Nobody said it more succinctly than Thoreau. We arose from the wildland and have been close to wilderness for most of our existence. Only in the last two centuries have we become a serious threat to wilderness (and, not coincidentally, the Earth itself). I give thanks that 50 years ago today, people had the strength to draw a line and say ‘no farther.’
That first official Wilderness was the Gila here in New Mexico and New Mexicans played key roles in the passage of the Wilderness Act. I can see more than one wilderness from my house in the middle of the largest city in New Mexico. (A hundred mile vista helps, and the closest wilderness towers 5,000 feet above the city.)
There are those who would sell off our shared heritage for quick profit and longterm devastation. The profiteers oppose every effort to expand wilderness beyond the tiny islands remaining from what was an entire continent of wilderness. Those islands are isolated and riven by roads. Their silence is shattered by air traffic. Their lifeblood is coveted by those who would bottle and sell it. Every single day, we need to roar “no farther!”
“The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.” – Thoreau
Wilderness Act – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wilderness Act is well known for its succinct and poetic definition of wilderness:
“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own 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.â€
Wilderness Act – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
50 years later, Wilderness Act divides ranchers, environmentalists – The Santa Fe New Mexican: Home By Staci Matlock, The New Mexican
Aldo Leopold, an avid hunter and angler who worked for the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico, convinced his bosses in 1924 to designate 750,000 acres of the Gila National Forest as the world’s first wilderness.
It would be four decades more before a bipartisan Congress, with only one dissenting vote, approved the Wilderness Act. …
Only 2.5 percent of public land is protected wilderness. “We’re not talking about a vast part of our public lands,†said Mark Allison, director of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance. “These are places so special that we want to set them aside for future generations.â€
The first two wilderness areas approved under the law were both in New Mexico — the Gila and the Pecos Wilderness. Since it was enacted, the act has preserved more than 109 million acres in 756 wilderness areas around the United States.
Over the past 50 years, Congress has approved millions of acres of designated wilderness, with votes of support from both sides of the aisle and presidents from both parties signing the bills into law.
But bipartisan support has changed in the last half dozen years.
50 years later, Wilderness Act divides ranchers, environmentalists – The Santa Fe New Mexican: Home