Ridge Road through Rocky Mountain to help carry the increasing traffic. Without the protection of designated Wilderness such actions could have taken place more easily than with today's designation.
If you are going to protect and preserve ecosystem areas to meet the reason an area was established (and that admittedly is very difficult to achieve) then you need to protect the integrity of as much landscape as possible. And that is not a move against the visitor, but rather a move to preserve those areas for the very reasons they were nationally significant enough to set aside.
The National Park Service may well be guilty of neglecting Wilderness to some extent. However, the NPS record is far better than that of the other three federal land agencies. For example:
• The National Park System has far more Wilderness — in total acres and percentage of the land base — than the National Forests, Bureau of Land Management Lands, and National Wildlife Refuges. Over 52 percent (43.9 million acres) of National Park System lands are designated under the Wilderness Act and more than 80 percent of the park system is designated or recommended Wilderness. Just 19 percent of National Forest, 14 percent of National Wildlife Refuge, and 4 percent of BLM lands are designated as Wilderness areas.
• National Park System Wilderness areas tend to be significantly larger than those of the other three agencies. The average BLM Wilderness area is a mere 5 percent as large as the average National Park System Wilderness. This figure increases to only 11 percent for National Forest Wilderness and less than 40 percent for National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness.
• National Park System Wilderness areas have stronger protection than that provided by the other three land systems. The other agencies — particularly the Forest Service and BLM — often allow “nonconforming” uses that were incorporated in the Wilderness Act due to political compromises. These harmful uses may include livestock grazing, hunting and trapping of predators, artificial habitat manipulation, game fish stocking, and motorized access to support certain activities.With rare exceptions, these uses are not allowed in National Park Service Wilderness.
• National Park System Wilderness areas are generally surrounded by lands managed under the protective Organic Act. In a few places they are adjacent to intensively developed recreation areas. On “multiple-use” National Forest and BLM lands, Wilderness areas are usually scattered islands in a sea of industrial resource extraction and motorized development. National Wildlife Refuge lands may allow intensive wildlife management adjacent to Wilderness.
• Despite budget cuts in recent years, the National Park Service has far greater resources to protect and manage Wilderness than any of the other federal agencies. The National Park System budget dedicates $27.00 per acre per year to park preservation, education, and recreation programs. This, in contrast to just $7.50 per acre for comparable programs for the National Forest System, $5.00 per acre for the National Wildlife Refuge System, and $2.50 per acre for the BLM’s National Landscape Conservation System.
So, let’s have a vigorous debate about how to improve National Park System Wilderness programs. However, that debate should be in the context of what is happening on the rest of America's lands. In the case of the Forest Service and BLM, they are actively destroying potential Wilderness areas and fragmenting existing Wilderness areas with massive and widespread industrial exploitation. If is fair to hold the National Park Service to a higher standard. However, if we are worried about the degradation and loss of Wilderness, the National Park Service is the least offensive of the agencies.
EC is right. Wilderness fanatics will never have enough. Federal agencies don't like Wilderness because it basically means that access to the backcountry reverts to 19th century means (woohoo, what a progress!!!). Trails can no longer be maintained in a cost effective manner (no chainsaw, ride a horse to the trail...).
We already have 100m acres of Wilderness, and millions more protected in some way, shape or form. Adding more does not solve anything. And when the world runs out of oil, we will drill in ANWR.
Wilderness designation is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be a "lock out". In fact, the law specifically states that the purpose of designating wilderness is to preserve recreational access to land unaffected by development or motorized vehicles.
There are other regulations that may restrict people's access to public lands. None of them are grounded in provisions of the Wilderness Act, because the Wilderness Act does not do that.
Please go ahead and criticize the lack of access to public lands, but make sure you're blaming the right reasons. It isn't the Wilderness Act.