Preservation Law Turned Wilderness Into Battleground

Not far from the gift shops and ski chalets of this crowded resort, a little trail by a little creek offers a way to the wild. Hike up the ridge, look to the east, and all you see is nature. No roads, no vacation condos, just forested valleys and the sky-scraping Pioneer Mountains.

Lynne Stone wants to keep it that way.

On a cloudless August day, she stands on the ridge and stares at a rocky knob bristling with lodgepole pines. In this exaggerated landscape, the hummock does not even rate a name on the map.

“A hill like this in Nebraska would be considered a national park,” Stone says and then suggests how nice it would be to spread Idaho’s beauty around. Give a mountain to Omaha, or a sparkling stream to Newark, N.J. Of course you can’t, she realizes: “It’s all in Idaho. You have to protect it where it is.”

And so she does, or at least she tries. The Pioneer Mountains are among 4 million acres of Idaho’s national forests that conservationists like Stone want placed in the National Wilderness Preservation System.

Conservation Fight

They would get a better reception in Newark. Here in Idaho, they are opposed by loggers, miners, ranchers and off-road vehicle users who would face more regulations or complete loss of access to the land if it is designated wilderness.

This is the latest battle in a drawn-out war over America’s roadless public lands, a conflict set in motion 25 years ago by a simple but far-reaching document called the Wilderness Act.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it Sept. 3, 1964, he institutionalized a radical idea: Let us protect some lands just as nature made them. They would be places, the act said, “where the Earth and its community of life are untrampled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Over the years, those tranquil places have seen a lot of contention. Sagebrush rebels have bulldozed roads into pristine land to spoil it for wilderness. “Ecoterrorists” have pounded spikes into ancient trees to spoil them for logging.

How Much Is Enough?

The law’s silver anniversary is a time for preservationists to celebrate--since 1964 the national wilderness system has grown tenfold to nearly 91 million acres. But it is also a time to take stock. After 25 years, have we set aside all the wilderness we need? Or does a growing populace in a polluted world require even more wild space, for the sake of balance?

“We don’t need any more designated wilderness,” says John Butterfield, snowmobiler and member of the Blue Ribbon Coalition, which promotes multiple use of public lands. “The land needs to be managed, not set aside and forgotten.”

“I think there ought to be twice or maybe three times as much land designated as wilderness,” counters Gaylord Nelson, former U.S. senator and now counselor to the Wilderness Society. “There are exceptional areas in practically every state that ought to be left alone forever.”

In the war over wilderness, balance is hard to find.

Idaho’s dark forests and high mountains fit the classic image of wilderness. But around the nation, the preservation system also includes swamps, beaches, deserts and prairies; 474 areas in all, ranging in size from Alaska’s 8.7 million-acre Wrangell St. Elias Wilderness to 3-acre Pelican Island, a haven for seabirds off the Florida coast.

Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s wilderness is in Alaska, and the West holds most of the other large chunks. But smaller areas are scattered from sea to shining sea. All but six states--Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, Delaware, Iowa and Kansas--have some designated wilderness.

Sampler of U.S. Landscape

Covering 4% of the country, wilderness areas constitute a sampler of the American landscape: Great Gulf and Lost Creek, Mud Swamp and Thunder Ridge.

If Fords Terror and Hell Hole Bay evoke the pioneers’ image of wilderness as a fearsome foe, then Shining Rock and Wonder Mountain reflect a kinder view, a new land ethic lauding wilderness as a connection to our roots and a source of national character.

“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1861. But it wasn’t until 1924, when the U.S. Forest Service set aside the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, that Thoreau’s poetic words became public policy. And it took conservationists 40 more years to get what they really wanted: wilderness with the force and permanence of law, shielded from bureaucratic whims.

The 1964 Wilderness Act, enacted after eight years of debate and 66 versions, gave Congress the sole power to declare wilderness. In wilderness, the law said, there would be no roads, no buildings, no travel by mechanical means. Hunting, fishing and camping were allowed, but commercial exploitation and development were generally prohibited.

Like Thoreau, the law was long on poetry. But it was short on details, setting aside just 9.1 million acres of noncontroversial wilderness that had already been designated administratively. It left the real battles to future sessions of Congress. Federal agencies were instructed to study national park, forest and wildlife refuge lands for wilderness suitability and make recommendations.

The agencies lumbered about this Gargantuan task for years, and as recommendations started coming out in the 1970s, the designation process gained speed. Since 1980 Congress has passed wilderness bills for 31 states. This year it faces bills for 19 million acres in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Idaho.

Hot Debate

Idaho’s debate has been hot, persistent and in many ways typical. This year there are two Idaho wilderness bills to choose from. One is a conservationists’ wish list for 4 million acres, introduced by Rep. Peter H. Kostmayer (D-Pa.). The other, more politically feasible one, is a 1.4 million-acre bill sponsored by Idaho’s senior senator, Republican James A. McClure.

Lynne Stone entered this fray as a volunteer soon after moving to Ketchum, near Sun Valley, in 1981. Now she calls herself a “working conservationist,” scraping by with seasonal government work or grants from environmental groups. Last year she flew to Washington for a stab at lobbying. She says she would rather stay in the mountains.

To be sure, that is where she seems most comfortable. At 41, she strides up the steep trail with ease, narrating natural history as she goes. She stops to inspect an elk track, then reels off the names of plants anchored in the dry mountain soil: sage and sego lilies, colorful cinquefoils, an ancient white bark pine with gnarled branches scratching like claws at the sky.

Pretty, yes, but the wilderness is good for more than scenery, she says. Wild plants and animals contribute to biological diversity and maintain a stock of wild genes for future scientists, who might just discover that something growing here cures cancer. Wilderness also protects watersheds and contributes to clean air, Stone says.

Such arguments are familiar to Joe Hinson of the Intermountain Forestry Industry Assn., which opposes both Idaho wilderness bills.

“Every time there’s a wilderness bill, somebody gets up and says, ‘This completes the wilderness system,’ ” Hinson says. “Five years later, they’re at it again. As long as an area doesn’t have a road in it, you’re going to have a debate over it.”

Need Development Areas

Some wilderness is fine, Hinson says, but you have to stop somewhere, or at least guarantee some areas for development while you’re locking up others. Idaho, he points out, already has 4 million acres of wilderness--7.6% of the state.

Others charge that environmentalists aren’t as interested in biological diversity as they are in creating elitist playgrounds for wealthy, urban backpackers--at the expense of local residents trying to make a living off the public land.

“These lands belong to the people. That means all the people, not a chosen few,” says Butterfield of the Blue Ribbon Coalition.

Lynne Stone, reared on an eastern Oregon ranch, says she is no yuppie backpacker. And there are more ways to make a living off the land, she adds, than by logging or mining it. Tourism is one of Idaho’s biggest industries, she says, and it’s hard to lure tourists to a clear cut.

In 20 years, roads have been pushed through more than 8 million acres of Idaho’s wild country, according to the Idaho Conservation League. “We’re destroying everything that is not protected,” Stone says. “If we don’t set it aside, we’ll lose it.”

Strong Arguments

Both sides have strong arguments strongly stated--if not overstated. In virtually every wilderness debate, conservationists say the area in question is a “crown jewel” of America’s wild lands, to be saved at all costs. The opposition counters that locking up the land in wilderness would deal the death blow to an already ailing (pick one) logging, mining or ranching industry.

Congress is left to sort it out, and the politics of compromise leave no one completely satisfied.

“It’s amazing that this is going to be decided in some room in the Capitol, 3,000 miles away,” Stone says. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Idaho wilderness. It’s who owes McClure a favor at the time.”

Whatever happens with Idaho, Congress faces enough other wilderness issues to keep busy for another 25 years.

Other Battles

It must decide whether 1.5 million acres of tundra in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is worth more for the caribou that migrate over it or for the oil reservoirs that may lie under it.

Battles also loom over vast Bureau of Land Management holdings in the deserts of Utah, Nevada, California and other Western states. The BLM has inventoried about 25 million acres of potential wilderness and is likely to recommend some fraction of that for designation. The Wilderness Society says it will push for far more.

Protecting entire ecosystems has become preservationists’ latest rallying cry. They hope to expand existing wilderness areas around Yellowstone National Park and in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee.

Lynne Stone, meanwhile, focuses on her own wild Idaho back yard. When lobbying, she argues the dollars and cents of tourism. But her real motives for saving wilderness prove more elusive, more personal.

In an alpine meadow flushed purple with blooming lupines, Stone gazes at a horizon of sawtoothed peaks and tries to explain her love for the land. She talks vaguely of hiking with friends, of the world she hopes her 11-year-old son will inherit.

Finally, she settles on words borrowed from a friend who has guided hunters and fishermen in the wild for years. “He says they don’t really come for the hunting or fishing. They come for the hush of the land.”

A breeze rustles through the white bark pines and sweeps across the lupines. A far-off chickadee squeaks out a song. “That’s what I’m trying to protect,” Stone says. “The hush of the land.”