The National Wilderness Preservation System was created on September 3, 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed The Wilderness Act -- eight years after the first wilderness bill was introduced by Senator Hubert H. Humphrey. The final bill passed the Senate, 73-12, on April 9, 1963, and the House of Representatives, 373-1, on July 30, 1964.
The original bill established 9.1 million acres of federally protected wilderness in national forests. The law did not increase the amount of land under federal control, nor did it mandate acquisition of additional lands.
>> Read the Wilderness Act
Eight Years in the Making
In 1956, Howard Zahniser, executive director of The Wilderness Society, drafted a bill to protect some of the nation's remaining wilderness. U.S. Representative Wayne Aspinall (R-CO) called it "a crazy idea," and even the National Park Service originally opposed it. The first version was introduced in 1957 by Sen. Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and U.S. Rep. John Saylor (R-PA), and was rewritten 66 times. Eventually Zahniser's dream came true, but he died four months before President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964.
The National Wilderness Preservation System, created at the signing of the Wilderness Act, was to contain those lands, already owned by the American people, that were "untrammeled by man." They were to be managed "for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness..." No roads or structures were to be built. Vehicles and other mechanical equipment were not to be used. The minimum size was set at 5,000 acres, with certain exceptions.
The Wilderness Act also put 9.1 million acres of national forest land into the new system. A process was created for congressional designation of future acreage in the national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges. In 1976, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act set forth a process for adding Bureau of Land Management (BLM) areas to the National Wilderness Preservation System. These four sets of public lands total 623 million acres, about 26 percent of our country.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 institutionalized an idea, describing a wilderness as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." By definition, then, it was a place where vehicles would not be allowed, where no permanent camps or structures could be made, where wildlife and its habitat would be kept in as primitive a condition as possible.
But the act did not do much in the way of creating a system. While 9.1 million acres of national forest areas that already had been administratively identified by the Forest Service as "wild" or "wilderness" or "canoe" were immediately designated by the act, this was the barest skeleton of what would eventually be intended.
The rest would have to come after the federal land-managing agencies surveyed their territory and recommendations to Congress as to which qualified as candidates for wilderness. Such recommendations might or might not be followed by legislation. Moreover, Congress had the power to bypass agency recommendations. It was a cumbersome process at best, but slowly, with many fits and starts and in spite of shifting political winds, bureaucratic complexities, and conflicting needs and desires on the part of the American citizenry, a National Wilderness Preservation System began to take shape.
Excerpted from Wilderness America, a 1990 publication of The Wilderness Society.
