The Wilderness Act at 60: A uniquely American legacy

“We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong and America the free, but America the beautiful. Today that beauty is in danger.”
– Lyndon B. Johnson, May 1964

Sixty years ago this fall, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law what would become one of the most important pieces of conservation legislation in U.S. history.

The culmination of a decades-long campaign by conservationists and outdoor enthusiasts from across the political spectrum, the Wilderness Act of 1964 enshrined into law America’s first legal definition of “wilderness” – “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” – and established the first national-level framework for protecting such places in their natural state.

The passage of the Wilderness Act brought more than 9 million acres of land across the country under federal protection within the newly created National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS), within which stringent restrictions on logging, mining, roadbuilding and other forms of development aimed to ensure that the land remained to the greatest extent possible untarnished by human interference. In the 60 years since, that area has grown to almost 112 million acres, encompassing more than 800 wilderness areas across 44 states plus Puerto Rico.

These protected lands, managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service, include some of America’s most famous and ecologically significant landscapes. Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, the Denali Wilderness in Alaska and huge tracts of other wild land across the country have all benefited from the act’s protections.

The conservation victories made possible by the Wilderness Act are myriad, but the significance of this law arguably extends beyond its environmental achievements. Wilderness preservation has historically been a rare issue that transcends partisan differences, in no small part a function of the unique role that wilderness has played in shaping America’s cultural identity. Even today, with arguably unprecedented levels of partisan division and conflict, everything about this particular law – from the way it was conceived, advocated for and drafted, to the way it has been implemented over the course of its 60-year existence – illustrates the power of shared American values.

The intrinsic value of wilderness

Conservation protections have historically been designed to strike a balance between the need to protect natural lands and those lands’ utility to human beings, and often therefore allow for some degree of resource extraction, agriculture or other forms of land use. The Wilderness Act, by contrast, is built on an explicit declaration of the intrinsic value of wilderness itself. The regulations it imposes on human activity in the areas it protects are not concerned with “balance.” The law’s (still to this day quite radical) acknowledgment that there are places where man is merely “a visitor who does not remain” forms the basis for a uniquely comprehensive level of protection.[i]

This recognition for the first time gave legal legitimacy to the notion that nature has value in and of itself, beyond whatever economic or even experiential value it may have to humans. The bipartisan support that enabled the Wilderness Act to come into being, and which has been a constant feature of the way it has been used in the decades since, is an indicator of just how firmly this sentiment is embedded in America’s collective consciousness, and arguably even in the founding myths of the nation itself.

Wilderness has been a constant presence in the American imagination for centuries. A reverence for the wild runs deep in the country’s early literary and artistic canon, with nature depicted as a manifestation of the divine (Emerson), a source of spiritual and moral renewal (Thoreau) and a sublime and awe-inspiring frontier filled with mystery and promise (think of Albert Bierstadt’s depictions of the wild landscapes of the American West). The duality of wilderness as a place both of danger and of promise became a foundational narrative in American culture, “the frontier” being symbolic of freedom and individual and national renewal, and the romanticized image of the lone frontiersman the icon of a mythology in which wilderness was a place where American virtues of self-reliance and resilience were forged.

While this may have been the myth, the reality of the settlement of the west was the widespread destruction of the very landscapes it romanticized – and with them the ecosystems, wildlife and native peoples they had supported for millennia. By the end of the 19^th century, with the unchecked expansion of mining and logging, the growth of the railroad system, the destruction of the buffalo, the conversion of grasslands to agriculture and the advent of mass tourism threatening the continent’s most awe-inspiring landscapes, the scale of this devastation was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

The cultural power of the wilderness idea enabled the nation to realize what it was on the verge of losing. By the early 20^th century, thanks to the works of John Muir, Aldo Leopold and others, wilderness had begun to evolve in the collective imagination from something that needed to be conquered into something that needed to be preserved – and from there, it was only a small step to the idea, articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, of “conservation as a national duty.”

A legacy of bipartisanship

Sixty years later, an overwhelming majority of Americans of both parties still seem to agree with this assessment. A poll in 2012 found that almost nine out of 10 Americans  believe it is “quite” or “extremely” important that the government protect natural lands, and more than 80% believe that doing so is “patriotic.” A 2019 survey in the western states found that more than two thirds of voters – a majority of both Republicans and Democrats – believe conservation should be a government priority. A similar poll last year found that overwhelming majorities say that public lands and wildlife issues will play a significant role in how they vote.

This broad cross-party support for conservation is a continuation of the bipartisan history of the Wilderness Act itself. Written by Howard Zahniser of The Wilderness Society, the law was the product of a bipartisan effort spanning a period of several years (its first sponsors in the Senate were six Democrats and four Republicans and the final bill passed both the Senate and the House with large majorities), and millions of acres have been added to the NWPS by presidents of both parties, including some perhaps unlikely ones – President Reagan signed 43 bills protecting a total of more than 10 million acres across the country; George W. Bush’s tenure saw the addition of 2.2 million acres of new wilderness areas, including half a million acres in Nevada, California, Colorado and South Dakota. Even President Trump signed legislation designating some areas as wilderness.

Often these designations have been the product of bipartisan campaign efforts, as was the case for example with the Scapegoat Wilderness in Montana, brought under the auspices of the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1972 by President Nixon in response to a campaign led by Montana’s Republican Rep. Jim Battin and Democrats Sen. Lee Metcalf and Mike Mansfield.

A law rooted in feelings of national, rather than partisan belonging, the Wilderness Act continues to provide vital safeguards for America’s wild places and keep alive the nation’s deep connection to the natural world. The history of this law, and arguably of the U.S. conservation movement itself, is a valuable reminder that shared national values can transcend even the most bitter partisan and ideological divisions. With the nation feeling as starkly divided as ever, we need as many examples of that as we can get.

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[i] The Act allows certain uses that existed before the wilderness designation to be grandfathered in, so they may continue to take place – specifically, mining, grazing or other similar uses that do not significantly impact the majority of the area may remain to some degree.