Why We Need Wilderness

Image Gallery During a nearly 60-year career, Pulitzer-Prize winner Wallace Stegner, known as the Dean of Western Writers, wrote eloquently about the value of wild places. CHUCK PAINTER/STANFORD NEWS SERVICE

Sept. 3 marks the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Wilderness Act, the landmark federal legislation that preserves more than 105 million acres of wild land throughout the United States. Within designated wild areas, the Act allows research and recreation, such as hiking, canoeing and camping, but prohibits mechanized vehicles and all development — including road building, logging and drilling. Wilderness, as defined by the Act, retains its primeval character — land where “the Earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Proposals are pending to protect millions more wild acres — the Act declared it to be “the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.” Today only 4.67 percent of U.S. land (2.5 percent outside of Alaska) has permanent wilderness designation.

On Dec. 3, 1960, four years before the Wilderness Act was adopted, the following letter was written by esteemed author and conservationist Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) to David Pesonen, a consultant to a commission reviewing the need for wilderness legislation. It received global acclaim and became the manifesto for the wilderness movement. “Even just the last four words, ‘the geography of hope,’ had enough magic to help sway a nation toward a course that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago,” wrote Stegner’s biographer, Jackson J. Benson.

To locate wilderness areas near you, visit www.wilderness.net. To learn how you can help preserve our remaining wild places, see "Help Preserve Wilderness," below. — Mother

Wilderness Letter

Dear Mr. Pesonen:

I believe that you are working on the wilderness portion of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission’s report. If I may, I should like to urge some arguments for wilderness preservation that involve recreation, as it is ordinarily conceived, hardly at all. Hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain-climbing, camping, photography, and the enjoyment of natural scenery will all, surely, figure in your report. So will the wilderness as a genetic reserve, a scientific yardstick by which we may measure the world in its natural balance against the world in its man-made imbalance. What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical-minded — but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.

I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. It has no more to do with recreation than churches have to do with recreation, or than the strenuousness and optimism and expansiveness of what historians call the “American Dream” have to do with recreation. Nevertheless, since it is only in this recreation survey that the values of wilderness are being compiled, I hope you will permit me to insert this idea between the leaves, as it were, of the recreation report.