Wilderness 2010-2011

Wilderness THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY 2010-2011

Saving Wildlife from Climate Change The Land You Inherited Essays by Douglas Brinkley and Gretel Ehrlich

wilderness.org

When Tragedy Strikes, Make Something Good Happen

© TOM BARRON

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

The BP spill took a terrible toll and placed the issue of oil and gas drilling front and center in the national consciousness. Our country cannot wean itself completely from fossil fuels tomorrow, but we can begin to make the transition to renewable energy and do it in a way that does not harm our public lands and waters. We also can help wild places recover from the mistakes of the past. The Wilderness Society has a bold plan to create this new conservation future for America.

First, we want to see faster development of solar, wind, and other clean energy sources to reduce the country’s dangerous dependence on oil, gas, and coal. The question is: Where are the best places to build these projects?

Many will be proposed for federal lands in the West, which makes sense. But it is imperative to put them only in appropriate spots. To that end, we have developed a set of criteria to help decision-makers select areas where the impact on the land, water, and wildlife will be limited.

(To learn more, please turn to page 54.)

A second priority is restoring lands previously damaged by drilling, logging, mining, and road-building. If you’ve walked through some of our national forests in the Pacific Northwest or Alaska, you know what I’m talking about.

Giant hemlock and spruce that were saplings when the Magna Charta was written were clear-cut in the second half of the 20th century—in some cases to make toilet paper.

No one knows if it is possible to recreate an old-growth forest, but scientists believe that over time we can bring most forests back to ecological health. That is our goal for the national forests. Working with tribal experts, the U.S. Forest Service, and other partners, we already are seeing

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promising signs in the Northwest, and we have more restoration projects underway in the Northern Rockies and elsewhere. Optimists—and I’m one of them—take heart from the remarkable progress made in reviving the eastern national forests over the past century. (For more on the recovery of cut-over woods from New Hampshire to Georgia, see page 44.)

Finally, we want to construct a new conservation movement. Several months ago the Obama administration kicked off an initiative called America’s Great Outdoors (AGO). It is aimed at a broad base of citizens—people like you—who together own the Grand Canyon, the Arctic Refuge, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and hundreds of other spectacular places. We joined in the effort to sharpen the public’s awareness of these landscapes and encourage people of all economic and cultural backgrounds, and especially our youth, to get out and explore their public lands—and then do something about protecting them. (To read about the youth movement, go to page 28.)

The BP oil spill was a tragic wake-up call for anyone who cherishes this planet. Yet with the support of members like you, we are going to write a different ending to the energy story and make the great outdoors whole once again. Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

William H. Meadows P.S. Protecting Alaska’s stunning lands and rich wildlife has been a central part of our 75-year history, and we hope you will join us on December 2 in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). This landmark law protected more land than any other in U.S. history.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 12 Heaven and Hope You own 635 million acres of some of the planet’s best real estate.

By Jeff Rennicke 17 “My Favorite Place” Five citizens tell us about theirs.

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18 Climate, Corridors, & the Continent’s Crown We can learn from wildlife’s success in this Northern Rockies stronghold.

By Douglas H. Chadwick

DEPARTMENTS 4 Past Year’s Achievements 6 News from the Regions 57 Faces of Conservation 58 Poetry 59 Meet a Wilderness Society Member

Jack Dangermond has magnified map power.

60 Wilderness Heroes

22 Gas Aplenty—But at What Cost?

In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, “fracking” stirs controversy

By Susan Q. Stranahan 26 What’s Special about Being on a Horse in the Back Country?

Q&A with Back Country Horsemen of America’s president 28 Connecting Young Americans— of All Kinds—with the Outdoors A new movement is determined to help young people fall in love with nature.

By Kara Palmer 31 We knew the Sea and the Seasons An essay by Gretel Ehrlich

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32 The Next Great Wilderness Areas A photo essay features eight treasures that deserve protection.

42 Justice for the Arctic An essay by Douglas Brinkley 44 A Centennial for Our Forests How a boy’s heartache led to new life for forests in the East

By Doreen Cubie

18 COVER PHOTO: Columbia Glacier in Alaska’s Prince William Sound © 2010 Patrick Endres/AlaskaStock.com This magazine was printed on 30-percent-post-consumer-waste-recycled, elemental chlorine-free paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. As a result, we used 227 fewer trees than we would have if printing on virgin paper. We also reduced our electricity consumption by 72 million BTUs, water use by 103,982 gallons, solid waste by 6,313 pounds, and greenhouse gas emissions by 21,589 pounds. (Environmental impact estimates were made using the Environmental Defense Fund Paper Calculator. For more information, visit http://www.edf.org/papercalculator/ The Wilderness Society meets all standards as set forth by the Better Business Bureau/Wise Giving Alliance.

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48 A Little-Known Treasure in Canyon Country This issue’s “Great Place to Visit” is Colorado’s Vermillion Basin.

By Jennie Lay 54 Sticking it Where the Sun Does Shine Picking the public lands where renewable power plants make sense

By Peter Friederici WILDERNESS, winner of a platinum Hermes Award, is published annually by The Wilderness Society. Members also receive a newsletter three times a year.

Founded in 1935, The Wilderness Society’s mission is to protect wilderness and inspire Americans to care for our wild places.

Editor: Bennett H. Beach (ben_beach@tws.org) Photo Editor: Lisa Dare Design: Studio Grafik, Herndon, Virginia © The Wilderness Society, 1615 M St., NW, Washington, DC 20036 www.wilderness.org

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ACHIEVEMENTS

Notable Achievements Over the Past Year Working with a broad array of partners over the past 12 months, we have succeeded in protecting many important natural areas. As always, the support provided by members of The Wilderness Society was invaluable. The success stories include:

ALASKA: Our coalition continued to fend off efforts to allow drilling in the biological heart of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge… A federal court agreed with our coalition’s contention that the Bush administration’s ambitious five-year offshore drilling plan for the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort seas did not comply with legal requirements… The Interior Department put off Royal Dutch Shell’s plan to drill exploratory wells in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas… We helped promote a transition from old-growth logging to selective cutting of smaller trees in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

WILDLIFE: To protect imperiled wild bighorn sheep from domestic sheep disease, we convinced the U.S. Forest Service to suspend domestic sheep grazing in Idaho’s Salmon River Canyon.

FORESTS: Our coalition helped secure another $90 million to restore damaged national forests. Thanks to the first two years of appropriations, the Forest Service is on track to improve 126,008 acres of wildlife habitat, restore 1,147 miles of rivers and streams, and decommission 2,194 miles of logging

roads… We helped draw up plans to restore national forestland in Colorado, Montana, and Idaho–three of the ten projects in the nation selected to receive funds… We prevailed in a legal challenge to the management plans for four national forests in southern California, so the Forest Service will reconsider its recommendation that only a small portion of the remaining roadless lands in these forests merits wilderness designation.

ENERGY: We helped persuade the Interior Department to reform the oil and gas leasing program on public lands so that citizens will have greater opportunity to raise concerns about potential environmental damage and the BLM will be more careful about where it issues leases. As part of that reform, the department suspended plans to proceed on 77 Utah areas that the Bush administration sought to lease in 2008, including proposed wilderness and lands adjacent to national parks… We were also successful in convincing the BLM to pull from lease sales dozens of tracts in sensitive areas throughout the West, including over a million acres of wildlife habitat in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska…

We helped stop the government from taking shortcuts in evaluating proposals for drilling in Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon.

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© JERRY OLDENETTEL/FLICKR

© NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

We worked with Trust for Public Land and other allies to secure funding to add acreage to Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge (left), Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area (right), and other popular natural areas.

A new BLM plan bars leasing in western Colorado’s Vermillion Basin (page 48)… The BLM issued a policy specifying that there is no presumed preference for oil and gas development over other uses.

Five exploration companies agreed to relinquish eight oil and gas leases on 29,000 acres along the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana... Our coalition successfully went to court to prevent the government from taking shortcuts in evaluating proposals for oil and gas drilling that posed a threat to prehistoric rock art in Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon… The Interior Department has made it a priority to put renewable energy facilities in appropriate places on the public lands (page 54).

NATIONAL PARKS: With our partners, we convinced the National Park Service to reduce the number of snowmobiles allowed in Yellowstone to no more than 318 a day, a vast improvement from the proposed 720…

A federal court ruled that the Park Service must give greater priority to resource protection than to Jet Ski use at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore (Michigan) and Gulf Islands National Seashore (Florida & Mississippi).

OFF-ROAD VEHICLES: We persuaded the U.S. Forest Service to reverse a plan that would have opened 331 additional miles of trails to off-road vehicle use in Modoc National Forest, in northern California. This should set a valuable precedent as other national forests develop transportation plans… In response to a lawsuit we filed, the Forest Service agreed not to allow dirt bikes near a wild and scenic river in Idaho’s Payette National Forest… www.wilderness.org

With local partners, we convinced the Forest Service to issue a plan that will keep off-road vehicles out of the backcountry in Oregon’s Mt. Hood National Forest… We successfully challenged a plan that would have allowed too much off-road vehicle use at the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon… We won a case challenging the BLM’s travel management plan for the Western Mojave area of the California Desert. The decision is likely to lead to greater restrictions on off-road vehicle use… We convinced the BLM to keep motorized vehicles out of the spectacular Paria River canyon and side canyons in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and PariaHackberry Wilderness Study Area… Significant limitations on off-road vehicles will help protect grasslands at California’s Carrizo Plain National Monument.

OTHER VICTORIES: We teamed up with many allies to defeat the Murkowski Amendment, which would have blocked EPA’s efforts to limit emissions of greenhouse gases… Congress increased appropriations from the Land and Water Conservation Fund by 80 percent.

That money, along with Forest Legacy program funding, made it possible to protect high-quality—but threatened—natural areas in dozens of states. The places that will benefit include Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge (Texas), Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area (Ohio), Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument (Oregon), and Montana’s southwestern Crown of the Continent... We led a coalition effort that resulted in congressional creation of a separate fund for fighting forest fires so that these rapidly escalating costs will no longer drain money needed for other public land programs.

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Notes from the field...

REGIONAL NOTES

ALASKA Anyone who has had the opportunity to take a cruise through Southeast Alaska knows that the Tongass National Forest is one of our most stunning natural treasures. The world’s largest remaining temperate rainforest, the Tongass is home to towering Sitka spruce and hemlock and to rivers surging with salmon. Unfortunately, an unsustainable, post-war federal program led to extensive logging of old-growth trees, which were fed to giant pulp mills. The high costs of this timbering, especially of building roads for the trucks, were covered by billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer subsidies.

For years we have urged a shift in priorities, and today we are central players in a partnership that is pursuing three goals: 1) Restore large areas of degraded forests and salmon streams; 2) Protect intact fish and wildlife habitat, clean water, carbon storage, and other ecosystem benefits; and 3) Create “in-the-woods” employment opportunities to support rural community health.

and blocks sunlight needed to promote development of a healthy old-growth forest. When timber companies thin this “second growth,” they create jobs while improving ecosystem performance. This pays multiple benefits for Native communities and other rural residents, who depend on the Tongass for food, jobs, recreation, and cultural traditions.

Nicole Whittington-Evans 907-272-9453 nicole_whittington-evans@tws.org

PACIFIC NORTHWEST Nestled in the foothills of the North Cascades, the charming town of Roslyn, Washington, is rich in both history and beauty. Once known for its logging and coal mining businesses, Roslyn is now a gateway to varied outdoor recreational opportunities. The town boasts access to the spectacular Alpine Lakes Wilderness, one of the nation’s most-visited wilderness areas.

To show how this can succeed, our partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, logging companies, and communities has embarked on pilot projects that restore damaged areas. As new trees grow in past clear cuts, they create a dense forest that hinders wildlife movement

We are working with partners—including city officials, local business interests, recreation groups, and the Citizen’s Advisory Committee—to enhance these opportunities while protecting forests, wildlife, water quality, and

Decades of old-growth logging in the Tongass National Forest have given way to forest restoration.

Once known for its logging and coal mining, Roslyn, Washington, is taking advantage of its natural recreational assets.

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1-800-THE-WILD © EVAN HJERPE

© CYNTHIA WILKERSON

historical and cultural assets. An upcoming trail and recreation plan for the Roslyn Urban Forest will try to strike this balance and help invigorate the community’s economy. For example, existing trails are not part of a coherent system, so creating a more functional network is one desired outcome.

The Wilderness Society has produced “Principles of Sustainable Recreation,” which illustrates the importance of connecting people with our public lands and suggests methods for doing so. We hope that the Roslyn plan will prove effective enough to serve as a model for other North Cascades communities.

Peter Dykstra 206-624-6430 pdykstra@twsnw.org

CALIFORNIA-NEVADA The Klamath/North Coast is one of the wildest and most diverse regions of California. Located in the northwestern portion of the state, the area is home to magnificent stands of ancient forests, seven distinct runs of native salmon and steelhead, more than 100 plant species that exist nowhere else in the world, and ruggedly beautiful wilderness areas such as the Trinity Alps and Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel. We are working to preserve this area’s wildlands and to restore forests and rivers that were damaged by poor logging practices and by a maze of obsolete or illegal roads that harm wildlife habitat, fisheries, and water quality. At the region’s southern gateway, our coalition is building public support for the proposed Berryessa Snow Mountain National Conservation Area. Such a designation would help protect habitat for bald eagles, tule elk, and other species while providing clean drinking water, spectacular views, and places to hike, kayak, and camp.

Our long-term goals for this region include restoration of wildlife habitat, improved management of off-road vehicle use, and permanent protection of significant portions of the remaining roadless lands. These efforts will make it possible for future generations to enjoy the unique natural qualities of this special place.

David Edelson 415-398-1111 david_edelson@tws.org We are working with partners to protect forests and other lands in the northern reaches of California.

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© RICH FAIRBANKS

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NORTHERN ROCKIES Lying between Yellow-

Unfortunately, disagreements over the growing use of off-road vehicles, mountain bikes, and snowmobiles have delayed efforts to permanently protect these lands. In particular, the Crest includes the 155,000-acre HyalitePorcupine-Buffalo Horn Wilderness Study Area, one of seven wild places in Montana that Congress set aside in 1977. (Wilderness study areas are potential additions to the National Wilderness Preservation System but are to be studied further before a recommendation is sent to Congress.)

To finally resolve this debate, The Wilderness Society is supporting a group of conservation-minded mountain bikers and other local recreational users, the Wilderness and Recreation Partnership (www.gallatinwrp.org). We are working on a new approach that expands local trail systems closer to communities while permanently protecting the wildlife-rich core of the Gallatin Crest.

Bob Ekey 406-586-1600 bob_ekey@tws.org

We are reaching out to a variety of interests to try to build consensus for sound management of Montana’s popular Gallatin Crest.

© CRAIG GHERKE

stone National Park and Bozeman, Montana, the Gallatin Crest is one of the Northern Rockies’ most popular backcountry areas—for good reason. The Gallatin Crest includes the fire- and ice-carved Hyalite Peaks and provides wintering grounds for the vast northern Yellowstone elk herd. Within these mountains are born the headwaters for the Gallatin River’s blue-ribbon trout fisheries.

The outlook for bighorn sheep has improved in Idaho.

IDAHO The Rockies’ bighorn sheep population is believed to have declined by 90 percent since the arrival of Europeans. Today the greatest threat to the surviving herds is an often-fatal form of pneumonia that most biologists believe is transmitted by domestic sheep. Once the disease enters a bighorn herd, it can reduce the health and reproduction of that herd for years. For six years we have worked with the Hells Canyon Preservation Council, the Nez Perce Tribe, and other allies to convince the U.S. Forest Service to prevent livestock grazing in areas of central Idaho’s Payette National Forest vital to bighorn sheep. Recently the agency agreed to protect 94 percent of bighorn habitat on the Payette, phasing in the plan over the next three years. The other six percent is still of concern, in part because bighorn sheep travel such great distances. Some ranching groups are threatening to sue the Forest Service, while we intend to continue working with the agency to fully protect the bighorn.

Craig Gehrke 208-343-8153 craig_gehrke@tws.org

© PETER AENGST

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central Utah’s Piute County feature three peaks exceeding 12,000 feet. This is also the home of “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” a multi-colored marvel made up of volcanic glass and lava. This relatively unknown range is the highest between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. Visitors can enjoy lush alpine meadows and clear, high-mountain lakes.

Among the wildlife that depend on this area are elk, mountain goats, mule deer, bobcats, black bear, greater sagegrouse, and bald eagles. We are working with local leaders to develop legislation that would protect this area by adding it to the National Wilderness Preservation System.

In addition, we are urging protection of 15 miles of Fish Creek, the longest free-flowing waterway in Fishlake National Forest, by designating this segment a wild and scenic river. Fish Creek originates high in the Tushar Mountains near Mt. Belknap and supports a healthy cold-water trout fishery. Farther east is the proposed Rocky Ford Wilderness, highlighted by the East Fork of the Sevier River, which meanders through dramatic volcanic rock formations, winding canyons, and the striking grey-green lava of the Phonolite Hill formation. The area is important to Bonneville cutthroat trout and osprey, among other species.

Julie Mack 801-355-0070 julie_mack@tws.org

ARIZONA The Grand Canyon State receives more hours of sunshine than any other state, making it an ideal candidate for solar energy plants. On top of that is an incentive created by the state legislature: By 2015, a set of Arizona’s utilities must generate 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources. As a result, many projects are on the drawing boards, particularly in westWe consider this parcel in the Sonoran Desert west of Phoenix an appropriate location for a solar power plant.

© BRYANT OLSEN

UTAH The spectacular Tushar Mountains in south-

We want to add Utah’s Tushar Mountains to the National Wilderness Preservation System.

central Arizona. On acreage that it oversees, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is reviewing three in particular: Sonoran (50 miles west of Phoenix), Quartzsite (130 miles west of Phoenix), and Hyder Valley (85 miles southwest of Phoenix).

Our renewable energy team has been working closely with the Interior Department, power companies, local chambers of commerce, and conservation groups like the Sonoran Institute and the Sierra Club to help identify the best places for such facilities in Arizona and other states.

In addition, we have been championing the construction of renewable energy plants on brownfields and other disturbed sites, such as landfills, old farm lands, and mines.

To identify such tracts—public and private—the Arizona office of the BLM created the Restoration Design Energy Project. The Arizona BLM plans to analyze 42 sites, and Arizona Congressman Raúl Grijalva, who chairs the House Public Lands subcommittee, is urging that a similar initiative be adopted by the BLM in other states. We will keep working to identify appropriate sites and to find ways to make them attractive for renewable energy development.

Mike Quigley 520-334-8741 mike_quigley@tws.org

© BLM

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Colorado, is known to offer one of the best and longest river trips in the West. It traverses the far western edge of Colorado from its southwestern corner, crossing into Utah 100 miles to the north. The corridor carved by the River of Sorrows features towering red-sandstone walls at the river’s edge that are up to 700 feet high, hardy piñon-juniper on its transitional slopes, and rich ponderosa pine country. These canyonlands are home to mountain lions, black bears, peregrine falcons, river otters, and ancient fish species that have survived five million years of drought and flood cycles. Fascinating Native American petroglyphs and 12 stunning geological structures reflecting 160 million years of history also attract visitors.

However, rapid expansion of population, energy production, and intensive recreation in the Four Corners States is increasing the threats to the river corridor’s natural qualities. We have hired ecologist and community leader Barbara Hawke to open an office in Montrose and direct our efforts to protect the area. Working with the Colorado Environmental Coalition, San Juan Citizens Alliance, and other partners, we are building public support for landscape-scale

© JOHN FIELDER

COLORADO The Dolores River, a tributary of the

In western Colorado we have stepped up our efforts to protect the Dolores River corridor, a major destination for rafters.

protection by Congress. Among the options are creation of national conservation areas and adding lands to the National Wilderness Preservation System.

Suzanne Jones 303-650-5818 suzanne_jones@tws.org

SOUTHEAST Tennessee’s wilderness acreage would increase from 66,000 to 86,000 acres if Congress passes S. 3470, introduced in June by the state’s two Republican senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker. This bill would expand five of the state’s 11 wilderness areas and create one, all of them within eastern Tennessee’s Cherokee National Forest. It would be the first expansion of the Volunteer State’s wilderness lands in a quarter century.

© BILL HODGE

The new area, the proposed 9,038-acre Upper Bald River Wilderness, is in Monroe County, 90 minutes southwest of Knoxville. Adding this land to the National Wilderness Preservation System would protect an entire watershed and extensive hardwood forests, home to black bear, native brook trout, and other species. Features include Bald River Falls, a spectacular 100-foot waterfall that is among the most-photographed in the nation. One of the wilderness areas to be expanded is also in Monroe County: the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness. The acreage includes a

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We are building public support for legislation that would protect 20,000 acres of wilderness in eastern Tennessee’s Cherokee National Forest.

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corridor used by black bears moving between the Cherokee and Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the north.

In addition, we are urging Congress to devote Forest Legacy funds to acquisition of 6,516 acres in Vermont’s northern Green Mountains. This forested tract, which is expected to be subdivided if sold to a developer, is important to moose, bobcat, black bear, and many rare birds. Running through the area is the Long Trail, the nation’s oldest long-distance hiking path and the inspiration for the Appalachian Trail. It is ideal for camping, birding, fishing, and other outdoor activities. If acquired with Forest Legacy money, the land would become part of Green Mountain National Forest.

The other wilderness areas that would grow in size are: Sampson Mountain, Big Laurel Branch, Big Frog, and Little Frog. All areas in the bill were recommended for wilderness status by the U.S. Forest Service, which has managed the acreage as if it were wilderness pending action by Congress. Please thank the senators for taking the lead in safeguarding this natural legacy for future generations.

Brent Martin 828-587-9453 brent_martin@tws.org

Leanne Klyza Linck 802-482-2171 leanne_linck@tws.org

Follensby Pond, the location of the Philosophers’ Camp, where Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James Stillman, Louis Agassiz, and others helped start the Transcendentalist movement, often cited as an important precedent for the modern environmental movement. We are working with The Nature Conservancy, the Open Space Institute, and others to obtain Forest Legacy program funds to bring this 14,600-acre tract in Tupper Lake and Harrietstown into public ownership. The pond and surrounding mixed northern hardwood forests border New York State’s largest wilderness area, the High Peaks. The parcel also includes more than 10 miles of meandering frontage on the Raquette River.

© KAREN LAUBENSTEIN/USFWS

© CARL HEILMAN II/WILD VISIONS INC.

NORTHEAST In the heart of the Adirondacks lies

We are working with allies to secure the funds needed to put the Adirondacks’ Follensby Pond into public ownership. The area is important to the bald eagle and other species.

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heavenand hope

The lands that belong to all Americans have long provided wilderness, recreation, and heavenly scenery. Now, scientists say, protecting them just might hold our best hope of saving the planet.

BY JEFF RENNICKE

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dawn. All around me in Lake Superior, the islands of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore are unwrapping themselves from ribbons of morning mist. There is birdsong and the slow, repeating verse of the surf. I walk to the water’s edge, dig my toes in the sand, spin a slow circle to survey each horizon, and then it hits me: I, along with every American, own every square inch of land that I can see in this heavenly morning light.

In the United States one quarter of the land—635 million acres in all—is part of the benefits package handed to each new baby and naturalized citizen. Our public lands are a kingdom of wild places with names that roll off the tongue like poetry: Yellowstone, Yosemite, Gates of the Arctic, Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, Chincoteague, Everglades, Grand Staircase, and more.

Each year over a half billion visitors go to our public lands to hike, fish, hunt, kayak, and camp. Recreation is just one of the benefits; our public lands also provide vital fish and wildlife habitat, clean air and water, and a natural laboratory where tomorrow’s medicines can be discovered.

“This is the most magnificent natural inheritance enjoyed by any nation on Earth,” said Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, a long-time U.S. Senator from Wisconsin www.wilderness.org

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The national park has been called “the greatest idea America ever had,” and that idea first bore fruit with the establishment of Yellowstone (inset) in 1872.

who spent his final quarter century with The Wilderness Society. These are the masterpieces of the American landscape, our showpieces to the world. And, in the face of the growing concern over the health of our planet, the public lands of the United States and the rest of the world could be something even more important: They could be our ecological salvation.

This nation’s first step to protect our public lands dates back to 1832, when Congress created a small natural federal preserve at Hot Springs, Arkansas, because of perceived medicinal values. That same year a painter named George Catlin was stunned by the beauty at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers and urged that it be protected, somehow. In 1872 the world’s first national park—Yellowstone—was born. Later, Britain’s Ambassador to the United States, James Bryce, called the national park “the best idea America ever had.”

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There were many steps along the road to creating our rich natural legacy. In 1891 passage of the Forest Reserve Act led ultimately to the National Forest System, now encompassing eight percent of the country.

President Theodore Roosevelt created the first national wildlife refuge along Florida’s East Coast in 1903, and today there are 550 of them. The fourth, and largest, collection of public lands is overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Almost all of those 253 million acres are in the West and Alaska, and the most pristine of them (27 million acres) were designated the National Landscape Conservation System for greater protection.

Some of our public lands have been made available for oil and gas drilling, logging, mining, and other commercial activities. To protect lands still in their natural condition from such use, Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964. Today one of every six acres of federal public land is part of the National Wilderness Preservation System, never to be developed.

it’s a fact:

How does the U.S. stack up internationally? The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) rates its 31 member countries in terms of the percentage of land within “major protected areas.” By its calculations, 22 percent of our landmass is considered “protected,” placing us fifth. Ahead of the U.S. are Poland (23.5 percent), Austria (28 percent), Switzerland (28.6 percent), and Germany (54 percent).

Numbers can be deceiving, however. Differences in laws, varying definitions of the term “protected,” agency enforcement levels, and accounting methods all make direct comparisons difficult, and perhaps misleading, according to Magnus Wessel, a biodiversity specialist with the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU), one of Germany’s oldest environmental groups. “The overall percentage [of protected lands] in Germany is relatively high,” says Wessel, “but with a very different level” of conservation status among the various designations.

And, he says, “In German law it is also common practice to designate the same area in different categories, thus the overall percentage is lower than it might seem.”

© JEFF RENNICKE

Our national forests are America’s largest source of municipal water supplies, providing fresh water for over 66 million Americans in 3,400 communities in 33 states.

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The OECD list also does not include many non-member countries that have large public land programs in place: Costa Rica, famous for its national parks and reserves, with 25 percent of its landmass protected; Bhutan, with 31.5 percent; and Venezuela, which, according to Earth Trends of the World Resources Institute, has protected an astounding 70.3 percent of its lands.

His ambitious goal is the target of a new program called “Nature Needs Half,” which seeks the designation of at least 50 percent of the world’s terrestrial surface to a level defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That would require the protection of some tribal, corporate, and private lands, yet its success will depend mostly on the protection of our cherished public lands.

As confusing as these numbers may seem, one number is becoming increasingly clear, says Harvey Locke of the Wild Foundation: 50 percent. For decades, according to Locke, conservationists pushed for protection of 10 to 12 percent of the Earth as a “politically acceptable” goal. “When those other targets were set they were bold and visionary,” he says, “but the world has changed and those…targets no longer conform to what we’ve come to understand scientifically nor to the current very serious conditions that exist around the world for nature.”

According to United Nations figures, only 14 percent of the planet’s land enjoys any kind of protection. That figure, however, does not include Antarctica, which accounts for almost 10 percent of the Earth. Furthermore, according to a study by Conservation International, 39 to 44 percent of the planet remains mostly wild and with low population densities, making formal protective status easier to achieve.

© BILL SWINDAMAN

Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands (left) is one of four national lakeshores in the National Park System. It includes 21 islands and 12 miles of Lake Superior shoreline. Most of the acreage lies within the Gaylord Nelson Wilderness. Every state has at least one of our more than 550 national wildlife refuges. Chincoteague (right) lies along Virginia’s coast and is used by some 300 bird species.

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SAVING DESERT LANDS HELPS VETERANS (Excerpts from May 31, 2010, op-ed in the San Bernardino Sun by Iraq War vet Johnathon Ervin, a member of the Vet Voice Foundation) While we were deployed we dreamed of returning back to our homes near the California desert. This is a peaceful and tranquil place. …The California desert was also the perfect antidote to the stresses—both physical and mental—of war. We could take long drives out into remote areas, and hunt or hike without seeing another soul.

Maybe that’s why it seems fitting that this Memorial Day, veterans like us can do something to help other veterans—and help current military personnel who are on active duty.

Locke admits the goal of “Nature Needs Half ” is “aspirational,” but several recent success stories give him hope. Canadian officials plan to create Mealy Mountains National Park Preserve, which would be larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined. Russia and the Netherlands also are taking significant steps to protect more public land. “It is a dream,” concedes Locke, “but as the poet Robert Browning said, ‘Man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’”

On a morning like this, looking out over the Apostle Islands appearing so poetically out of the mist, public lands have never seemed so beautiful nor so vital. Owned and protected forever by all of us, they seem a little bit like heaven, and that should give us all a little hope.

Jeff Rennicke is a teacher, writer, and photographer living among the public lands of northern Wisconsin.

We can make sure that California’s wild desert lands are protected for them to enjoy and to help them readjust to civilian life.

© BOB WICK/BLM

The largest of our national land systems contains the acreage overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The Long Coast Trail (below) hugs the northern coast of California.

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“My Favorite Place” Most of us can name a place that is our idea of paradise. Its allure may stem from the memories, the scenery, the wildlife, the things we do, the sounds and smells, or some combination of ingredients. We asked a number of people to tell us about their favorite places, and here are five of the answers.

© JOSHUA HICKS/TWS

© PHOTO COURTESY

OF CANADIANWILDLIFEP

© MIKE QUIGLEY/TWS

Christa D. Weise Conservation biologist Tucson, Arizona

HOTOGRAPHY.COM

The breathtaking Napali Coast on Kauai, Hawaii, blows my mind every time I visit. It’s on a volcanic island with dark green tropical foliage, deep blue ocean, tropical birds, waterfalls, and little private beaches. In the winter, if you are lucky, you can see humpback whale blows in the distance. I like that there are no roads; you can get there only by foot or canoe.

I have always enjoyed summer trips to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

My wife and I first visited in 1976, before we were married, and returned often after we were married, with our two children. The warm weather, beautiful beaches, lush forests, and meandering bike paths make it an ideal vacation spot. I have many fond memories of Harbor Town at Sea Pines, with its majestic lighthouse and sunsets over the water.

Kyle Clevenger Civil engineer Philadelphia

Jim Heldman Lawyer Cincinnati

Juliebeth Pelletier Veterinary technician Denver

© EVAN T. BEACH

Mammoth Mountain, California, is an amazing place. Perhaps it is because of my love for winter sports, but racing down this enormous mountain covered in untouched powder really makes me feel small compared to the world. Driving up to the mountain is truly breathtaking as the snowcapped Sierra Nevada mountains seem to just sprout right up from the desert.

My favorite place is the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, especially through the Teton Range. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the Tetons jutting wildly out of the sage-covered flatlands, as bison, moose, trumpeter swans, bear—a never-ending array of ground and sky critters—traversed the landscape, and wildflowers sprouted all around with fervent abandon. The Tetons remind you how small you are, while inspiring you to want to be part of something more, to be connected to something strong and wild and real. It is where I go when I need a reminder of who I am and what matters most to me.

www.wilderness.org

My favorite place is Great Bend, Kansas. Nothing floats my boat like stepping into a Kansas winter wheat field, or Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) grasslands, with a goshawk on my fist, anticipating the explosion of a cock pheasant or black-tailed jack rabbit at any moment.

And if watching a goshawk in flight against the backdrop of a pristine Kansas sky isn’t enough, I can always visit the largest interior marshland in the United States – Cheyenne Bottoms, where thousands upon thousands of shorebirds and waterfowl gather. Great Bend is a magical place and should be on every nature lover’s to-do list.

Darryl A. Perkins Writer, photographer Blackstone, Massachusetts

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climate, corridors, and the continent’s crown

by Douglas H. Chadwick

© CHRIS PETERSON

Cross-country skiing on spring snow, I’ll sometimes come upon an elk or deer carcass surrounded by footprints of grizzly, cougar, wolf, coyote, raven, bald eagle, marten, and maybe wolverine.

The tangled tracks raise more questions than they answer: If winter’s hardships didn’t bring down the victim, which of these predators did? Which then took over?

How often does a solitary hunter like the cougar lose its kill to wolves drawn by the sight of circling birds? Can even a large wolf pack fend off a grizzly following its nose to the prize? And why, when there’s still flesh on the bones, am I forgetting to check over my shoulder every 18

so often? In the part of the Rocky Mountains called the Crown of the Continent, wildness is more than a legacy.

It is created anew, moment by moment, from the interweaving of powerful lives.

There are scarcely a dozen places on the globe where no plant or animal has gone extinct in the modern era. One is the Crown. Tall, rugged, and 16,000 square miles big, it stretches along the Continental Divide for 250 miles from the Blackfoot River drainage of Montana nearly to Banff National Park in Alberta. Most of this region is public land. At its core are five strictly protected areas, the northernmost being Alberta’s Waterton Lakes National Park. That park borders Montana’s million-acre Glacier National Park, 95 percent of which is managed as wilderness. Immediately to the south begins a 1.5-million-acre chain of three national forest wilderness areas: the Great Bear, Bob Marshall, and Scapegoat, jointly known as the 1-800-THE-WILD

© JESS LEE

© TIM FITZHARRIS

© NEIL SHADER/TWS

The Crown of the Continent in the Northern Rockies still has lynx, wolves, hoary marmots—in fact, all its native mammals, illustrating the value of protecting areas large enough to allow wildlife to adapt to climate change.

Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. Two smaller federal wilderness areas, a tribal wilderness on the Flathead Reservation, Canadian provincial parks, and an assortment of other reserves bejewel the Crown as well.

The long list of resident carnivores includes the healthiest enclave of threatened lynx in the Lower 48 states and a crucial share of the 300 to 500 wolverines surviving south of Canada today. Grizzlies in the Lower 48 have rebounded from lows of perhaps no more than 750 during the late 1970s to around 1,400, and more than half of them call the Crown home. At the same time, the region’s cold, clear headwaters form a stronghold for threatened bull trout and increasingly rare westslope cutthroat trout.

North America’s richest variety of megafauna is found in the 2,000-mile-long Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) sweep of the Continental Divide. The Crown’s trans-boundary www.wilderness.org

location makes it a pivotal segment. For example, although traps and predator poisons completely eliminated wolverines from the Lower 48 early in the 20th century, the species was able to return to the northern U.S. Rockies during the 1960s by traveling south along the Crown. Two decades later, wolves, absent from the American West for 50 years, naturally recolonized northwestern Montana via the same mountain corridor.

Packs have since spread (both under their own power and through transplant programs sparked by the species’ reappearance) into at least half a dozen western states.

Such mobility is our best hope for saving wildlife as the climate changes. Without the opportunity to move away from habitats that have become too warm or too dry to places that still provide cooler temperatures, as well as food, shelter, and other necessities, most wildlife species will struggle to survive. Expanded wilderness areas and 19

corridors facilitate these changes in species distributions and are part of the latest dividend paid by past efforts to protect wilderness.

added to the forces of change, the need for corridors is greater than ever. Animals especially need routes that enable them to reach cooler environments.

It is also important to think big. “Most major U.S. environmental laws, including the Wilderness Act, were passed in the 1960s and ‘70s,” Bob Ekey, director of The Wilderness Society’s Northern Rockies office, reminded me. “Since then, everything biologists have learned about how ecosystems function tells us that we can’t protect wildlife values just by protecting national parks and wilderness. We have to work across all kinds of different lands on a very large scale.”

I used to study mountain goats in Glacier Park as a seasonal biologist. Over the past several years I served as unpaid help on a groundbreaking wolverine study there, led by Jeff Copeland of the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station. The place feels like a second home, yet something is awry in the neighborhood.

Subalpine fir trees sprawl across meadows that were alpine tundra when I first rambled through. Downslope, larger and more frequent wildfires char vast swaths of the woodlands, while exploding insect and fungus populations turn other evergreen forests orange with dead needles. Pika colonies have disappeared from boulder fields toward the low-altitude end of their range. High in a hanging valley where I used to marvel at a glacier’s blue crevasses, all that remains is moraine rubble with a dirty pond at its base.

In some places, removing roads altogether can help strengthen the integrity of the ecosystem.

At other sites, selective timber-cutting may make the forest less vulnerable to wildfire and disease. The goal is to give wildlife and human communities alike the best chance to adapt and survive in a changing landscape.

A world-class ensemble of reserves has been set aside in the West, mainly among the scenic peaks and plateaus.

Though the boundaries may enclose enough grandeur to nourish the human spirit for generations, the rules of biology haven’t changed. The most diverse and productive habitats for wildlife in the Rockies tend to be on gentler slopes with deeper soils, which is to say at lower elevations. With human activities overwhelming the region’s largely unprotected foothills and valley bottoms and spreading up previously remote mountainsides, the existing preserves become more isolated from one another every year.

As opportunities to move freely across the landscape diminish, wildlife communities begin to collapse. Once the largest members that require the most room to roam become scarce, the natural balance is lost, and the variety of life at all levels inevitably starts to fade. Saving wildlands and saving the connections between them amount to one and the same challenge. With global warming 20

These aren’t just personal impressions. Exhaustive studies led by U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Dan Fagre have documented stunning changes. Over the past century, temperatures in upper elevations of the northern Rockies have risen three times as much as the global average. During that period, the park’s 150 glaciers have dwindled to fewer than 25—and those holdouts are expected to be history within the next 10 to 20 years.

Even as Wilderness Society field personnel continue to advocate for wilderness, they are now playing a leading role in developing common-sense projects in the surrounding landscape with partners such as ranchers, loggers, and rural town leaders. Controlling weeds and exotic plants that displace native vegetation is a concern that all share. So is dealing with poorly designed road culverts that block fish migration. In some places, removing roads altogether can help strengthen the integrity of the ecosystem. At other sites, selective timber-cutting may make the forest less vulnerable to wildfire and disease. The goal is to give wildlife and human communities alike the best chance to adapt and survive in a changing landscape. It can be tough acre-by-acre work, but it’s the kind that creates jobs and a boost for local economies.

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© IMAGE COURTESY OF THE U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE

© JESS LEE

© CHRIS PETERSON

GPS data show travel by grizzly bears in the Swan Valley, nestled between the Mission Mountains (left) and the Bob Marshall Wilderness (right). The valley floor is a checkerboard of clear-cuts, and grizzly movements in these areas, now regenerating, highlight the importance of connecting wilderness areas for species facing pressure from habitat fragmentation and a changing climate. The wolverine (bottom, right) depends heavily on the Crown.

“We talk in terms of habitat restoration and adaptive management,” said Anne Carlson, a Wilderness Society biologist based in Montana. “But I tend to think of it as making our ecosystems more climate-ready.”

trusts. A major chunk of the newly protected area lies in the Swan Valley, which links the west side of the Bob Marshall complex to the eastern slopes of the Mission Mountains Wilderness.

In August 2010 the U.S. Forest Service approved funding for a plan by conservationists, timber companies, ranchers, and rural organizations to restore 46,000 acres of forest land and 937 miles of streams in the southwestern portion of the Crown. “This is the wave of the future,” said Scott Brennan, The Wilderness Society’s forest program director for the Northern Rockies and co-chair of the group that wrote the proposal. “Among the many benefits is an improved chance for fish and wildlife to hang on as the climate changes.”

The broad-landscape perspective is also part of the America’s Great Outdoors initiative, launched by President Obama in April 2010. Its dual purpose is to shore up connections both between wildlands and between Americans and their outdoor heritage. To find out what citizens want, the Obama administration held listening sessions across the country this year, many of them in rural communities. Fittingly, officials chose to hold the first gettogethers in the Crown of the Continent. “If we do things right here,” said Ekey, “a century from now grizzlies, lynx, and wolves will still roam the Crown.”

With support from a similar coalition, a moratorium on oil and gas development went into effect in 2006 on federal lands along the Rocky Mountain Front, where wildlife abounds next to the eastern edge of the Bob Marshall complex. Not long afterward, the Montana Legacy Project arranged the sale of 310,000 acres in the Crown from Plum Creek Timber Company to conservation land www.wilderness.org

Wildlife biologist Douglas H. Chadwick is the author of 11 books and hundreds of articles on natural history and is a founding board member of the conservation land trust Vital Ground. His latest book is The Wolverine Way, published

by Patagonia Books.

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GAS APLENTY BUT AT WHAT COST?

BY SUSAN Q. STRANAHAN

For a struggling land trust with a $300,000 annual budget, the deal was enticing: Sign a lease to allow gas drilling at one of its preserves and pocket $5 million. But after much soul-searching, the North Branch Land Trust, based in northeastern Pennsylvania, said no thanks.

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Nowadays a lot of such soul-searching goes on in the Keystone State. Just as the Gulf of Mexico became the poster child for the risks of offshore oil drilling, Pennsylvania is now at the center of the growing debate over exploiting massive reserves of natural gas buried within the rock formation known as Marcellus Shale.

Nearly two-thirds of Pennsylvania is underlain with Marcellus Shale, which stretches from Upstate New York into West Virginia. Some experts believe there is enough gas in Pennsylvania alone to supply all the nation’s needs for 10 to 15 years. But will tapping this gas do too much damage to the land and water?

As the nation struggles to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, natural gas is being touted as a “bridge” fuel that can transition the U.S. from polluting coal and oil to renewable sources such as solar and wind energy. Marcellus gas has the added advantage of being near populous northeastern markets.

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© KEITH HODAN/PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW

So, the rush to drill has begun. Pennsylvania has issued more than 4,000 permits since 2005, and the pace is accelerating. More than a quarter of the state has been leased for exploration. By some estimates, 50,000 natural gas wells may be drilled in the state in the next 20 years.

PHOTO COURTESY OF WWW.DONNAN.COM

The risks of the gas shale boom include fire, like this one in Pennsylvania’s Moshannon State Forest, and water contamination from chemicals used in the fracking process.

In contrast, New York State has imposed a moratorium on drilling until environmental impacts can be determined. Of prime concern is protecting metropolitan New York’s drinking water, which comes from the Marcellus-rich upper Delaware River basin.

Marcellus gas, like natural gas in most of the U.S., is extracted by a process known as hydrofracturing— “fracking,” for short. The Marcellus formation lies 6,000 to 8,000 feet below ground. (Pennsylvania’s aquifers lie above that.) The gas well is drilled vertically to a depth of about a mile, and then horizontal drilling occurs over large areas. More than a million gallons of water, sand, and chemical additives are injected under extremely high www.wilderness.org

MA

NY

CT

MI PA NJ MD

OH IN

WV VA KY NC

TN

Marcellus Shale area: New research shows an estimated 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas lies within the rock.

Devonian Black Shale Successioin: The Marcellus Shale Comprises part of this large formation.

SC AL

GA

Based on U.S.G.S. sources

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© PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE, 2010, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

© PHOTO COURTESY OF WWW.DONNAN.COM

Worries about fracking have drawn large crowds to public meetings. Concerns include drilling wastewater (right).

pressure to fracture the shale and bring the gas to the surface. Each well may be “fracked” multiple times.

Flowing back up with the gas is briny waste, which is 10 times saltier than sea water, plus chemicals known as fracking liquids. The identity of those chemicals has become a point of contention. The industry claims the mixtures are safe, but has balked at disclosing them, saying the components are proprietary. Among the chemicals that have been identified are known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors. The waste also contains radioactive elements from the shale itself. Environmentalists have pressed for disclosure, saying fracking poses a threat to drinking water supplies.

Some of the waste remains below ground, its ultimate fate uncertain. What flows to the surface is often stored in large pits awaiting disposal. Leaks and spills have been reported at a number of sites.

Concern about hydraulic fracturing is not confined to the Northeast. “In western Wyoming’s Pinedale Anticline, where fracking has occurred for over a decade, there is wide speculation that it was the cause of nearly 90 contaminated wells,” says Steff Kessler, The Wilder-

ness Society’s Wyoming Program manager. The industry blames natural causes, and there were no baseline water tests to help resolve the argument.

Earlier this year, Wyoming became the first state to require drillers to disclose the components in the fracking liquids to state regulators. Conservationists plan to track this provision as new drilling applications are filed. The information will either be posted automatically on the state’s oil and gas commission website, or will require a request for release of the information under the state’s Public Records Act. “We hope this will start to shed light on the chemicals within these fluids, so that nearby residents can test their home water wells for constituents of concern. This information is important for public health protection,” says Kessler.

Another concern is the impact on the land. The North Branch Land Trust’s Paul Lumia points out that acreage, often in remote, forested regions, must be cleared for drilling pads. Access roads, compressor stations, and other processing equipment must be constructed. Trucks hauling water and wastes ply rural roads; vast quantiThe Howland Preserve and surrounding lands could have become a fracking site if the North Branch Land Trust had sold drilling rights.

© RICK KOVAL/NORTH BRANCH LAND TRUST

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© WENDY SHATTIL - INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE OF CONSERVATION PHOTOGRAPHERS

© HELEN SLOTTJE FOR SHALESHOCK

In western Wyoming (left) gas drilling fields sprawl for miles. To make way for fracking, fields like this one in Pennsylvania (right) must have roads built.

ties of water are sucked from small streams to feed the drilling. Miles of pipeline will eventually snake across the land to hook up with a large transcontinental gas pipeline that traverses Pennsylvania.

Residents who live near drilling sites in Pennsylvania have reported contaminated drinking water wells and sickened livestock. Chemical spills have polluted streams and wetlands. In June, a Marcellus well in western Pennsylvania exploded and burned out of control for 16 hours.

Soon after that incident, 1200 people showed up at an EPA meeting near Pittsburgh. Many demanded tougher regulations. The 2005 Energy Policy Act exempted hydraulic fracturing from compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act. Because the process was pioneered by Halliburton, a major oil field services firm once headed

by Vice President Richard Cheney, the exemption became known as the “Halliburton loophole.” The EPA is currently reassessing the exemption, and for the moment, regulating the industry falls to state governments.

“There is no such thing as zero-impact drilling, even when it goes well,” says John Hanger, who heads Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).

The Pennsylvania Land Trust Association’s review of DEP records documented 1435 violations of state oil and gas laws due to gas drilling or other earth disturbance activities related to natural gas extraction from the Marcellus Shale between January 2008 and June 25, 2010. The association identified 952 violations as having or likely to have an impact on the environment.

www.wilderness.org

The state has more than doubled its number of regulators and is updating drilling rules, some of which are more than 30 years old. Permitting fees and fines for infractions have been increased to help pay for the beefed-up operations. Environmentalists argue that such steps are not enough, and there have been increasing calls for a moratorium on drilling until Pennsylvania can catch up with the frenzied pace.

For many in Pennsylvania, the revenue to be derived from drilling is too attractive to turn down. In advance of drilling, energy companies blanketed the state, offering leases at rates that have soared to $4,000 an acre. Last year, Pennsylvanians were paid an estimated $1.8 billion for drilling rights. And everybody is getting into the act.

In Lackawanna County leases were signed by a local Bible college, a cemetery, and a sewer authority, among hundreds of others. Along with the influx of money comes the promise of thousands of jobs and ongoing royalty payments for gas extracted.

As Pennsylvania sprouts “mailbox millionaires” and drilling rigs, Lumia concedes the money was tempting.

But when he ponders what might have happened to the Howland Preserve, a protected parcel on a beautiful Susquehanna River oxbow, he feels confident that the decision was right.

Susan Q. Stranahan, a freelancer living on Maine’s Chebeague Island, was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer for 28 years. She is the author of Susquehanna, River of Dreams, and has written for The Washington Post, AARP Bulletin, Mother Jones, and Fortune, among others.

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In 1973 four horseback riders at a campfire in Montana’s Flathead Valley decided that they needed an organization to ensure that national forests and other public lands provided reasonable access for visitors riding horses. They created Back Country Horsemen, and in the next few years other Montana chapters were formed. As they added riders outside Montana, they became the Back Country Horsemen of America. With the recent addition of a Michigan chapter, there are now affiliated groups in 32 states, with total membership of 17,000.

use in wilderness areas is recognized, protected, supported, and sustained consistent with the capabilities of the land.

Wilderness magazine spoke with BCHA President Terry Morrison to learn more about the use of horses in wilderness areas and on other public lands. Morrison grew up on a ranch at the base of northeastern Utah’s Uinta Mountains and for the last 42 years has run a flooring business that he started.

The Wilderness Society is always seeking new partners and joined forces with BCHA in 2009, naming the partnership the Wild Riders. Our goal is to ensure that traditional, historical, and responsible pack and saddle stock

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© MICHAEL BODIN /BCHU

Besides weighing in on land management policy, BCHA educates citizens on Leave No Trace rules and other sound outdoors practices. Based in Grant, Washington, BCHA also helps maintain the trails that riders use, with its members contributing 345,690 hours to trail work on the public lands in 2009. That volunteer work was worth an estimated $8 million.

Sometimes members help with search and rescue missions in the back country.

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Q: What got you concerned about horse riders’ access?

A: When I came home from the service in the late sixties I headed to a place called Maple Grove just to be by myself in the back country for awhile and try to put the war behind me. My relatives had been riding in that area for generations. But I ran into fences and gates and was told I couldn’t ride there anymore. That turned me into an advocate for riders, working on my own, and then in 1992 I discovered BCHA, people who shared my passions and beliefs.

Q: As our population grows and as citizens seek peace and quiet from urban life, there is increasing demand for public land getaways. Is it possible to accommodate all the different groups?

A: We certainly think so. For example, a couple of years ago we helped put together an event in Missoula, Montana, to discuss trail classification with the U.S. Forest Service. We had mountain bikers, ATV riders, people in wheelchairs, hikers, and of course, horse riders. We talked about trail width and lots of other things, and every group had to give up a little. I think it was a good outcome.

Q: For most visitors, seeing wildlife is an important part of the back country experience. How is it different on a horse?

A: Last spring my wife and I rode up into a meadow filled with elk. They seemed to recognize the smells of the horses; those smells weren’t completely foreign to them. So the elk didn’t scatter. Now if your horse senses a bear is nearby, he’ll get skittish. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knows he’s lunch. Horses understand they are down the food chain, and the ears will go up, and they’ll kind of dance a little bit, looking for an escape. Some horses don’t like moose or bison either.

Q: How would you compare a wilderness visit on foot and one on horseback?

A: There’s not a huge difference. The main one, I think, is that I can cover much more ground on a horse, so I can get farther away from civilization, so to speak. Also, hikers often establish one campsite and return to it every night, whereas a horse rider is probably going to have a different one every night, and I like that.

Q: Are the younger generations showing an interest in horse riding?

A: There has been some drop-off, but a number of pony clubs have been created to spark interest in kids, and that should help. I thoroughly enjoy riding with my grandchildren. One is a 14-year-old boy who’s just getting into gasoline and perfume, but he came out with us on a recent ride. There are a lot of other activities for a youngster nowadays.

I want to see this tradition kept alive. U.S. history, across the country, was built on the backs of horses and mules. I hope that Americans will always have a chance to experience what our forebears did by traveling through the back country, on horse or on foot.

Q: What misconceptions do you think other outdoors people have about people on horseback?

A: It comes down to the simple fact that today not as many people understand horses. We often hear complaints about manure, which is really just recycled grass that breaks down.

Q: Why is The Wilderness Society a good partner for BCHA? A: We share a belief that there are many benefits to protecting wilderness, and we both feel strongly that we have a responsibility to take care of the resources we have inherited. We are guardians. We also have found common ground in our commitment to supporting federal trails, rivers, and forest restoration programs. I think we have worked very well together and look forward to future efforts to protect our natural legacy.

For more information, visit www.backcountryhorse.com.

www.wilderness.org

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Š YMCA B.O.L.D.

The YMCA is one of the organizations getting youngsters out into nature. These climbers are enjoying popular Royal Columns crag in the North Cascades.

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Connecting Young Americans– of All Kinds–with the Outdoors

By Kara Palmer

“i love nature!” proclaims Halima, a 14-year-

old girl shrouded in the traditional Muslim headscarf.

Halima is one of a 120-plus crowd participating in a Seattle youth listening session for President Obama’s America’s Great Outdoors (AGO) initiative.

Launched in April 2010, the initiative aims to reconnect Americans to the great outdoors and engage citizens in developing a 21st century strategy to protect our natural landscape. In particular, the president asked that “special attention be given to bringing young Americans into the conversation.”

Will Shafroth, deputy assistant secretary of the interior for fish, wildlife and parks, says of the AGO sessions, “We heard countless wonderful stories and received innovative recommendations from young people across the country about the need for education and better access to outdoor resources.”

In recent years, a burgeoning movement has emerged to reconnect kids to nature, propelled by Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, the Children & Nature Network (C&NN, www.childrenandnature. org), and “No Child Left Inside” campaigns.

© NEIL SHADER/TWS

At the Seattle session, “Evidence shows children youth break into small are smarter, more cooperagroups to talk about tive, happier, and healththe question: “What ier when they have free, can we do to support unstructured play in the and encourage young outdoors,” reports Cheryl people’s involvement in Charles, president and The Youth-to-Wilderness program (Y2W), co-sponsored by the YMCA and nature and getting conCEO of C&NN. “Good The Wilderness Society, organized this Appalachian Trail hike in Maryland. nected to the outdoors?” things are beginning to The school auditorium is bubble up. We founded abuzz with the exchange of ideas. Youth report back to the Children & Nature Network to reverse the trend, to the larger group that we need more outdoor education bring children and nature back together in their everyday in schools, field trips to national parks, better transportalives for their healthy development and well-being, and tion, and increased job opportunities. we’re seeing momentum build with more than 70 groups in 40 states.”

Halima, who attends the Islamic School of Seattle, suggests that more role models and youth leaders are C&NN’s Natural Leaders is part of the growing cadre of needed. She got turned on to nature through a school young people whose mission is to reconnect youth and field trip to Olympic National Park. nature. In June 2010, C&NN’s Natural Leaders joined www.wilderness.org

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© NEIL SHADER/TWS

© NORTH CASCADES INSTITUTE

© YMCA B.O.L.D.

Young people who experience nature are more likely to fight to protect it as they grow older, according to studies.

more than 500 young people in New York’s Central Park to launch a youth-driven Outdoor Nation movement (www.outdoornation.org). Doubling as an AGO youth listening session, the summit provided a platform for young people to share their priorities and ideas to reconnect kids to nature.

“Many kids haven’t been out in nature,” observes Saul Weisberg, executive director of North Cascades Institute (NCI, www.ncascades.org), a conservation organization focused on education. “They have never seen a starry night sky or felt the warmth of a campfire. They don’t have a strong tradition of public lands. The idea that this [land] belongs to you is a really powerful idea.”

Giving young people an opportunity to make that positive connection to the natural world could provide another societal benefit: citizen commitment to protecting the environment. “It’s just common sense that people will fight to protect a place only if they have had a chance to get to love it,” contends Doug Walker, the new chairman of The Wilderness Society’s Governing Council. “We are trying to promote enjoyment of the natural treasures that each American inherits.” Studies by Louise Chawla and

by Nancy Wells and Kristi Lekies have documented the link between a child’s exposure to the natural world and his inclination to protect the environment as an adult.

To blend recreation and stewardship, The Wilderness Society and a number of partners in the North Cascades have created several innovative programs. “For example, we’ve been working with a youth rock climbing team that climbed mostly indoors, to get them outside,” says Peter 30

Dykstra, Pacific Northwest regional director. “They do trail maintenance and invasive species removal projects in areas that lead to rock climbing crags. The kids learn about nature and how to take care of our public lands, and at the end of a hard day’s work, they get to climb. It gives them a sense of ownership of the land, and we hope once they grow up they’ll pass this experience and a love for the land on to their children.”

An important theme in this youth movement is diversity. According to U.S. Forest Service data, 97 percent of federal public land users are Caucasian. Yet by 2042, over half of America’s population will be of Hispanic, African, or Asian descent. This growing population is largely missing out on nature play and all of its benefits.

A YMCA program called B.O.L.D. (Boys Outdoor Leadership Development, www.ymcabold.org) uses wilderness experiences to bring together youngsters from different backgrounds to explore their emotional intelligence and develop self-awareness and decision-making skills. Expeditions include an “Olympic Coastal Hiking & Goofing Off ” trip, where they can fish, build driftwood forts, and play the game camouflage. “A big piece that has been lost for young boys is learning how to play and goof off in the outdoors,” says Andrew Jay, director of B.O.L.D. at the Seattle Y. “B.O.L.D.’s focus on ‘play’ strikes an emotional chord with young boys.”

Mickey Fearn, an African-American and a deputy director of the National Park Service, shares at the Seattle AGO listening session that when he was young, playgrounds Continued on page 62 1-800-THE-WILD

“We Knew the Sea and the Seasons” by gretel ehrlich

“The ocean is our garden,” a woman from Barrow, Alaska, told me. Yet coastal Arctic people are having trouble harvesting their traditional food. As the ice pack retreats farther and farther out to sea, walrus are struggling to get food, and hunters are having trouble getting to the walrus. Polar bears have no ice on which to travel, hunt, or rest and are coming into villages like Kaktovik, adjoining the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to look for food.

As snow cover vanishes, ring seals’ denning sites become exposed to predators; nesting places for seabirds are being washed away. The Seward Peninsula is being bashed by huge wind waves causing such severe erosion that whole villages have to be moved. Ice cellars where whale and walrus meat is stored, dug down into the permafrost and lined with whalebones for thousands of years, are melting and caving in. Keeping food fresh in the Arctic was never a problem because of the cold. Now, large stores of meat are rotting. Memory of how to travel by dogsled, how to speak Inupiat, how to make a walrus-hide kayak, is eroding, despite valiant attempts to keep the old ways alive.

Consider the numbers. “Skip” Walker of the Institute of Arctic Biology in Fairbanks found that summer sea-ice cover has declined 27 percent along Arctic coastlines, pack ice has receded from the continental shelf and, according to the NSIDC in Boulder, Colorado, the aver-

age circumpolar sea ice extent has declined by 625,000 square miles as of July 15, 2010.

I have been fascinated by the Arctic and its people for a long time. Over the past two decades, I have traveled for extended periods with indigenous Arctic people, whose cultures have been remarkably constant for 15,000 years. By dogsled, reindeer, on foot, skis, by helicopter and airplane, I’ve had the unusual and sad experience of feeling the ice go out under the soles of my sealskin boots, of crashing though rotten ice, of experiencing abrupt climate changes.

In 2007 I went to Wales, Alaska, and listened to traditional marine mammal hunters speak fervently about the many ice problems, the disruption in animal migration patterns, the shift in wind and ocean currents, permafrost decomposition and erosion, coastal erosion from wave action, and the deforestation of 60 million hectares of boreal forests in Alaska’s interior as a result of warmer winters and the resulting epidemic of spruce budworms and pine beetles that kill trees.

Continued on page 61

[T]he Inuit subsistence hunters of northwestern Greenland and the animals upon which they depend for food are vanishing. Winter sea ice that was routinely 12 to 14 feet thick is now only 7 inches thick. “Eighty or ninety percent of our food comes from the ice,” a hunter says. “Without ice we are nothing. Without ice we can’t travel. Without ice, we starve.”

“Man and dogs go together here,” Jens says. “It’s a good combination. We have great respect and admiration for each other. They aren’t pets; they’re half wild; maybe we are too!”

© ELIZABETH LABUNSKI/USFWS

Excerpts from In the Empire of the Ice by Gretel Ehrlich (published by National Geographic)

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© JOSEPH SENUNGETUK

The Arctic is carrying the wounds of the world—wounds that are not healing. The ecology of the circumpolar Arctic is unraveling. With multi-year ice all but gone and new ice struggling to stay together in windier, stormier, warmer winter conditions, polar bears, humans, walrus, seals, migrating seabirds, and fish find themselves in climate-change chaos.

Wilderness Treasures The National Wilderness Preservation System contains more than 109 million acres—and they belong to you and every other American. Many more of our natural treasures deserve to be permanently protected, and you will find a number of them on the following pages.

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Southern Utah’s stunning redrock canyonlands include gems like this one in San Juan County.

The region features cliff dwellings, soaring desert buttes, stone towers, arches, slot canyons, and much more. We are working to persuade Congress to permanently protect this unique part of the nation. © TOM TILL

SE UTAH Gold Butte, a two-hour drive east from Las Vegas, is rich in Native American petroglyphs and other archaeological treasures. It is home to desert bighorn sheep, desert tortoises, and unique geologic formations, but mushrooming off-road vehicle traffic is a serious threat. © DAVID BLY

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Tennessee’s two Republican senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, are authors of S. 3470, which would expand five of the state’s 11 wilderness areas and create a 9,038-acre Upper Bald River Wilderness (above). All six are within Cherokee National Forest. © BILL HODGE

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The diverse California Desert includes endless acres of spring wildflowers, giant sand dunes, Joshua tree forests, and much more. S. 2921 would create three wilderness areas, expand four existing wilderness areas, designate two national monuments, and protect more than 70 miles of wild and scenic rivers. Š JOHN DITTLI

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The Organ Mountains are the backdrop for one of the most breathtaking views in New Mexico. Named for the granite needle-like peaks at the height of the range, similar to the pipes of an organ, these mountains lie just outside Las Cruces. S. 1689 would protect 300,000 acres of southern New Mexico’s Doña Ana County, in part as wilderness and in part as national conservation areas. © MIKE GROVES/NEW MEXICO WILDERNESS ALLIANCE

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Montana’s majestic Rocky Mountain Front is where the western prairie meets the Rockies, and it is home to a rich mix of grizzlies, elk, and other species. We are part of a broad coalition seeking a congressional sponsor of a proposal that would add 86,000 acres to Bob Marshall Wilderness and designate another 218,000 acres as a conservation management area. Š JASON SAVAGE

Nesting seabirds such as roseate terns, Atlantic puffins, laughing gulls, and common eiders rely on numerous islands and three coastal parcels along 150 miles of Maine coastline that are part of Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge.

We are urging the state’s congressional delegation to introduce a bill that would designate these lands as wilderness to help restore the populations of these birds. Š PAUL REZENDES

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S. 3294 would create three wilderness areas in central Idaho, totaling 330,000 acres. These lands are part of the largest unprotected piece of backcountry in the lower 48 states, including the peaks of the Boulder-White Cloud Mountains, the headwaters of four rivers and prime winter range for wildlife in sagebrush hills. Castle Peak (above), at an elevation of 11,815 feet, is the highest peak in the White Cloud Mountains. Š LARRY ULRICH

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The Telaquana Lake area of Lake Clark National Preserve would be an outstanding addition to the National Wilderness Preservation System. Located southwest of Anchorage, Lake Clark protects the headwaters of five major regional watersheds. There are millions of acres in Alaska, including the fabled coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that deserve to be protected as wilderness areas. Š KENT MILLER/NPS

www.wilderness.org

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JusticE

for the

ARCTIC

By Douglas Brinkley

F

Though he was a U.S. government biologist for most of his career, Murie was the director of The Wilderness Society and understood a few things about what turned the wheels in the nation’s capital. The Muries organized a fiveperson expedition to explore the area in the summer of 1956. They had the scientific brains lined up, but needed a big name, and finally they got one when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas confirmed that he would join the expedition on June 29 with his wife, Mercedes Hester Davidson.

© HARRIS AND EWING/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

or two decades the controversy over whether to let the oil industry drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been one of the nation’s most intense environmental battles. But in the 1950s almost no one knew anything about the place. The acclaimed biologist Olaus Murie and his wife Mardy did. And they knew it should be permanently protected from molestation by mining concerns or oil and gas outfits.

want to go for a walk?” power-brokers quickly grabbed their hats. Only Woody Guthrie and Carl Sandburg had more celebrated tramping credentials than Douglas in 1956.

Every chance he got, Douglas crusaded for protecting treasured landscapes. Preservation coursed through his body like red blood cells. Effectively using The New York Times and The Washington Post as his bully pulpits, Douglas argued that conservationists had to battle with both fists flying to save forests, lakes, canyons, and rivers from the maw of hyper-industrialization. Scolding, steely-eyed, and intolerant when polluters came to the highest court in the land, Douglas was always willing to be a lone Supreme Court vote when it came to protecting America’s natural heirlooms.

The Sheenjek Expedition of 1956 (named for the Sheenjek River Valley) Justice William O. Douglas was one of those trips where party members found even cones of dried mud and cotton grass worth discussing. Everybody was measuring Olaus Murie had hiked the C & O Canal—the 180-mileeach other’s depth of spirit—not their accoutrements of long waterway from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, success. There was never a pecking order of power when Maryland—with Douglas in 1954 during a successDouglas was in the wilderness. He had no higher rank than ful campaign to prevent the towpath from becoming a tin-plate cleaner after supper. Through decades of hiking, highway. Murie had been amazed by the justice’s exact warding off the demon polio, Douglas learned a basic outknowledge of birds, astounding stamina, and conserdoors lesson: Be humble and do your proper chores. vationist conviction. Murie knew that the Arctic would satisfy Douglas’s burning desire to escape Washington, Early in the expedition Mardy Murie, wanting to be D.C., during the humid summer. Moreover, to the brilgracious, said, “Justice Douglas, will you have some liant jurist, nature hikes were productive think time away soup?” Furrow-browed, the prodigious hiker glowered from the noise pollution of urban America. at Mardy, as if insulted, and said coldly: “Bill.” A little while later Mardy innocently asked, in her cheeriest The Muries believed that Douglas might hold the key to voice, “Justice Douglas, can I make you a cup of cocoa?” convincing President Eisenhower to sign an executive Clearly perturbed that she hadn’t gotten the message order protecting the area. Whenever Douglas asked, “You the first time, he gave her the blue-gaze treatment and 42

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“This is the place for man turned scientist and explorer; poet and artist. Here he can experience a new reverence for life that is outside his own and yet a vital and joyous part of it.”

a single syllable: “Bill.” On some of the cooler evenings Douglas would pour a little bourbon in his hot chocolate to stay extra warm.

tains. This is a loneliness that is joyous and exhilarating.

All the noises of civilization have been left behind; now the music of the wilderness can be heard….

With field glasses he scoured the landscape looking for the great bull caribou and watched a fox fatten itself on blueberries. Down on his hands and knees, Douglas examined lilies, buffalo bush berries, and poppies. He picked tiny bog cranberries and turned them into jam and caught grayling that he smoked with alderwood. “What impressed me most,” Mardy Murie recalled in her memoir Two in the Far North, “was the far-ranging interests of this man of the law. What a divine thing curiosity is!”

“The beauty is in part the glory of seeing moose, caribou, and wolves living in a natural habitat, untouched by civilization. It is the thrill of seeing birds come thousands of miles to nest and raise their young…. The Arctic has a call that is compelling. The distant mountains make one want to go on and on over the next ridge and over the one beyond. The call is that of a wilderness known only to a few. It is a call to adventure.”

Douglas had left the Sheenjek Valley convinced that it needed to be preserved as a primitive park with full federal protection. It was an Arctic Eden. “This is—and must forever remain—a roadless, primitive area,” Douglas said, “where all food chains are unbroken, where the ancient ecological balance provided by nature is maintained.”

Once back in the capital, he started writing My Wilderness: The Pacific West, with an opening chapter titled “Brooks Range” about the Sheenjek Expedition. “The Arctic has strange stillness that no other wilderness knows,” Douglas wrote. “It has loneliness too—a feeling of isolation and remoteness born of vast spaces, the rolling tundra, and the barren domes of limestone mounwww.wilderness.org

© DANNY TURNER

The Living Wilderness, the quarterly magazine of The Wilderness Society, published a detailed account of the Sheenjek Expedition of 1956 under the heading “Alaska with O.J. Murie.” While Murie praised Dr. Brina Kessel of the University of Alaska for documenting 85 birds on their summer trip at the article’s outset, it was the spirit of William O. Douglas that energized this account. “I feel fortunate in having on our Supreme Court a man of his honest outlook, and one who so loves the mountains and virile outdoor living.”

The campaign worked. Douglas’s upbeat report on the Arctic as a wilderness area had a seismic effect on the entire conservationist community. Olaus Murie had taken photographs and movies to show the splendor of the land and its wildlife, and they were put to work on college campuses, with sportsmen’s clubs, and elsewhere.

Minnesota ecologist Sigurd Olson, a future Wilderness Society president, was dispatched by Secretary of Interior Fred Seaton during the summer of 1960 to make sure the Arctic Range plan made practical sense. On December 6, a few weeks before leaving office, Eisenhower—on Seaton’s recommendation—signed the executive order designating 8,900,000 acres in the northeastern corner of Alaska as the Arctic National Wildlife Range (changed to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1980).

Douglas Brinkley

Twenty years later President Jimmy Carter issued a proclamation changing the name of the Arctic Range to the William O. Douglas Arctic Wildlife Range. However, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) vowed that the Alaska Lands Act, a landmark bill then being debated by Continued on page 61

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By Doreen Cubie

John Wingate Weeks grew up in New Hampshire’s White Mountains in the 1860s and loved the woods. So he was devastated as he watched large swaths of those forests clear-cut.

© USFS

When he got to Congress, Weeks did something about it. A Republican representing a Massachusetts district, he introduced a bill that would permit the federal government to buy land to establish public forests.

Popular White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire (above) is one of the many national forests east of the Mississippi made possible by the Weeks Act.

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© TIM FITZHARRIS

A Centennial for Our Forests

up to that point, Congress had failed to pass more than 40 forest purchase bills. Opposition ranged from the potential cost to the constitutionality of the bills.

The Weeks Act, however, made it all the way through Congress and was signed by President William Howard Taft on March 1, 1911. Today, as we approach its 100th anniversary, there are 48 national forests that owe all or a major part of their acreage to this far-sighted legislation.

“It was such a significant milestone,” says Brent Martin, The Wilderness Society’s Southern Appalachian Program director. “We wouldn’t have a National Forest System in the East without the Weeks Act.”

Another hurdle was the continuing debate about whether the federal government even had the authority to buy land from the private sector for public conservation purposes.

Eventually Weeks and his allies prevailed on that point.

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the right to regulate commerce, and since the interstate commerce of the period was dependent on navigable rivers, it was deemed the government could purchase property for forests if the land contained the headwaters of navigable rivers.

© USFS

Protecting these headwaters was also crucial to preventing devastating floods caused by excessive clear-cutting.

“Downstream flooding was a major driver for the Weeks Act,” says Christopher McGrory And without our Klyza, professor of eastern national public policy, politiIndiscriminate logging took a heavy toll in North Carolina and elsewhere in the East. forests, Americans cal science and enwould have far fewer vironmental studies outdoor recreation opportunities. “These forests are ideal at Middlebury College. “When passed,” says Klyza, “the for escaping the rat race, and that’s important to more and Weeks Act was hugely significant for two main reasons. more people these days, especially in the East’s crowded First, it set the constitutional precedent that the federal urban corridors,” says Martin. “If you like to hike, watch government could purchase land for conservation. Secbirds, bike, kayak, fish, hunt, or camp, it’s hard to do much ond, it set the precedent for all government conservation better than a national forest.” These forests average about land purchases—in national parks and wildlife refuges as eight million visits a year. well as national forests—in the East, Midwest, Southeast, and the West.”

The push to protect U.S. forests had started in 1891, when Congress passed the Forest Reserve Law, allowing The first acreage bought under the act was near Old the government to set aside parts of the public domain Fort in western North Carolina: 8,100 acres that would as federal forest reserves. In the East, however, virtually eventually become the core of Pisgah National Forall of the land was in private hands, so when the forest est. A group of activists in New Hampshire was not far reserves became known as national forests in 1907, there behind. For some time they had been trying to protect was not a single acre east of the Great Plains. what was left of the White Mountains, after years of clear

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© STEVEN MCBRIDE PHOTOGRAPHY

© JOHN NELSON

The Weeks Act led to acquisition of lands for the Pisgah, Francis Marion, and Superior national forests. The Superior is home to the Boundary Water Canoe Area (above, right).

“Much of the land acquired was completely cutover, burned over, and eroded,” says Michael Francis, director of The Wilderness Society’s National Forests Program. In addition to being cut, it had often been further degraded by poor agricultural practices. “The success in restoring these places gives us confidence that it will be possible to repair ecological damage in western forests, too. Such restoration is now a top Wilderness Society priority.”

sion, when much of the property was obtained. In contrast, the desirability of such parcels today is reflected by the lofty sums that developers offer to acquire adjacent parcels for construction of vacation homes.

© DONNA DEWHURST/USFWS

cutting. Their first purchase was the beginning of today’s 700,000-acre White Mountain National Forest. Eventually, the legislation Weeks hammered through Congress created a truly national forest system, one that stretched from coast to coast.

Wilson’s warbler depends on eastern

One of these Depression-era purchases became South Carolina’s Francis Marion National Forest in 1936. When the Franklin Roosevelt administration authorized its purchase, the forest’s oldgrowth longleaf pine had been logged, and subsistence farmers were trying to eke out a living on depleted soils. Today, 70 years later, more than a quarter-million acres of longleaf pine savannas, cypress swamps, tidal creeks, and even salt marshes are found in this forest. Located just north of the burgeoning coastal city of Charleston, the Francis Marion harbors wildlife ranging from black bears to red-cockaded woodpeckers.

In most cases, the owners of eastnational forests during migration. ern tracts were glad to sell this “land nobody wanted” to the federal government for three to Other national forests that acquired land via the Weeks six dollars an acre, especially during the Great DepresAct include Florida’s Apalachicola, Ocala, and Osceola; 46

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© CRAIG BLACKLOCK/LARRY ULRICH STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY

In a sense, the Weeks Act was a century ahead of its time in terms of protecting ecosystem benefits Minnesota’s Chippewa and Superior; Missouri’s Mark Twain; Kentucky’s Daniel Boone; Mississippi’s Delta; Vermont’s Green Mountain; Virginia’s George Washington and Jefferson; and Pennsylvania’s Allegheny. “If you look at the Appalachian mountains today, all of the highlands are in public ownership because of the Weeks Act,” says IT’S A FACT: Francis.

“The Weeks Act will continue to be relevant,” agrees Francis. “For one thing, it allows us to expand the boundaries of the national forests and take on development interests eager to subdivide nearby tracts.” In fact, the Forest Service has estimated that nationwide, on an average day, 6,000 acres of open space are lost to development.

Our national forests contain roughly 400,000 miles of road, built mainly to facilitate logging.

That’s enough to circle the planet 16 times.

“In a sense, the Weeks Act was a century ahead of its time in terms of protecting ecosystem benefits” such as water regulation, cultural and spiritual values, and refuge for endangered species, says Spencer Phillips, vice president of research for The Wilderness Society.

“These forests also store carbon that otherwise would worsen our climate problems. These things will become even more important as time goes by.”

www.wilderness.org

Expanding national forests by purchasing additional land may also help mitigate some of the new threats facing eastern national forests, which range from invasive plants to climate change. In its second century the Weeks Act may turn out to be even more important than it was during its first 100 years.

Journalist Doreen Cubie of Awendaw, South Carolina, also writes for National Wildlife magazine and Audubon.

More of her work is at www.doreencubie.com.

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A GREAT PLACE TO VISIT: a little-known treasure looking out across colorado’s canyon country © DAVE SHOWALTER

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By Jennie Lay www.wilderness.org

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If

you want to get a spectacular view of northwestern Colorado’s inspiring canyon country, head for Lookout Mountain above Vermillion Basin. Governor Bill Ritter (D) was there in 2007, with then-U.S. Senator Ken Salazar (D), and is said have had his “come to God” moment. He went away committed to keeping the pristine basin free of oil and gas development.

Vermillion Basin’s vast expanse of crimson bluffs, fossil beds, wily creeks, and meandering canyons is one of the Rockies’ best-kept secrets. You are virtually guaranteed to never see another soul there. In fact, if you ask most folks in the nearby town of Steamboat Springs about Vermillion Basin, they will have no idea where you’re talking about.

Wilderness Society in this part of the Centennial State.

“We have been working with other groups and local citizens for a decade to keep Vermillion Basin from becoming next on the list and are enormously pleased that the BLM made this decision.”

My first trip into Vermillion Basin was to visit Vermillion Canyon on the west side of the basin. It’s a steep, narrow, mile-long oasis of water, shade, wildflowers, and towering grasses. A squawking peregrine tracked my every move from overhead, and I’d been forewarned that the resident mountain lion likely would be doing the same.

Tracks in the canyon’s mud were sighted so fresh as to stand hairs on the back of your neck. I practically forgot about them as I became mesmerized by the panels of

“Almost five million acres of Colorado lands belonging to the American people have been leased to the oil and gas industry,” says Soren Jespersen, who represents The

© NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Fortunately, it seems that this natural treasure won’t be tarnished anytime soon. In August 2010 the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued a 20-year resource management plan that bars oil and gas development across the basin’s 77,000 acres. These delicate badlands will remain off-limits to the heavy trucks, pipelines, drill rigs, and man camps that embed their signature on many nearby landscapes. Vermillion Basin’s stunning silence and vistas will prevail.

Ancient petroglyphs created by the Fremont peoples are among the many features awaiting those who visit Vermillion Basin.

© SASHA NELSON/COLORADO ENVIRONMENTAL COALITION

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Fremont petroglyphs that line the canyon walls. Among the other creatures that depend on Vermillion Basin are pronghorn, mule deer, and majestic golden eagles.

Traversing to the south side of the basin, over rough twotrack roads and washed-out creek crossings, we intended the next stop to be G Gap, followed by a hike in to Sanders Draw to see a field of stromatolites: 65-millionyear-old balls of fossilized mud and algae.

It was not to be. When we were halfway in, fierce lightning and sideways rain pelted our ridgeline and threatened to leave us stranded on slick roads. I’ll be back.

EAGLE: © 2009 PAT GAINES PHOTOGRAPHY

That is a good cue to make it clear that Vermillion Basin is not a place to visit if you want to travel in comfort. This is a spot that will challenge you.

There are no scenic byways, developed hiking trails, or campsites.

Bear in mind that summer days can be scorching and winter snowstorms in northwestern Colorado are often epic. Crossing the basin requires climbing up and down the sharply-cut banks of dry creek beds, where a layer of crust curls back like saturated cardboard, and mica

sparkles in the red dirt. When storms move through, they are fast and furious, easily turning dry creek beds into fast-moving floods and making the soil thick and greasy as it gloms onto your boots.

But none of that kept me from returning. On my second venture, I traveled with three BLM archaeologists. Until now, the land had never been archaeologically surveyed.

So we set out walking the eastern reaches of the basin near Dry Creek in 40-square-acre increments— snaking back and forth across randomly selected tracts at 20-yard paces. We traversed sage flats and rolling piñon-covered rises below the steep Vermillion Bluffs. While Lookout Mountain dominated the horizon on our side of the basin, our eyes pored over the earth in search of shards, stone tools, or maybe an ancient hearth. Ultimately, 1,000 acres of Vermillion Basin will be surveyed this way.

Our day in the field paid off. We found numerous shards, shatters, and flakes, and a tool that was likely left by Fremont people migrating across the land as they hunted or moved between camps. “People were all over this area,” says archaeologist Robyn Morris.

Vermillion Basin is known for its long and striking vistas, and a variety of species, including the golden eagle. Nearby Dinosaur National Monument is home to the greater sage-grouse (center), famous for its mating dance.

© DAVE MENKE/USFWS

www.wilderness.org

© SOREN JESPERSEN/TWS

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But we discovered no shelters or hearths—nothing suggesting permanent settlement. “People have left a light footprint here for a long time. They were moving through, maybe made some tools and got the heck out of Dodge,” archaeologist Ethan Morton says.

After you leave Vermillion Basin, you might want to sample Browns Park National Wildlife Refuge, just seven miles to the west. It was established in 1963 mostly for the benefit of migratory birds flying along the Central Flyway. An eight-mile wildlife drive takes you along the Green River and elsewhere, and you may see osprey, songbirds, river otter, moose, and elk. Also nearby is 200,000-acre Dinosaur National Monument, protected a century ago after a Pittsburgh paleontologist discovered a treasure trove of dinosaur fossils. It was significantly expanded by President Franklin Roosevelt to include the heralded Green and Yampa rivers, which pass through the area forming deep sandstone canyons. This national monument crosses into northeastern Utah.

The sweet smell of sage was pervasive. The desert soil is deep and dank, and every footprint leaves its mark. A long-legged cow elk careened through the sage, rabbit brush, and prickly pear cacti. Two rattlesnakes clattered loudly to make sure they were seen. The rock was striped with red, yellow, white, and orange, and juniper trees bearing fat berries offered welcome shade.

Rafting is popular along the Yampa River in Dinosaur National Monument. Bottom photo: sunset, looking north over Vermillion Basin.

© DON DAILEY

As you leave Vermillion Basin and environs, give thanks to the foresight shown by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Governor Ritter, Presidents Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and others. Your visit will leave you committed to doing your part to keep this place just the way it is.

Jennie Lay is editor of the Steamboat Springs Visitors’ Guide. From her off-the-grid log cabin south of Steamboat Springs, she writes for High Country News, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Yoga Journal, and other publications.

© SAM COX/ LANDSCAPE IMAGERY NATURE PHOTOGRAPHY

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Vermillion Basin Visitor Information The BLM’s Canyon of Lodore Surface Management 1:100,000 topographic map is essential. The most current version is 2002, but an update is in the works with significant changes expected due to the new resource management plan. Maps cost $4 and are available in person at the Craig office or over the phone with a credit card.

Little Snake Field Office 455 Emerson St. Craig, CO 81625-1129 970-826-5000 Open 7:45 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday W y o m i n g

Browns Park National Wildlife Refuge

Vermillion Basin 318 Dinosaur National Monument

Vernal !

Maybell !

40 £ ¤

U t a h

C o l o r a d o

© CORE GIS

!

Dinosaur

Craig !

The best hiking resource for Vermillion Basin is Colorado’s Canyon Country by Mark Pearson, 2001. (www.westcliffepublishers.com).

To get into Vermillion Basin, plan on at least a 1.5-hour drive from Craig, where there are mom-and-pop motels, a few chain hotels, and grocery stores to stock up—or another hour from Steamboat Springs, where every imaginable ski-town amenity is available. Vermillion Basin’s closest developed camp sites are along Moffat County Road 10N (from U.S. 40 near Maybell, turn northwest onto Colorado Highway 318, then north onto 10N), which runs through Irish Canyon. Check out the interpretive exhibit of Fremont petroglyphs as you enter the canyon, and then continue to the north end of the canyon to find six sites with tables, fire rings, and pit toilets. Along the way, marvel at 12 of the Uinta Mountains’ 22 geologic formations visible in the layers of the steep red, green, and gray canyon walls. Info about Irish Canyon is available at: http://www.blm.gov/co/st/en/fo/lsfo/programs/recreation/ irish_canyon.html Vermillion Canyon is on State Land Board property, not BLM land, and you must get permission to visit: Northwest District of the Colorado State Land Board 555 Breeze St. (#110) Craig, Colorado 81626 970-824-2850

ENJOY 2011 WITH THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY CALENDAR

14” x 12” wall calendar with large daily planning boxes, only $13.95 To order, call Westcliffe Publishers at:

800-258-5830

or send an e-mail to: sales@westcliffepublishers.com www.westcliffepublishers.com www.wilderness.org

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Sticking it Where the Sun Does Shine In California’s Mojave Desert lie 500 acres that could answer an important question: Can the lands that belong to the American people play a major role in generating clean energy?

By Peter Friederici

To end our dangerous dependence on fossil fuels and to combat climate change, the United States needs to build a large number of solar, wind, and geothermal power plants. Economic viability is one challenge for these facilities. Another is finding the best places to put them.

Since many of the western tracts where the sun and wind are strongest are public lands, the Interior Department has ramped up a search for the most appropriate of those places to place such facilities.

© CHEVRON ENERGY SOLUTIONS

The desert Southwest seems to offer the greatest potential for solar power generation. Enough solar energy hits the ground in easily accessible locations there to generate seven times the electricity now produced by all sources in the entire country, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Southwestern sunshine is a largely untapped resource close to such power-hungry metropolitan centers as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.

Illustration of the proposed Lucerne Valley Solar Project in the California Desert

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But would tapping this resource take an unacceptable toll on these public lands? “The Wilderness Society supports projects done in the right place and in the right ways,” says Alex Daue, renewable energy coordinator at the group’s BLM Action Center in Denver. “We feel strongly that we need to find solutions for clean energy. There’s a way to do it so the benefits outweigh the costs.”

Daue says that the Mojave site, just east of Lucerne Valley, looks like one of those right places, based on criteria developed by The Wilderness Society to assess the suitability of public lands: • The tract already has been disturbed by a road and lowlevel mining activity, making it ineligible to become a wilderness area; • There are minimal—and solvable—conflicts involving desert tortoises and other wildlife; • It doesn’t appear to be rich in cultural resources; • It is near existing transmission lines; and • Adjacent lands already have been developed.

A Chevron subsidiary has proposed building a solar energy plant there that would use photovoltaic panels to produce 45 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 20,000 homes. In August the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees the acreage, concluded that the project would have only limited environmental impact.

There are about 100 more proposals for public lands in the Mojave Desert, and the BLM is actively studying more than a dozen, as is The Wilderness Society, which believes there are opportunities to improve the plans for each one.

1-800-THE-WILD

© ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/DAN BARNES

© TULEYOME

The Wilderness Society has developed a set of principles for selecting the most suitable public lands sites for renewable energy facilities. Some, such as Northern California’s Walker Ridge (above right), are inappropriate because the likely environmental damage is too great.

The BLM is moving quickly. The agency has “fasttracked” numerous solar and wind energy projects—a dozen in Southern California alone, or enough to cover more than 45,000 acres. That means the agency has made it possible for potential developers to go through an expedited review process, mainly because renewable energy projects that break ground by December 31 are eligible for federal stimulus funding.

Also forcing the pace is California, which, like a number of other states, has enacted standards that require utilities to produce a set percentage of their power from renewable sources. Signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2008, California’s standards are particularly stringent: they require one third of the Golden State’s energy to be renewable by 2020. That’s almost three times today’s percentage.

The resulting speed of decision-making by an agency with a checkered past for environmental reviews of energy projects concerns some, such as California desert expert Jim Cornett, an ecological consultant who has conducted environmental surveys on a number of proposed power plant sites. “I’m all in favor of the development of renewable energy projects,” he says, “but agency personnel are oftentimes sidestepping environmental regulations.”

That has not happened with the Lucerne Valley project, Cornett points out. And Alice Bond, of The Wilderness Society’s California staff, says she has generally been satwww.wilderness.org

isfied with the willingness of renewable energy developers to alter proposals to address environmental concerns.

Almost any proposed site is going to generate controversy. Chuck Bell, president of the Lucerne Valley Economic Development Association, says the number of jobs and the energy output are too modest to justify the impact on the land. He also points to other solar and wind projects that have been proposed for public and private sites in the vicinity. “By the time you add up all the cumulative impacts, like the construction impact, it will be a mess,” he contends.

The cumulative impact of multiple facilities is important, Bond agrees. The BLM’s California Desert District alone, for example, has received 45 applications for wind and solar plants as of mid-August. Most are much larger than the proposed Lucerne Valley project.

One concern, says Cornett, is the potential impact of these projects on the desert tortoise, which has been victimized by rapidly increasing off-road vehicle use, military tank operations, and various development schemes. “Now this comes along,” he says, referring to prospective power plants.

The BLM is trying to address concerns about cumulative impacts and avoid a scattershot review process by developing a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) addressing solar energy development in six 55

“turning brown to green”

southwestern states: California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. The agency will designate up to 24 “solar energy areas” that it deems highly suitable for solar plants, in part because they don’t include such other priorities as wilderness, critical habitat for endangered species, or rare-plant habitat. Developers seeking to build solar plants within the pre-screened areas will face an easier review process; for example, they may have to compile only an environmental assessment, rather than a more detailed environmental impact statement because some review has already been completed. That region-wide plan is slated for completion in late 2011.

What can be done with the thousands of industrial brownfields, former mine sites, and abused agricultural lands across the United States? The Wilderness Society is working with the U.S. Conference of Mayors and other allies to use these places to build solar power plants and wind farms.

One such spot is a molybdenum mine tailings site near Questa, in northern New Mexico, that has been designated for Superfund cleanup. A Chevron subsidiary broke ground in May 2010 on a solar photovoltaic demonstration project that will have about 175 solar panels and will generate electricity for 700 homes. The facility will use lenses to focus sunlight onto three-layer solar cells. The technology is anticipated to be twice as efficient as traditional solar panels and would use less photovoltaic material, according to Chevron. One fan is Questa Mayor Esther Garcia, who said, “The Questa community is looking forward to turning brown into green.”

© ZOE KRASNEY/TWS

In tandem with the BLM’s PEIS and plan for solar development, the state of California is developing a Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan. The primary goal is to maintain biodiversity while promoting renewable energy. The plan will identify and evaluate areas where the state will emphasize energy development and areas where conservation will take precedence.

Lieutenant Governor Diane Denish, U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman, Mayor Esther Garcia, and Chevron Mining Vice President Bill Sharrer in Questa, N.M.

The potential use of such sites is large. “EPA data show that there are brownfields with renewable energy potential in every single state,” said Jessica Goad, who leads The Wilderness Society’s brownfields policy work in Washington, D.C. “In fact, EPA has identified 11,384 such sites. As a land protection organization, we think it’s appropriate for us to find creative ways to make these damaged places more attractive for renewable energy development so that we can ease the pressure on places that are wilder and so far untouched.”

In the meantime, what happens to fast-track projects, especially in California, is likely to continue shaping the national debate. “We’re the tip of the spear for renewable energy on BLM land,” says Greg Miller, renewable energy program manager for the BLM’s California Desert District. “Things that occur here result in policy that comes out of Washington.”

The Wilderness Society’s Daue agrees. “We’re excited to be able to get in on the ground floor in creating a renewable energy program for our public lands,” he says. “If we can help shape policies that are smart from the start, the environmental, economic, and energy payoffs can be tremendous.”

Peter Friederici teaches journalism and science writing at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He is the editor of the new book What Has Passed and What Remains: Oral Histories of Northern Arizona’s Changing Landscapes.

Legislation promoting this approach has been introduced by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ).

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© SASHA NELSON/COLORADO ENVIRONMENTAL COALITION

www.wilderness.org

MEGGAN LAXALT MACKEY is a founder of the Idaho Children and Nature Network, dedicated to connecting children with nature in Idaho, from backyards to mountaintops. While chairing the coalition from 2007 to 2009, she led the effort to create a statewide initiative “Be Outside Idaho.” The initiative encourages youth to experience Idaho’s natural treasures. A long-time employee of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Mackey also is active with the Basque Museum & Cultural Center, which seeks to raise awareness of Basque culture.

© DAVID KCHAO

CAROLYN FINNEY, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Ph.D. in geography, is committed to working with all people to reclaim, review, and renew their relationship with the natural world. Her work grows out of a determination to reconsider long-held assumptions about the production, representation, and dissemination of knowledge about people, places, and ideas. She serves on a committee of the Second Century National Park Commission that addresses the educational role of the national parks in the 21st century, and she is finishing a book exploring the relationship of African Americans to the environment and to the environmental movement.

© DELANE SIMS

BISHOP HERON JOHNSON a is the founding pastor of Faith Apostolic Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He orchestrated a partnership that brought a church, an environmental group, a power company, and two universities together to protect the endangered watercress darter.

His work with the fish and the Freshwater Land Trust expanded to include other green initiatives across the city, including the creation of 1,108-acre Red Mountain Park, which he hopes will one day connect via a greenway to the church’s Seven Springs Preserve. Bishop Johnson, who received the Torchbearer Award from the United Negro College Fund, believes that God placed the fish in his care and marvels that such a tiny fish could make so many great things happen.

© BURNS STUDIO, BOISE

© OLAN MILLS

© LYNNLY LABOVITZ

Faces of Conservation

RUE MAPP created Outdoor Afro, a Web site promoting AfricanAmericans’ involvement with the natural world. She believes: “Participation, across generations, is the only way to foster outdoor stewardship. If people don’t have a personal relationship with the outdoors through repeated, positive interaction, then it’s hard for people to have awareness about the outdoors, much less care for it.” Her leadership and creativity led to a White House invitation to participate in a 2010 conference to shape the Obama administration’s initiative America’s Great Outdoors.

VIRAK KCHAO started an environmental group at Virginia Tech that grew rapidly and made an impression on the community with projects such as the one dramatizing the deforestation of the Amazon. To illustrate that every second a square mile of forest is cut down, the students marked off a square mile on the campus forest.

Now working for the United States Conference of Mayors, Kchao helps mayors stay informed on climate change, sustainability, and green jobs.

He hopes to go to Cambodia, where his parents immigrated from, to play a role in protecting that country’s rapidly disappearing forests.

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Wildsong

Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to endure earthquakes, lightning, the deaths of all those you love, the most blinding beauty. It’s a story so compelling you may never want to leave; this is how she traps you. See that stone finger over there? That is the only one who ever escaped.

Edited by John Daniel

Joy Harjo Albuquerque, New Mexico “Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit” from Secrets from the Center of the World

by Joy Harjo and Stephen Strom, © 1989 by the Arizona Board of Regents.

Piute Creek

© AMY ORR

My First Bear

Orectic

Alarmed and honored by his unforeseen presence, I do not grasp him whole— no teeth, claws or eyes— only his voluminous rump as he strolls out of the river, black against white water, a hole burned in middle ground darker than any shadow, obsidian come to life, negative of the bright air— but around each guard hair a halo of rainbows glistens and flashes.

From the throats of heron and lost wolves, we learn of a mistake made by the gods.

They gave us red-winged birds and vesper sparrows who make songs of leaf-light and flying. The gods thought we’d be so happy— all that fruit, one big garden, our nakedness in sun and water.

They never counted on our needing a sound for longing, too. They gave that to the loon, to wild dogs whose teeth throb from the light of the moon; they poured it into the long necks of birds. How could they have known? Where in our bodies would they have moored the slender cry of the crane who calls out that night is closing the sky, taking away the glinted green of the frogs’ moist backs, the dazzle the sun makes of every hair, of every shining wing?

Diane De Pisa Albany, California

One granite ridge A tree, would be enough Or even a rock, a small creek, A bark shred in a pool.

Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted Tough trees crammed In thin stone fractures A huge moon on it all, is too much.

The mind wanders. A million Summers, night air still and the rocks Warm. Sky over endless mountains.

All the junk that goes with being human Drops away, hard rock wavers Even the heavy present seems to fail This bubble of a heart.

Words and books Like a small creek off a high ledge Gone in the dry air.

A clear, attentive mind Has no meaning but that Which sees is truly seen.

No one loves rock, yet we are here.

Night chills. A flick In the moonlight Slips into Juniper shadow: Back there unseen Cold proud eyes Of Cougar or Coyote Watch me rise and go.

Jennifer Boyden Walla Walla, Washington

Gary Snyder San Juan Ridge, California

“Orectic” from The Mouths of Grazing Things by Jennifer Boyden, © 2010 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.

“Piute Creek” © 1965 by Gary Snyder from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

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profile of a wilderness society supporter

Jack Dangermond has been called the “Father of GIS.” In 1969 he and his wife, Laura, founded ESRI (short for “Environmental Systems Research Institute”) to use Geographic Information Systems software to help government agencies and others make better land-use decisions. After ten years ESRI began to develop and sell software, and soon became a giant.

The son of a gardener (and a gardener himself), Dangermond has always believed in protecting the natural world.

“When my parents moved to California from Holland, they bought land and started a nursery,” he explains. “My brothers and I grew up in that nursery, and we took many trips to national forests and parks.” Brother Peter became director of the California State Park System.

Jack Dangermond graduated from California Polytechnic State University and earned advanced degrees in landscape architecture from the University of Minnesota and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

As president of ESRI, he was eager to help conservation groups put GIS to work and began giving them software.

“The Wilderness Society showed a lot of interest,” he recalls. The relationship began in 1989 when an ecologist in our Seattle office spoke with Charles Convis, who directed ESRI’s new Conservation Program. “The first software we received helped kick off our mapping of oldgrowth forests,” says Janice Thomson, now head our Center for Landscape Analysis. Dangermond was pleased that The Wilderness Society was using the software to provide technical support to smaller groups.

The generosity of Dangermond and ESRI was critical to the growth of our GIS work and proved instrumental in winning numerous battles. For example, analysis of how off-road vehicle use affected wildlife helped us win a campaign to limit such activity along the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana. Our GIS work also helped www.wilderness.org

© ESRI / ERIC LAYCOCK

GIS Pioneer Gives Away Software to Save Land

protect Colorado’s Roan Plateau and Vermillion Basin, which were threatened by proposed oil and gas drilling.

“A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, but a really good map is worth a million words,” contends Dangermond, who dreams of seeing the National Park System doubled in size. “This kind of work has helped legislators understand conservation issues.”

Dangermond’s generosity extends beyond donating software. He mobilized employee teams to assist in recovery after the World Trade Center attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the shuttle disaster over Texas, California wildfires, and the BP Gulf of Mexico explosion.

The demand for what ESRI offers is huge, and growing.

The company’s software dominates the world market in GIS technology, and 2009 sales exceeded $1.2 billion.

Dangermond’s ARC/INFO software (now called ArcGIS) revolutionized the fields of engineering, design, planning, geography, business, and natural resource management.

University of Rhode Island Professor Arthur J. Gold considers it “the GIS equivalent of Microsoft Word.”

Not surprisingly, Dangermond likes to look ahead.

“Today,” he says, “the new computing platforms are the Web and mobile devices. A few months ago we released a new generation of our tools on these platforms which will eventually put GIS Web services into the hands of virtually anyone in near real time. This information will help everyone from the little farmer in Rwanda to major farming companies, from small retailers to major commercial firms.”

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AWARDS

Paying Tribute to Environmental Heroes Teamwork. That’s how wilderness is saved. But teams need leaders, and The Wilderness Society believes in honoring those citizens who have gone above and beyond in their efforts to protect America’s wildlands and wildlife. Over the past year, we have presented the following awards. © TONY MEYER/NORTHWEST INDIAN FISHERIES COMMISSION

© PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSINSTEVENS POINT/TOM CHARLESWORTH © DOUG MOORE

Elena Krieger, Lesley Sheridan, & Jenna Gatzke

Rose Graves Billy Frank, Jr

Brad Smith

Mike Dombeck

Former U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck received our Ansel Adams Award for his major role in protecting the national forests. “Mike was a gamechanger,” said William H. Meadows, president of The Wilderness Society. “He restored balance to the management of our 155 national forests, making clean water, recreation, and fish and wildlife priorities, as the law requires. He was the main architect of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which prevented logging and road building across 58.5 million acres of our national forests. It was the capstone of a quarter century of sterling public service with federal land management agencies.”

Dombeck is a University of Wisconsin System Fellow and a professor of global conservation at the College of Natural Resources at the University of WisconsinStevens Point.

Named for one of our founders, the Robert Marshall Award is The Wilder60

© LAURA GILLETTE

© PAT WILLIAMS

ness Society’s highest honor given to a private citizen.

The 2010 honoree was Billy Frank, Jr., of Olympia, Washington. A Nisqually tribal elder and chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission for 30 years, Frank has been a pioneering leader in the fight to protect Pacific salmon runs and the Indian treaty rights to those salmon. “Billy’s lifelong work as a caretaker of the natural world and bridge builder to many different constituencies makes him a deserving recipient of this award,” said David Getches, dean of the University of Colorado School of Law and a member of our Governing Council.

The Olaus and Margaret Murie Award honors frontline state or federal land management employees, or any “young environmentalists,” especially those who are innovative and have taken risks to promote the principles of natural resource conservation. The 2010 recipient was Brad Smith of the Idaho Con-

servation League, for his outstanding work to shape plans for Idaho’s national forests that will help protect the land and fish and wildlife from damage by unrestricted off-road vehicle use. “Brad is meticulous, professional, and absolutely unflappable,” said Craig Gehrke, who directs our efforts in Idaho.

The Gloria Barron Wilderness Society Scholarship was awarded to Rose Graves for her research on re-connecting wilderness areas in the Northeast to promote wildlife movement and survival in the face of threats from development and climate change. Graves’ project combines ecological and GIS analysis with a plan for partnerships with communities to help those re-connections happen. This research is part of her master’s program at the University of Vermont‘s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. “This scholarship aims to find the Aldo Leopolds and Rachel Carsons of the future,”

says Tom Barron, an author and long-time member of our Governing Council. He established the fellowship to honor his mother, who was a dedicated educator and tireless advocate for wilderness.

Three University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point graduate students received Gaylord Nelson Earth Day Fellowships in 2010. Elena Krieger of Amherst Junction, Wisconsin; Jenna Gatzke of Traverse City, Michigan; and Lesley Sheridan of Dubuque, Iowa, were recognized for making significant contributions to promoting conservation ethics and environmental education, and for exhibiting future leadership potential in the field of environmental education.

We initiated these annual fellowships in 1990 to honor Earth Day’s founder, former U.S. Senator from Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson, long-time counselor of The Wilderness Society, who died in 2005.

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WE KNEW THE SEA AND THE SEASONS (continued from page 31)

Some of us think of ice and cold as the enemy, but to Arctic people it is life. Ice, itself, is alive. Its strong presence in the northern seas calms water that, in turn, allows more sea ice to form. It shelters marine mammals, birds, and fish. In the weak light under the ice, chlorophyll redoubles and ice-flora provides food for the Arctic’s open-ocean ecosystem.

But now inconsistencies in weather, snow depth, and ice are shattering traditional life in the most basic of ways. Not being able to hunt, to provide for families, to understand the weather has become an everyday event. The extinction of languages, dialects, ancestor stories, and material cultures goes hand in hand with the extinction of animals.

What does the Arctic have to do with us in the Lower 48?

The Arctic drives the climate of the world. It sequesters 25 percent of all reactive carbon dioxide. It is Earth’s natural air conditioner: Its white covering of snow and ice radiates solar heat back into space, thus keeping the lower latitudes cool.

The Arctic is unable to do these jobs anymore—and its ability to do so is declining. Positive feedback mechanisms

© PHOTO COURTESY OF GROUP GOETZ ARCHITECTS

Ansel Adams At The Wilderness Society

During the last year of his remarkable life, Ansel Adams and his wife Virginia donated 75 original photographs to The Wilderness Society, which worked closely with him on many conservation projects. The collection is on the ground floor of our headquarters, 1615 M Street, N.W., in Washington and is open to the public Monday to Friday (except federal holidays) from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For more information, call 202-833-2300.

The Wilderness Society is grateful to William A. Turnage, a former president of The Society, for his help in securing this collection.

www.wilderness.org

are stacking up: Melting ice causes more melting ice; the mist that rises from open water holds in warmth that keeps ice from reforming. Wind waves rupture thin ice from beneath, push the ice pack into the open sea, or else tear it to nothing. The apron of tundra that encircles the Arctic Ocean from Alaska to eastern Siberia is decomposing, and ever-greater amounts of carbon dioxide and methane are being released to the sea and the atmosphere—about 50 million tons per year. All of this intensifies global heating.

These astonishingly rapid changes in the Arctic teach us a simple lesson. But we are not learning. We have done almost nothing to address the changes we are causing in the climate. Sometimes I wonder what I would see 20 years from now if I were to take another tour of the Arctic. Just imagine.

Gretel Ehrlich, a long-time resident of Wyoming, has written 13 books, including The Solace of Open Spaces; John Muir: Nature’s Visionary; and, most recently, In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape.

JUSTICE FOR THE ARCTIC (continued from page 43)

Congress, would not be passed with Douglas’s name on that sanctuary. As it turned out, friends of Douglas had written Carter saying that Douglas himself would object to placing a human name on this great area. Reportedly, at a campfire discussion during the Sheenjek Expedition, everyone, including Douglas, had agreed that a human name on wilderness would “degrade the area and detract from its intended significance.”

After leaving the White House, Carter had a chance to lay eyes on the place that had so inspired the Muries, Douglas, and their companions. “The closest thing I’ve seen to this is Africa’s Serengeti Plain,” he said. “Oil development can never be allowed here.”

Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, is the author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America and the forthcoming The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960.

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CONNECTING YOUNG AMERICANS (continued from page 30)

and the woods were children’s sacred places. That’s no longer true, he says. “Young people, particularly kids of color, have a small home range. If they don’t have the experience or context to calculate the return on investment of being in nature, then they won’t get out,” Fearn explains. “We need to break that cycle.

Society’s Atlanta office. An African-American, Peterman has worked for years to engage blacks in public lands matters and took the lead in creating “Keeping It Wild,” which organizes outdoor activities in Georgia. He also has worked with students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the Carolinas.

“If we don’t,” Fearn continues, “we run the risk that people of color won’t see themselves as part of the environment.” And if the majority of America’s population doesn’t have experience in nature or understand the benefits of wilderness, the National Wilderness Preservation System and other protected lands could be in jeopardy.

An Asian-American girl, after having a chance to canoe on North Cascades National Park’s Ross Lake, thanks to an NCI program called North Cascades Wild, said it was an experience that finally made her feel like a U.S. citizen.

“It’s also important that young people of color feel that our national parks and forests are as open to them as to white Americans,” says Frank Peterman in The Wilderness

the

wilderness society

GOVERNING COUNCIL Edward A. Ames, Riverdale, NY James R. Baca, Albuquerque, NM Thomas A. Barron, Boulder, CO Richard Blum, San Francisco, CA David Bonderman, Fort Worth, TX* Crandall Bowles, Charlotte, NC William M. Bumpers, Cabin John, MD Majora Carter, Bronx, NY Bethine Church, Boise, ID Bertram J. Cohn, New York, NY William J. Cronon, Ph.D., Madison, WI Brenda S. Davis, Ph.D., Bozeman, MT, Chairman* Christopher J. Elliman, New York, NY Joseph H. Ellis, New York, NY David J. Field, Gladwyne, PA George T. Frampton, New York, NY Jerry F. Franklin, Ph.D., Issaquah, WA David Getches, Boulder, CO Caroline M. Getty, Corona Del Mar, CA* Reginald “Flip” Hagood, Washington, DC Marcia Kunstel, Jackson, WY, Secretary* Kevin Luzak, New York, NY Michael A. Mantell, Sacramento, CA Dave Matthews, Charlottesville, VA Molly McUsic, Chevy Chase, MD Heather Kendall Miller, Anchorage, AK Scott A. Nathan, Boston, MA, Treasurer* Jaime Pinkham, St. Paul, MN Rebecca L. Rom, Edina, MN* Theodore Roosevelt IV, Brooklyn, NY Patrick L. Smith, Arlee, MT Cathy Douglas Stone, Boston, MA Sara Vera, Seattle, WA Douglas Walker, Seattle, WA, Vice Chair* Christina Wong, San Francisco, CA Hansjörg Wyss, West Chester, PA, Vice Chair*

Kara Palmer is a freelance writer who lives in Seattle and enjoys exploring the Pacific Northwest’s great outdoors with her husband and two children.

HONORARY COUNCIL Frances G. Beinecke, Bronx, NY Robert O. Blake, Washington, DC Gilman Ordway, Wilson, WY Charles Wilkinson, Boulder, CO SENIOR STAFF William H. Meadows, President Frederick L. Silbernagel III, Senior VP (Finance & Administration) Amy Vedder, Senior VP (Conservation) Paula Wolferseder Yabar, Senior VP (Membership & Development) Sara Barth, Vice President, Regional Conservation Melanie Beller, Vice President, Public Policy Ashford Chancelor, Vice President, Finance Leslie Jones, General Counsel Lisa L. Loehr, Vice President, Operations Ann J. Morgan, Vice President, Public Lands Spencer Phillips, Vice President, Research Michael Washburn, Senior Director, Eastern Forests Melyssa Watson, Senior Director, Wilderness

* member of Executive Committee

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just one more

Idaho’s Sawtooth Wilderness features hundreds of jagged peaks, 42 over 10,000 feet in height, as well as hundreds of high alpine lakes and tranquil basins. It has the clearest air in the continental United States. Š JEFF FOX

www.wilderness.org

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Memories with your loved ones can last a lifetime… but can wilderness?

ERINE

/CATH

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CKP © ISTO

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YEULE

Contact us today to learn how you can leave The Wilderness Society in your will, trust or other estate plan and have the peace of mind that your legacy will help to protect wilderness forever. © ISTOCKP

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