Happy Birthday Wilderness America!!

[Duckster]

Forty five years ago today, September 3, 1964, President Johnson signed Public Law 88-577, better known as the Wilderness Act:

“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 community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

 -- Henry David Thoreau 

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The wind will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

– John Muir

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone – and to no one.

– Edward Abbey

The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.

Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.

– Aldo Leopold

There is just one hope for repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every inch on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom and preservation of the wilderness.

– Bob Marshall

I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.

– Steve McQueen

[Reply]

Agreed wholeheartedly!

I spent the last few months in Wilderness areas and I’ve never felt more at peace and blessed to be living in this country. The experience infinitely increased my appreciation for my state, my country, my world and its environments.

I read some story about Muir and how he invited Roosevelt (I think?) to Yosemite for but a day, after which Roosevelt immediately telegraphed his Department of the Interior secretary and expanded the protected areas around the region. I can’t imagine something like that happening so nonchalantly today.

I wonder if the Wilderness Act will last the test of time (and human greed). I still bitterly remember a herd of damned cattle grazing through an otherwise tranquil forest at 10 pm. (No. More. Cowbell. Ever!) I wonder what other compromises will eventually occur…