1964: The Beatles
released their first album; Plans to build the World Trade Center in New York
were announced; the Vietnam war was beginning to escalate; Dr. Martin Luther
King won a Nobel Peace Prize and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil
Rights Act.
On September 4, Johnson signed another significant bill into
law – a bill that took 60 drafts and eight years to pass through Congress: the
Wilderness Act of 1964.
Next year marks
the 50th anniversary of the act.
Written by Howard Zahniser of The Wilderness Society as the
culmination of a long national, grassroots effort to protect what remained of
our nation’s wild places, the Wilderness Act created the National Wilderness Preservation
System, which has since grown to nearly 110 million acres of wilderness managed
by four agencies in 44 states and Puerto Rico.
The Wilderness Act succinctly and poetically defines wilderness
as:
“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.”
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| President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Wilderness Act |
With its roots dating back to 1910 – an extension of the conservation
policies put in place by the likes of President Theodore Roosevelt -- three U.S.
Forest Service employees were pivotal in pushing forth the concept of setting
aside lands as wilderness: Bob Marshall, Arthur Carhart and Aldo Leopold.
"For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given
way. The priority of industry has become dogma,” wrote Leopold. “Are we as yet
sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or
do without our wilderness?"
Zahniser put it
this way: “I believe that at least in the present phase of our civilization we
have a profound, a fundamental need for areas of wilderness - a need that is
not only recreational and spiritual but also educational and scientific, and
withal essential to a true understanding of ourselves, our culture, our own
natures, and our place in all nature.”
