Tag Archives: Wilderness Act

One warm summer morning in early August of 2005, a small group of grad students from Western Washington University and I gazed across a small lake at one of America’s most spectacular mountain views. The lake was indeed small, really a small tarn, its glass-like surface reflected a perfectly clear upside-down image of Glacier Peak, a gleaming white volcano of …

  On September 3, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law. Its purpose: “to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition” and “to ensure for the …

Wilderness is to me like a home, a place of happiness and comfort. Not so much physical comfort; rather, an emotional comfort. There is a sense of wilderness as the way a place should be, with a natural feeling of everything there working as it should, not needing to be changed or “improved”. That house is in order. It was …

More than one hundred million acres. This is the quantity of designated wilderness lands in the United States of America today. This bounty is the result of the Wilderness Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3, 1964. The Act defines “wilderness” in language unusually poetic for legislation: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where …