Groups seek to gut Wilderness Act on its 60th anniversary

A handful of mountain bikers have partnered with a notoriously anti-Wilderness senator to introduce legislation in the U.S. Senate that would gut the 1964 Wilderness Act during this, the 60th anniversary of that landmark law.

In June, the Sustainable Trails Coalition (STC), a mountain biking organization solely focused on weakening the Wilderness Act, celebrated as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced Senate Bill 4561, which would directly amend the Wilderness Act to allow mountain bikes, strollers, and game carts in all 111 million acres of the National Wilderness Preservation System, unless each local wilderness manager undertook a cumbersome process to say no. The bill is premised on the false claims that the Wilderness Act never banned bikes, and that supposedly the U.S. Forest Service changed its regulations in 1984 to ban bikes.

The U.S. Congress passed the Wilderness Act 60 years ago and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law on Sept. 3, 1964, to preserve “the wilderness character” of an initial National Wilderness Preservation System of 54 wilderness areas totaling 9.1 million acres. Today, in a tremendous conservation success story, the National Wilderness Preservation System has grown to protect 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, biodiversity and the genetic diversity of thousands of plant and animal species.

The protections of the Wilderness Act include a ban on logging, mining, roads, buildings, structures and installations, both mechanized and motorized equipment, and more. The authors of the Wilderness Act sought to secure for the American people “an enduring resource of wilderness” to protect these wilderness areas as places “untrammeled” or unmanipulated by modern society, as a refuge for wildlife, and where the ecological and evolutionary forces of nature can continue to play. Bicycles, an obvious kind of mechanized equipment, have always been prohibited in Wilderness by the plain language of the law since it passed in 1964; the Forest Service merely clarified its regulations on this point in 1984 as mountain bikes then gained popularity.

Unfortunately, the STC bikers are little different from other recreational interest groups that want to weaken or violate the Wilderness Act in order to pursue their own personal activities, with what seems to be a narrow self-serving myopia.

Some rock climbers, for example, are now also pushing Congress via the so-called Protecting America’s Rock Climbing (PARC) Act (now also part of the EXPLORE Act) to allow them to deface wilderness rock faces by pounding in permanent bolts and pitons rather than using only removable climbing protection. Trail runners want exemptions from the ban on commercial trail racing. Drone pilots and paragliders want their aircraft exempted from Wilderness Act protections. Recreational pilots want to “bag” challenging landing sites in Wilderness.

The list of those seeking to exempt their activities from the Wilderness Act is long and growing. And ironically, most of these recreational groups say they support Wilderness – but just not the protections that restrict their particular activity. They want to slice out their own piece of the wilderness pie. And if the STC mountain bikers succeed, they will likely open the floodgates to other interests that together will truly gut the Wilderness Act.

Rather than weaken the protections that the Wilderness Act provides, what we now need on this 60th anniversary of the Wilderness Act is a reinvigoration of humility and restraint toward Wilderness. Rather than divvying up our priceless wilderness heritage, with a slice of the wilderness pie going to any interest group that believes its own activities should be allowed regardless of the damage to Wilderness or the Wilderness Act, we need to remember that designated wildernesses have deep values far beyond our human uses of them. We can and should still visit Wildernesses, of course, but our uses of Wilderness must not degrade the wildness of the area, with all of its profound intangible values.

We must re-learn to practice the humility and restraint toward Wilderness that the architects of the Wilderness Act believed in 60 years ago. Only then can the Wilderness Act — and the wilderness areas it preserves — survive for another 60 years into the future. Instead of slicing up our wilderness heritage like pieces of a pie, let’s protect and cherish that wilderness heritage, whole and intact, for the current and coming generations of wild things and their wild places, and those who enjoy them.

Kevin Proescholdt is the conservation director for Wilderness Watch, a national wilderness conservation organization headquartered in Missoula. Proescholdt, a former wilderness guide, has studied and worked with the 1964 Wilderness Act since 1974. He has written extensively about wilderness, including “Troubled Waters: The Fight for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness,” which, among other things, tells the story of the only time the Wilderness Act has been substantively amended.