Washington Wilderness Coalition - Celebrating Wilderness

New Conservation Voices

Putting the Finishing Touches on Wilderness

By Bill Pope
October 2008

I work for an organization that is focused on directly protecting land within designated and proposed wilderness areas around the country. However, I don’t work for a wilderness organization, recreation group, federal agency or consulting firm.

I work for the Wilderness Land Trust, the only land trust devoted exclusively to purchasing privately-owned parcels of land within existing and proposed federal wilderness areas. We work closely with wilderness advocacy groups, like the Washington Wilderness Coalition, to identify and prioritize private in-holdings within or adjacent to wilderness areas for purchase.

Celebrating Wilderness

By Doug Scott

We humans use anniversaries as occasions to celebrate and to take stock. Wedding anniversaries and birthdays are obvious examples. As it happens, 2009 has been a year rich in wilderness anniversaries for Washington conservationists to celebrate.

July 3rd was the 25th anniversary of the Washington State Wilderness Act, signed that day by President Ronald Reagan. That single law extended the protection of the Wilderness Act to one million acres of our national forests. The largest was the nearly 170,000-acre William O. Douglas Wilderness immediately east of Mt. Rainier National Park. The 1984 law also designated four small but ecologically-vital wilderness areas that protect some of the wild lands on the Olympic National Forest along the border of Olympic National Park. And it significantly expanded the block of wilderness that stretches from the North Cascades Highway nearly all the way to Stevens Pass—a complex of national park and national forest wilderness areas centered around Glacier Peak which totals more than 1.2 million acres, making this the largest unbroken expanse of wilderness in our state (and larger than the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Idaho and Montana).

This fall we can also savor the 45th anniversary of the Wilderness Act itself—the historic charter that sets out legal protections for all of our wilderness areas. The Wilderness Act, signed into law on September 3, 1964 sets the “gold standard”—affording the strongest legal protection for natural areas within our federal lands, that is protection by act of Congress.

Of course, it takes an act of Congress to add new lands to our National Wilderness Preservation System, and passing such laws is always hard. But the outcome of each wilderness campaign—carried to success over the years by elected officials of both political parties—means that in all of the future, should someone seek to allow development within one of these areas, they will face the burden-of-proof of convincing Congress, since only Congress can alter a wilderness area once it is designated.

Reflecting on these recent wilderness anniversaries is one way to stimulate our energies for challenge of gaining this same protection for additional key lands, such as the pending bipartisan Murray-Reichert legislation to expand the Alpine Lakes Wilderness.

Happy anniversaries!