CU Boulder’s Paul S. Sutter looks back on the history of the Wilderness Act as it approaches its diamond jubilee

Passage of the Wilderness Act was anything but a foregone conclusion.

First introduced in Congress in 1956, the “often-sidetracked Wilderness Bill,” as New York Times writer William M. Blair called it, underwent 65 revisions before finally surviving the House and the Senate and being signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Sept. 3, 1964.

“It was an eight- or nine-year period,” says Paul S. Sutter, professor of environmental history at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. “There are not too many pieces of legislation with such a lengthy history.”

Paul S. Sutter, a professor of environmental history in the CU Boulder Department of History, notes that understanding the 60-year history of the Wilderness Act requires understanding what wilderness is.

A lengthy history and a rocky one, with as many ups and downs, peaks and valleys as the terrain the Wilderness Act protects. But to understand that history, says Sutter, one must first understand what wilderness is.

The modern wilderness idea

The Wilderness Act defines “wilderness” as follows:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his 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.

That peculiar word, “untrammeled,” is crucial, says Sutter. “A lot of people assume it means ‘untrampled,’ but it doesn’t.”

To “trammel” something, Sutter explains, is to hinder or restrict its freedom of action. “So to trammel wild nature is effectively to harness it to human economic forces and activities.”

This desire to safeguard large stretches of land against such forces led to what Sutter calls the modern wilderness idea, or “the idea that we ought to be protecting lands from modern development as much as possible.”

That means, among other things, no roads. Roads are the oil to wilderness’s water.

“[T]here is no use fooling ourselves,” wrote Ansel Adams, whose photography captured the ethos of the modern wilderness idea and posthumously earned him a wilderness area in his name, “that nature with a slick highway running through it is any longer wild.”

It’s this roadlessness, along with prohibitions against motorization and mechanization, that distinguishes wilderness areas from other nationally protected lands, says Sutter.

“A wilderness area doesn’t have visitor centers, doesn’t have bathrooms, doesn’t have the amenities we come to expect when we go to somewhere like Yellowstone or Yosemite. You have to go into a wilderness area either carrying everything you need or living off the land.”  

Howard Zahniser, Washington wizard

Once it became law, the Wilderness Act immediately protected just over 9 million acres and established the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS), which consists of congressionally designated wilderness areas within the lands controlled by the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Now, six decades later, the Act protects 111 million acres (about 173,000 square miles), a marked increase made possible, Sutter says, by mechanisms within the act itself that allow Congress to add more wilderness to the NWPS over time.

A sign at the boundary of Colorado's Collegiate Peaks Wilderness. (Photo: Tyler Lahti/Wikicommons) 

The man behind those mechanisms was Howard Zahniser, former executive director of The Wilderness Society, the Wilderness Act’s primary author and someone who, according to Sutter, didn’t quite fit the environmental-activist mold.

“When you look at the pantheon of famous wilderness activists in American history—from John Muir and Henry David Thoreau to Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall and Olaus and Margaret Murie—they tended to be these rugged outdoor people. Many of them were trained foresters or avid hikers. Zahniser was different.”

Though Zahniser—who wore a specially tailored overcoat with four large inside pockets for carrying books, Wilderness Act propaganda and Wilderness Society membership information—felt comfortable in the outdoors, his real strength was his political savvy, Sutter claims.

“He was this Beltway insider who was a mastermind at pulling together support for this bill.”

And pull together support he did, from both sides of the aisle.

“One of the most fascinating things about the Wilderness Act, and really all of the major environmental legislation that came after it—the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, all of the hugely important environmental legislative achievements of that era—is that they were overwhelmingly bipartisan.”  

Not so anymore, Sutter says, noting that environmental politics now is far more polarized and partisan than it was in Zahniser’s day.

“When I teach this to my students, that’s one of the things I really harp on—whether there’s any way we can reclaim some of that bipartisanship.”

Loving nature to death

The Wilderness Act has met its share of resistance over the years. One major source was the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s.   

The Sagebrush Rebellion, says Sutter, sought to transfer ownership of western federal lands to the states. “A lot of people in the West had come to rely on public lands for their well-being and saw the Wilderness Act as a major threat.”

Though it eventually fizzled out after gaining little traction in Washington, D.C., the Rebellion did manage to garner a fair amount of support, most notably from Ronald Reagan, who said during a July 1980 campaign speech in Salt Lake City, “I happen to be one who cheers and supports the ‘Sagebrush Rebellion.’ Count me in as a rebel.”

Another challenge that has continuously dogged wilderness activists is how to strike a balance between making wilderness accessible to as many people as possible without simultaneously undermining its wilderness qualities.  

“Back in the early years of wilderness advocacy, one of the frequent critiques of wilderness was that it was elitist, that it was a way of preserving nature for people who wanted to access it in a certain way,” says Sutter.

“So critics of wilderness would say, ‘Well, if we build a road into a wilderness area, far more people are going to be able to see it and experience it.’ And the wilderness advocates would say, ‘But if you build a road into it, it’s not wilderness anymore.’”

This tension between preservation and accessibility—between loving nature and loving it to death—has always been central to discussions about wilderness, says Sutter. And it’s a tension he predicts won’t slacken any time soon. Currently, for example, there are debates about whether fixed rock-climbing anchors ought to be allowed in wilderness areas or whether areas long used by mountain bikers ought to be added to the NWPS, as the Wilderness Act prohibits any form of mechanized or motorized transport.

“We think of wilderness politics as being about environmental preservation and recreation versus mining, timber-cutting, grazing. But there are conflicts within the recreational community that have always demanded subtler forms of preservation. The modern wilderness idea emerged from such conflicts.”

And so, 60 years on, the work of the Wilderness Act continues, adapting to the demands of the present moment yet remaining rooted in the belief that wilderness areas provide an essential, if intangible, service—a service perhaps best articulated by none other than Zahniser himself, who died four months before the bill he’d spent the better part of nine years defending graduated into law.

“[W]e have a profound, a fundamental need for areas of wilderness,” Zahniser wrote, “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 nature, and our place in all nature.”

Top image: the Uncompahgre Wilderness in the north-central San Juan Mountains of Western Colorado (Photo: Bureau of Land Management)

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