The Wilderness Card

The Wilderness Act was designed to protect forever our country’s greatest natural assets -- its wild rivers, tall grass prairies, rich swamps and bayous, ancient forests and mountain peaks.

At the time the act was signed into law by President Johnson on Sept. 3, 1964, no other nation had such a protective system in place. It remains one of the great foundations of this nation’s environmental policies.

The Wilderness Act is, in its simplicity, a work of poetry. It declares each generation responsible to those that follow to preserve areas “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” It recognizes that, in addition to providing refuge for our wild creatures and filtering an industrial nation’s increasingly burdened air and water, wilderness serves the spiritual, physical and emotional needs of countless millions of Americans seeking solitude in an ever more crowded world. With 107 million acres now covered by the act in 44 states, most Americans have at least some wilderness available nearby.

This year, the Wilderness Act turns 40. In celebration of the anniversary, a federally sponsored weeklong conference was scheduled to be held in Colorado, but those plans have recently been shelved.

The U.S. Forest Service decided the conference might be a political liability to the Bush administration.

It’s easy to see why. This administration has been a direct enemy of wilderness. Its proposed energy bill would allow pipelines and high voltage transmission lines to be built through some of our wildest areas, including the spectacular Rocky Mountain Front in central Montana. Its Department of the Interior agreed to open 2.6 million acres of unprotected Utah wilderness to oil and gas drilling. Its chief law officer, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, has gutted the Clinton administration’s Roadless Rule, which blocks the government from building taxpayer-subsidized roads for logging companies to gain access to roadless areas in our national forests. And the list of wilderness attacks goes on, jeopardizing the productive collaborations that environmentalists have formed with loggers and other groups in recent years.

Sally Collins, the associate chief of the Forest Service who canceled the conference, said that when she found out the 40th anniversary celebration was to be scheduled “before the presidential election,” she “got really concerned, because I didn’t want anything to take away from the celebratory nature of this summit.”

Forest Service spokesman Joe Walsh elaborated. “If we don’t want this to be political, it has to be in a neutral time frame,” he said.

Collins and Walsh are sadly mistaken if they think such a celebration can ever be divorced from politics. Wilderness arouses deep passions among its advocates as well as its would-be exploiters. The best way to honor the act -- and to avoid protesters at the conference -- is not to cancel the celebration but rather for Congress and the Bush administration to begin moving away from their shameful records on the environment.

In my own million-acre valley, the Yaak in northwest Montana -- a wild, little rain forest that lies hard against the Canadian border -- there’s still not a single acre of designated wilderness despite its being one of the most biologically diverse and pristine valleys in the West. We’ve been waiting 40 years for such protection.

One of the many bitter ironies of this latest failure of domestic leadership is the fact that historically, Forest Service employees have been among the nation’s strongest advocates for, and leaders of, the wilderness movement in this country.

“I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in,” wrote Aldo Leopold, himself once a Forest Service employee, almost 60 years ago.

For Americans of any age, the National Wilderness Preservation System is one of the many great jewels of our democracy. If a celebration of its accomplishments is to be canceled, let it be because there is still so much work that remains to be done rather than because it falls at a potentially touchy time in the reelection campaign.

The current president may see the Wilderness Act as an inconvenience to be sidestepped, but here in the Yaak we see it as an obligation still not entirely fulfilled.