Value of ‘Plain’ Wilderness

“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1862, when California was a young, barely settled state. Now, with a population of 33 million and growing, and the state’s wild lands pressed by people and industry, Thoreau’s words are more urgent than ever for California.

Road building, off-road vehicle use, logging, mining and other activities are eating into our remaining wilderness storehouse at a rate of 97 acres a day, according to the California Wilderness Coalition. Fortunately, the U.S. Forest Service has declared a moratorium for now on road building to potential logging areas. Still, as the population grows, pressure builds inexorably on roadless regions of special natural beauty and biological significance.

The Wilderness Coalition has undertaken Wildlands 2000, a mammoth effort to catalog the best of the state’s unprotected wild lands for inclusion in proposed legislation to go before Congress in the next year or two. The starting point is studies by the Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that identified nearly 600 wilderness areas totaling about 13.5 million acres. The areas span the natural diversity of California, from desert regions to alpine mountain areas, ranging from the Mexico border to Oregon.

California has developed so rapidly in recent decades that it is easy to forget how extensive the state is and how much of it remains roadless and pristine. Of the state’s total 100 million acres, barely 5 million acres were covered by urban and rural development by the early 1990s. That figure has grown since, but the vast majority of California is still farmland, range, desert and forest.

The federal Wilderness Act was passed in 1964 and was followed in the 1970s and ‘80s by a flurry of legislation creating wilderness areas. These often focused on scenic regions that fit the public picture of wilderness--the high alpine country of the Sierra Nevada, for example, the realm of lakes, peaks, snowfields and glaciers. In 1994, Congress created the first great desert wilderness with the California Desert Protection Act. This virtually doubled the amount of formally designated wilderness on federal lands in California to about 14 million acres.

There has been no further action, however, on millions of acres identified by federal agencies as potential wilderness regions free of roads or other marks of human development. These might be oak woodlands, chaparral, grasslands and wetlands. To some, they do not seem as pretty or dramatic as the High Sierra, but they fully qualify as wilderness, providing the state a chance to maintain healthy ecosystems, wildlife habitat, clean watersheds and recreation opportunities for future generations of Californians.

These lands are the last of the best that we inherited--all there ever will be. We must act soon to preserve this wealth of wildness.