September 3rd marks the 45th anniversary of the Wilderness Act – a law that has resulted in bipartisan support for protecting more than 100 million acres, and it’s still going strong. The U.S. Senate is commemorating the anniversary, and so are thousands of people in every state who have had some role, be it large or small, in protecting their backyard wilderness. Regular people are celebrating for one simple reason: The great power of the Wilderness Act lies in how it enabled ordinary citizens to petition their government for change.
In 1964, the act was written in a way that shifted responsibility from the public land management agencies to the people; rather than wait for an agency such as the BLM or Forest Service to recommend wilderness designation–with their cumbersome administrative processes–citizens could develop their own wilderness proposals and submit them directly to a member of Congress.
It gave people who chose to organize and work hard at these proposals the chance to leave a real lasting legacy–part of their corner of the world, as the Act states, “… 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.” What greater gift could we possibly leave to our own descendants and to the wildlife, too?
Ginnie in the Jarbidge Wilderness, Nevada’s oldest wilderness area.
