The Wilderness Act’s Next 60 years: Elevating Earth’s Community of Life

This fall, Wilderness Watch and other wilderness advocates gathered at the feet of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, in the trees and away from computer screens, to reflect on the 60th anniversary of the Wilderness Act and talk about where we might go in the years ahead. The conservation movement has excelled at Power Point presentations and Zoom meetings and cranking out 50-page legal briefs, but we’ve become really lousy at gathering around the campfire to tell stories, share food, and build our strength from the ground up. The campout was a welcome opportunity to reconnect.

I was asked to speak about the next 60 years of wilderness protection, which is no simple forecast. It’s hard to envision the next 60 years. Many of us feel that uncertainty in our bones. But it seems that if the future will be aided by anything, it will be storytelling and community—remembering what it is to be a human animal who exists as part of a broader community of life and finding ways to tell that story from the gut. We need the lawsuits and agency comments and the technocratic data and lingo—we have to play that game to hold the line—but we can’t get so wrapped up in those boxes that we forget how to tell the right stories.

We are a world in crisis—in ecological crisis, in climate crisis, in a crisis of community and belonging. If there were ever a time for a radical retelling of how we exist on this planet, it is urgently now. Yet, the loudest voices in this discussion, including many non-profit conservation groups, are becoming increasingly corporate in their operations and thinking, and they end up pushing the same more-of-everything agenda that we see everywhere else. Restraint—the thing that creates space for other species to exist—is not at the forefront of the conversation.

In explaining the need for Wilderness, Howard Zahniser said, “This need is for areas of the earth with- in which we stand without our mechanisms that make us immediate masters over our environment—areas of wild nature in which we sense ourselves to be, which in fact I believe we are, dependent members of an interdependent community of living creatures that together derive their existence from the sun.”

The Wilderness Act, more than anything, codifies restraint and recognizes a natural right for “earth and its community of life [to be] untrammeled by man.” The drafters of the Act were careful in their word choice here.

People often mistake “untrammeled” for “untrampled” or “pristine and untouched,” but that isn’t what this word means. A trammel is a restraint or a shackle, something intentionally used to restrict freedom and to control. To be untrammeled is to be free and unbound, to have autonomy and self-will.

There are no places on this planet that are untouched by humans and uninfluenced by human activity, but that is different than direct, intentional control and domination. The Wilderness Act defines Wilderness “in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape.” The word “untrammeled” is, fundamentally, a check on domination. Rather than the “desired condition” bias so prevalent on other public lands, the Wilderness Act protects natural processes—the intelligence of nature. And it prohibits the industrial tools that have allowed us to decimate unprotected landscapes so quickly—roads, aircraft, motorized and mechanized equipment, structures, installations, and commercial enterprise are all prohibited.

But the Wilderness Act protects less than three percent of land in the Lower 48, and it’s no big surprise that those three percent are some of the most secure spaces left for wildlife trying to persist in the middle of overwhelming human activity. Add to the mix booming outdoor recreation and our desire to chase what is left of the wild, and these pockets of protected space really start feeling the squeeze. I was sitting in on a Forest Service discussion about stunning recreation overuse in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. In one ranger district, the Forest Service counted over 100,000 visitors entering just a few trailheads in a one-year period. The Forest Service used helicopters to fly out 8,000 pounds of human waste in 2022 and buried nearly 1,100 piles of exposed human excrement and toilet paper—a 790 percent increase from 10 years prior.

In that discussion, there were various “stakeholders” talking in circles about “user group” interests and “visitor use metrics” and doing more studies when someone from the Tulalip Tribes spoke up and said bluntly, “The animals have nowhere left to go. Where do you want them to go?” Nobody answered that question, but that’s exactly the question we need. Until we address the access needs of other species—across their native territories, which includes rural and populated areas, and into new spaces they may need for adapting to a rapidly changing climate—we should be extremely concerned about further imperiling their delicate space in Wilderness.

We need to unapologetically extend the umbrella of equity to the rest of the natural world—to the pika drying wildflowers for winter, the grizzly foraging cutworm moths on a scree slope, the bighorn mother giving birth in the spring, and the honeybee gathering pollen. Their interests matter, and they have a lot to teach us about what it is to be a human animal beholden to the influences and limits of the world that sustains us.

And as we carry wilderness protection into the future, we should be forging better relationships with other communities telling similar stories. The climate movement has a lot of energy, and at least a portion of that movement isn’t afraid of telling the right stories. We should be building relationships with Indigenous communities who carry deep historical knowledge and thousands of years of connection to place.

Speaking on the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Jamie Pinkham, a Nez Perce tribal member, said, “For the last 50 years the Wilderness Act has been a platform for us to protect natural laws and nature’s freedom.” And, “our task going forward is to harmonize our constitutions with nature’s instinctive constitutions that are timeless and intelligent with long established roles, processes, and commitments essential for their survival.” Jamie noted that nature’s “constitutions depend on the freedom to remain wild.”

This goal—safeguarding the freedom to remain wild, protecting these timeless natural rights—is the ultimate goal of wilderness protection.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes took the wilderness model and made it better. Using the 1964 Wilderness Act as a template, they designated their Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness. The Tribe outright prohibits commercial outfitting and guiding in the Wilderness and codifies respect for grizzly bears, closing a 10,000-acre area to human use between July 15 and October 1 when grizzly bears are gathering to feed on insects.

Instead of wheeling and dealing compromises to the recreation industry or acting like the livestock industry gets a pass to decimate landscapes forever and always, we should take a note from the Salish Kootenai and treat the 1964 Wilderness Act as a floor rather than a ceiling. I very much appreciate the hurdles such things face in Congress, but I also know that if we never demand it, it will never happen. And if we start telling the right stories, more people will understand why we are demanding it.

Our current undeniable reality is that human activity—with our buildings, highways, fast-moving cars, 4-wheelers, e-bikes, aircraft and drones and satellites, 5G networks, mono-cropping, pesticides and herbicides, urban sprawl, logged out landscapes, and an increasing appetite for adventure sports and outdoor recreation—is overwhelming. Some species persist amid all of this, but many don’t, and we’ve squeezed plants and animals who don’t into increasingly fragmented pockets of land away from this inundation. In this context, it should not be a radical position to hold the line for them and to demand a lot more. And we should do this while simultaneously reassessing—seriously reassessing—how we exist on this planet and what our obligations are to those living alongside us.

We owe the rest of the natural world restraint and deference. We owe it a voice. We owe it space. We certainly owe it three percent. Rather than squeezing out that last percent, killing it with the same stories of entitlement and business as usual, our goal for the next 60 years is to unapologetically defend these endangered landscapes and pull them closer, to start seeing and protecting more of the wild in our own backyards and in ourselves.

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