Just 4.5 million acres sits east of the Rockies, where human populations, our roads and cities, have spread amok. Over half of this wilderness, some 57 million acres, is in Alaska, our last frontier. A tally of current federally protected wilderness comes to roughly 110 million acres, which is 5 million more acres than the area of California. Wilderness must be “of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition” (Congress suggested “at least 5,000 acres” would be a start) it must have no functioning roads (old wagon trails and boulder-strewn four-wheel-drive tracks don’t count as roads) and it should provide “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.” We should laud the relatively good run of the last fifty years, during which time Congress expanded our wilderness more than tenfold. The requisites for designation are formidable. When the Act passed in 1964, Congress opted to immediately place 9 million acres into the nascent National Wilderness Preservation System. These acres have been given the highest form of protection for public lands: no mechanized transport (not even bicycles), no manmade structures (but for the occasional sign), no commercial activity (except for outfitters whose work is “necessary,” in the words of the law, for certain members of the public to realize the benefits of wilderness). In a country that has historically spent its energies on the crushing of the wild for exploitation and gain, this minor achievement is nonetheless admirable. Federally designated wilderness in the lower 48 adds up to a pitiably small figure, less than 3 percent of the total landmass. We have neither been humble nor responsible. Without the gadgets, the inventions, the contrivances whereby men have seemed to establish among themselves an independence of nature, without these distractions, to know the wilderness is to know a profound humility, to recognize one’s littleness, to sense dependence and interdependence, indebtedness, and responsibility.” Howard Zahniser, executive director of The Wilderness Society for two decades and the primary author and principal advocate of the Wilderness Act, wrote in 1956-the year the bill first arrived to the floor of Congress-that we need “to know ourselves as the dependent members of a great community of life, and this can indeed be one of the spiritual benefits of a wilderness experience. There is a practical argument here-the preservation of certain genetic pools as the human race busily wipes out genetic diversity elsewhere-and a transcendent one, related to the not-so-transcendent fact that our species evolved out of such primeval places, and our character was substantially shaped by them. Wilderness is intended, among its other purposes, to be a refuge for wild animals and plants, where the processes of evolution, so far as we humans have observed them, are to remain unmolested and unhampered. What is meant by primeval character is not up for debate. A total of nine wolves in the Frank Church wilderness were killed last January in contravention of the spirit and letter of the Act, which was passed by Congress in 1964 to protect those tracts of land “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,” where the land retains “its primeval character and influence” and is “managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.” Elk bring in wholesome revenues for the state in the form of hunting licenses and fees, and large herds of elk-preferably unnaturally large herds, fat and lazy and without threat from native predators-provide local guiding concerns a major source of profit. And the wolves howl and hunt and take down elk for dinner, which was the behavior that prompted the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to hire its mercenary. Here the cougars slip through the forests. Ragged with mountains and cut by chutes of whitewater, the Frank Church is a forbidding and trackless place. LAST WINTER, as if to flip its middle finger at the fiftieth anniversary of the Wilderness Act, the state of Idaho dispatched a hunter-trapper on horseback to track and slaughter two packs of wolves in the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness, the largest wilderness area in the contiguous United States.
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