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Endorse This: A Love Letter To America’s Wilderness

Endorse This: A Love Letter To America’s Wilderness

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Fifty years after the passage of the Wilderness Act, America’s natural treasures are threatened by powerful forces like overdevelopment and climate change. But they are still as magnificent as ever.

Click above to see filmmaker Pete McBride’s striking ode to America’s wild backcountry – then share this video!

Video via The Atlantic.

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Ah Wilderness! The Wilderness Act At 50

Ah Wilderness! The Wilderness Act At 50

You wouldn’t think the word wilderness needed a legal definition, but it did. And in 1964 this became it as far as the U.S. government is concerned.

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. When it was signed into law by President Johnson on September 3 of that year it created the National Wilderness Preservation System and set aside 9.1 million acres of land. Today that average has increased to 109.5 million acres throughout 44 states and Puerto Rico – some five percent of the land in the U.S.

And if you haven’t visited one of these drop-dead gorgeous places, now is a good time to start.  CNN has some enticing photos that will make you want to pack your hiking boots and commune with nature.

Photo: Wikipedia

Century’s Worth Of Difference In Saving Wildlife

Century’s Worth Of Difference In Saving Wildlife

By Jamie Rappaport Clark, The Philadelphia Inquirer

How can we visualize the number five billion, especially when it comes to thinking about a wildlife species?

Worldwide, it’s hard to find a species, outside the insect world, with a population equivalent to five billion. But during the Civil War, there were that many passenger pigeons in the skies, making it the most abundant bird in North America. And yet, by 1914, the bird was gone forever.

September 1 marked the 100-year anniversary of the passenger pigeon’s extinction. It was on that day 100 years ago that the last of the species — “Martha,” named after George Washington’s wife — took her last breath.

With Martha’s death a species that once dominated the skies over America disappeared forever. And although this sad tale seems long ago, the same factors that caused the passenger pigeons’ demise continue to imperil our native wildlife species today.

In the 1700s and 1800s, citizens regularly recount seeing massive migrating flocks of passenger pigeons — millions of wings beating in unison. In 1813, famous naturalist John James Audubon witnessed a flock of birds so large he said it blocked the sun and took a total of three days to pass by.

But unregulated hunting and development throughout the birds’ critical nesting grounds depleted the bounty of passenger pigeons faster than the birds could reproduce. And, by 1890, they were nearly gone, with only a few small flocks still alive in the wild.

By 1910, Martha was the only one left, living in a cage in the Cincinnati Zoo, the last surviving relic of a vanished species.

Unfortunately, as the birds declined in the late 1890s, Americans were only just beginning to understand the impact that our westward expansion would have on the natural world. We were not monitoring the passenger pigeons’ numbers and there were no mechanisms for protecting the bird and balancing consumption with conservation.

Although the birds’ extinction has left a haunting mark on American history, there is a silver lining to this tragic tale.

The disappearance of passenger pigeons spurred an awakening and awareness about the value of preserving wildlife in our country. Indeed, I would argue that it was the passenger pigeons’ extinction, and later the rapid decline of species like the peregrine falcon and the bald eagle, that led directly to Americans’ current commitment to wildlife conservation.

By the 1970s, this country had concluded that we should never again be responsible for the extinction of a native wildlife species. That is why Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, our nation’s most important safety net for imperiled animals and plants on the brink of extinction.

Though the ESA came too late to protect the passenger pigeon and Martha, it has effectively shielded thousands of species from their same fate. Thankfully today, gray wolves, Humpback whales, Southern sea otters, Florida manatees, peregrine falcons, and Florida panthers still walk this planet precisely because we vowed to protect them through the ESA.

Though long gone, Martha’s story continues to teach us an important and urgent message. It serves as an ongoing reminder that we must work together as a nation to protect our imperiled wildlife and the important law that assures those protections.

Without a strong ESA, the decline of many species would accelerate, until they too vanished, even ones so numerous they darken the sun and the face of the earth.

Jamie Rappaport Clark, a former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. Clark wrote this for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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To Save The Wilderness Act, And Wilderness Itself, Things Have To Change

To Save The Wilderness Act, And Wilderness Itself, Things Have To Change

By Gary Ferguson, Los Angeles Times

Fifty years ago Wednesday, President Lyndon B. Johnson strolled out to the Rose Garden, pressed a fountain pen between the fingers of his hefty right hand and signed into law the highest level of protection ever afforded the American landscape. “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt,” Johnson said later, “we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning.”

On that day, America gained a wilderness preservation system. Initially containing some nine million acres of wildlands, the system now protects more than 109 million acres from California to Alaska, New Mexico to Montana, Florida to New Jersey; every acre afforded the simple right to unfold unshackled by human inventions or appetites.

Johnson’s enthusiasm was in part a nod to the fact that in 1964, nature was on the run. We were by then well on our way to spreading more than a billion pounds of DDT on the American landscape. Rampant clear-cutting was happening in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Northern California, including the decimation of many of the last privately held sequoia groves. Wild rivers were dammed. Rural states still offered government-sponsored bounties on a wide range of “bad” animals: mountain lions and coyotes, wolves and weasels, hawks and owls.

Even so, for many Americans, wild landscapes were still a major means both of celebrating the roots of our nation’s past and for defining the nature of our generosity to future generations. Across our history, periods of environmental abuse have tended to lead to fierce, highly patriotic indignation. Which is a big part of why the Wilderness Act became law with such a stunning level of consensus, passing unanimously in the Senate and with just a single dissenting vote in the House. Arguably, if the Wilderness Act does nothing more today than remind environmentalists of the patriotic power of conservation, it would be doing a lot.

But in fact wilderness does much more. Ecological economists J.B. Loomis and Robert Richardson have estimated wilderness preserves in the Lower 48 states are providing air and water filtering, carbon storage and climate regulation services worth more than $3 billion annually. In addition, wilderness use supports some 24,000 jobs, and is part of an outdoor recreation industry that sees roughly $650 million each year in consumer spending.

But beyond all that, the wilderness preservation system forms an invaluable set of base lines for showing us what healthy, natural systems look like. On the other hand, these base lines allow scientists to gain the knowledge needed to restore damage already done, including rehabilitating salmon fisheries in the Northwest, reclaiming toxic mine sites in California and the Rockies, and stemming dwindling songbird populations in New England.

At the same time, wilderness areas teach us the fundamental needs of natural systems in the face of climate change.

This latter benefit will only become more important in decades to come. Taking full advantage of it, however, will require two things: First, given that some species can’t survive in the face of the rapidly shifting habitats that climate change induces, we’ll need to expand the size of some of our current wilderness preserves.

Yet even if that happens — and the political climate today is hardly friendly to such notions — many species simply won’t be able to migrate quickly enough from their current habitats to more suitable ground. Unless wilderness managers assist in those migrations, actually moving or planting threatened species to more appropriate habitats, those species will become regionally extinct.

And this is where things get really sticky. Although the current Wilderness Act allows great flexibility — providing for all sorts of special actions so long as the original intentions of the act are honored — it can be argued that relocating species to areas where historically they never occurred is prohibited by the law.

Unquestionably, in the coming years the courts will hear a variety of challenges to the idea of wilderness managers using these sorts of tools. On the one hand, we can hardly fault those who object. As ecologist Frank Egler pointed out more than 30 years ago, “Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think. They’re more complex than we can think.” Time and again we’ve found out the hard way that just when we thought we were being helpful, we were actually causing harm.

With this in mind, even if the courts do grant increased power to wilderness managers to do things like assist migration, it seems prudent to allow some wilderness preserves to continue under the more traditional “hands-off” policy. The challenge will be knowing what to do, where.

This 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act finds us facing something unimaginable in 1964: Today, no landscape on Earth is free of the effects of human-caused climate change. If wilderness is to continue to be characterized by healthy watersheds and vigorous biodiversity, some of its provisions will have to be re-interpreted. Only then can we hope to minimize the enormous climate changes we’ve unwittingly unleashed.

The wilderness system was fashioned both from our notions of non-human life and untamed landscapes having the simple right to exist, as well as from a desire to pass along these natural wonders to future generations. If we’re to honor those admirable impulses, we’ll have little choice but to use every thoughtful, well-considered tool at our disposal.

Gary Ferguson’s latest book is The Carry Home, which will be published in November. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Heatkernel via Wikimedia Commons

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