“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed …” — Wallace Stegner
The goal of the Wilderness Act, now celebrating its 60th birthday, was to set aside a small proportion of public land in America from human intrusion. Some places, the founders said, deserved to be free from motorized, mechanized and other intrusions to protect wildlife and wild lands.
But now, a handful of mountain bikers have partnered with a senator from Utah to gut the Wilderness Act.
This June, the Sustainable Trails Coalition, a mountain biking organization, cheered as Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced a bill (S. 4561) to amend the Wilderness Act and allow mountain bikes, strollers and game carts on every piece of land protected by the National Wilderness Preservation System. Stopping these intrusions would take each local wilderness manager undertaking a cumbersome process to say “no.”
The U.S. Congress passed the Wilderness Act, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law on September 3, 1964, to “preserve the wilderness character” of 54 wilderness areas totaling 9.1 million acres. Today, this effort has become a true conservation success story.
The National Wilderness Preservation System now protects over 800 wilderness areas totaling over 111 million acres in 44 states and Puerto Rico, making it America’s most critical law for preserving wild places and the genetic diversity of thousands of plant and animal species. Yet designated wilderness is only 2.7% of the Lower 48, and still just about 5% if Alaska is included.
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