Wilderness past, present and future

The 50th anniversary of the federal Wilderness Act comes with much deserved fanfare and celebration, mainly because of widespread acceptance and appreciation for the country’s 54 wilderness areas covering 109.5 million acres.

There was, to be sure, much opposition to the act before it was passed in 1964. But in the years since, wilderness areas have come to represent wisdom in protecting some of the most iconic public lands for perpetuity.

Again, acceptance and appreciation have evolved when it comes to wilderness areas. Maybe people resisted the designation in the beginning, but can you recall anyone complaining about there being a Bob Marshall Wilderness lately?

Quite the contrary. There are legions of people who have had incredible experiences in the Bob, and it is those stories that someone is far more likely to hear rather than a complaint.

There is strange irony involved with the Wilderness Act when it comes to new designations, however. They continue to be hotly resisted, and the fight that wilderness advocates encounter can arguably be largely attributed to the environmental movement itself.

That’s because people have seen how the principle of multiple use management has been chiseled away when it comes to logging, mining or other economically productive forms of resource extraction from public lands.

And that can be partly attributed to the zealous, environmental full court press (as in court challenges) that has been applied to enforcement of laws such as the Endangered Species Act. This long-running phenomenon has played a large part in the 80 percent decline in timber harvest from national forest lands over the last two decades. In Montana, it has played a large part in the loss of 3,300 jobs, and the closure of 27 sawmills and one paper mill over the same period.

So it’s really not that surprising when legislation like the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act comes along, there is ample resistance. That’s because the legislation, led by Montana Sen. Jon Tester, has guaranteed wilderness designations for about 700,000 acres in Montana, but the “jobs” part of the title comes with no such guarantees.

Those who object to this newer bill rightly point out that its provisions pertaining to logging and forest health would be vulnerable to litigation, regardless of whether some conservation groups go along with those provisions. In other words, there is little trust among many who have witnessed Montana’s wood products industry being battered into submission. These are the people who wonder why more land should be “locked up” as wilderness when active management outside potential wilderness has been diminished so much.

And that’s a shame. Because there surely are pristine areas that are deserving of wilderness designations that would be appreciated in the future, just as those created by the Wilderness Act of 1964 are appreciated today.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.