Latest news with #WildernessAct
Japan Today
22-05-2025
- General
- Japan Today
Why protecting wildland is crucial to American freedom and identity
By Leisl Carr Childers As summer approaches, millions of Americans begin planning or taking trips to state and national parks, seeking to explore the wide range of outdoor recreational opportunities across the nation. A lot of them will head toward the nation's wilderness areas – 110 million acres, mostly in the West, that are protected by the strictest federal conservation rules. When Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964, it described wilderness areas as places that evoked mystery and wonder, 'where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.' These are wild landscapes that present nature in its rawest form. The law requires the federal government to protect these areas 'for the permanent good of the whole people.' Wilderness areas are found in national parks, conservation land overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, national forests and U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuges. Earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives began to consider allowing the sale of federal lands in six counties in Nevada and Utah, five of which contain wilderness areas. Ostensibly, these sales are to promote affordable housing, but the reality is that the proposal, introduced by U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei, a Nevada Republican, is a departure from the standard process of federal land exchanges that accommodate development in some places but protect wilderness in others. Regardless of whether Americans visit their public lands or know when they have crossed a wilderness boundary, as environmental historians we believe that everyone still benefits from the existence and protection of these precious places. This belief is an idea eloquently articulated and popularized 65 years ago by the noted Western writer Wallace Stegner. His eloquence helped launch the modern environmental movement and gave power to the idea that the nation's public lands are a fundamental part of the United States' national identity and a cornerstone of American freedom. Humble origins In 1958, Congress established the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission to examine outdoor recreation in the U.S. in order to determine not only what Americans wanted from the outdoors, but to consider how those needs and desires might change decades into the future. One of the commission's members was David E. Pesonen, who worked at the Wildland Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. He was asked to examine wilderness and its relationship to outdoor recreation. Pesonen later became a notable environmental lawyer and leader of the Sierra Club. But at the time, Pesonen had no idea what to say about wilderness. However, he knew someone who did. Pesonen had been impressed by the wild landscapes of the American West in Stegner's 1954 history 'Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.' So he wrote to Stegner, who at the time was at Stanford University, asking for help in articulating the wilderness idea. Stegner's response, which he said later was written in a single afternoon, was an off-the-cuff riff on why he cared about preserving wildlands. This letter became known as the Wilderness Letter and marked a turning point in American political and conservation history. Pesonen shared the letter with the rest of the commission, which also shared it with newly installed Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. Udall found its prose to be so profound, he read it at the seventh Wilderness Conference in 1961 in San Francisco, a speech broadcast by KCBS, the local FM radio station. The Sierra Club published the letter in the record of the conference's proceedings later that year. But it was not until its publication in The Washington Post on June 17, 1962, that the letter reached a national audience and captured the imagination of generations of Americans. An eloquent appeal In the letter, Stegner connected the idea of wilderness to a fundamental part of American identity. He called wilderness 'something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people … the challenge against which our character as a people was formed … (and) the thing that has helped to make an American different from and, until we forget it in the roar of our industrial cities, more fortunate than other men.' Without wild places, he argued, the U.S. would be just like every other overindustrialized place in the world. In the letter, Stegner expressed little concern with how wilderness might support outdoor recreation on public lands. He didn't care whether wilderness areas had once featured roads, trails, homesteads or even natural resource extraction. What he cared about was Americans' freedom to protect and enjoy these places. Stegner recognized that the freedom to protect, to restrain ourselves from consuming, was just as important as the freedom to consume. Perhaps most importantly, he wrote, wilderness was 'an intangible and spiritual resource,' a place that gave the nation 'our hope and our excitement,' landscapes that were 'good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.' Without it, Stegner lamented, 'never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.' To him, the nation's natural cathedrals and the vaulted ceiling of the pure blue sky are Americans' sacred spaces as much as the structures in which they worship on the weekends. Stegner penned the letter during a national debate about the value of preserving wild places in the face of future development. 'Something will have gone out of us as a people,' he wrote, 'if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.' If not protected, Stegner believed these wildlands that had helped shape American identity would fall to what he viewed as the same exploitative forces of unrestrained capitalism that had industrialized the nation for the past century. Every generation since has an obligation to protect these wild places. Stegner's Wilderness Letter became a rallying cry to pass the Wilderness Act. The closing sentences of the letter are Stegner's best: 'We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.' This phrase, 'the geography of hope,' is Stegner's most famous line. It has become shorthand for what wilderness means: the wildlands that defined American character on the Western frontier, the wild spaces that Americans have had the freedom to protect, and the natural places that give Americans hope for the future of this planet. America's 'best idea' Stegner returned to themes outlined in the Wilderness Letter again two decades later in his essay 'The Best Idea We Ever Had: An Overview,' published in Wilderness magazine in spring 1983. Writing in response to the Reagan administration's efforts to reduce protection of the National Park System, Stegner declared that the parks were 'Absolutely American, absolutely democratic.' He said they reflect us as a nation, at our best rather than our worst, and without them, millions of Americans' lives, his included, would have been poorer. Public lands are more than just wilderness or national parks. They are places for work and play. They provide natural resources, wildlife habitat, clean air, clean water and recreational opportunities to small towns and sprawling metro areas alike. They are, as Stegner said, cures for cynicism and places of shared hope. Stegner's words still resonate as Americans head for their public lands and enjoy the beauty of the wild places protected by wilderness legislation this summer. With visitor numbers increasing annually and agency budgets at historic lows, we believe it is useful to remember how precious these places are for all Americans. And we agree with Stegner that wilderness, public lands writ large, are more valuable to Americans' collective identity and expression of freedom than they are as real estate that can be sold or commodities that can be extracted. Leisl Carr Childers is Associate Professor of History, Colorado State University. Michael Childers is Associate Professor of History, Colorado State University. The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. External Link © The Conversation
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Researchers make alarming discovery while observing wildlife using infrared cameras: 'A major finding'
It's no surprise that human visitation in national parks where wildlife is abundant can disrupt animals' lives and ways of living. Now, Spartan News Room has reported that a study on how human recreation affects wildlife behavior at Isle Royale National Park in Michigan has discovered alarming news. Researchers were curious about how human recreation in Isle Royale National Park affected the animals living there, particularly after the park saw an increase of 338% in visitors after 2020. They studied wolves, snowshoe hares, red foxes, and moose using 156 infrared cameras over multiple years to determine whether the animals changed their habits to accommodate people being in the area. The study discovered that the more people who showed up at the park, the more these animals changed their behavior, and the greater the tendency to avoid areas where humans were. The study found, "A major finding was that species space use and activity patterns were altered only on-trail while remaining constant off-trail. This suggests that the influence of human activity occurs mostly on trails." Hailey Boone, lead author of this study, explained per Spartan News Room, "Even though humans are technically allowed to recreate in the wilderness areas, the fact that they are potentially changing some sort of behavior from animals goes against the federal Wilderness Act." The Wilderness Act was passed in 1964 to formally designate and protect federal wilderness. Another purpose was to ensure minimally invasive human influences in these areas so local ecosystems were able to change on their own terms. Human recreation impacting wildlife isn't only harmful to the wildlife. While human activity disrupts animals' natural lives, having too many people around is dangerous to animals and humans alike. As more people visit national parks, there are more human-wildlife encounters. In some of these encounters, people get too close to animals, causing conflict, which can result in injury or death to humans and wildlife. Do you think America does a good job of protecting its natural beauty? Definitely Only in some areas No way I'm not sure Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Wildlife behavioral changes may also eventually include moving on to other areas due to too much human activity, which could inadvertently put them into contact with even more people, depending on how close to civilization they get, causing further human-wildlife interactions. This study had a few suggestions for dealing with this issue. One suggestion said, "Reducing visitation during peak seasons or redistributing visitation across a season could reduce mammals' responses to recreational activity while continuing to provide for public enjoyment." So, if visitors go to parks during off-peak times, there's not an overabundance of people, which might help the wildlife. Meanwhile, another similar study suggested limiting human activity to certain areas in parks to offset the problem. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
