Wilderness Society Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Wilderness Society Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

The Wilderness Society is a nonprofit environmental organization based in Washington, D.C., with 10 U.S. regional offices. Through science, economic analysis, advocacy, and education, it works to achieve wilderness designation on federal lands.

Since its founding in 1935, it has helped add 105 million acres (42.4 million hectares) to the National Wilderness Preservation System.

The Wilderness Act of 1964 was written by former society president Howard Zahniser and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The act defined 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.” The act enables Congress to set aside select units in national forests, parks, wildlife refuges, and other federal lands as areas to be kept permanently unchanged by humans, meaning no roads, mechanized vehicles, resource extraction, or other significant impacts. To date, 106,619,208 acres (43,147,262 hectares) of land have been added to the National Wilderness Preservation System and the Wilderness Society is striving to protect an additional 100 million acres (40.4 million hectares).

The story of the society’s founding is that foresters and friends Bob Marshall, Benton Mackaye, Bernard Frank, and Harvey Broome were in a heated debate over how to best save America’s wilderness as they drove across the rolling hills of Tennessee. The men got out of the car, scrambled up an embankment, and argued over the philosophy and definition of the new organization that they eventually called the Wilderness Society.

The Wilderness Society’s work is guided by a “land ethic,” a philosophy of the relationship between people and the land based on the work of Aldo Leopold, one of the society’s founding members. Leopold, who believed in preserving the integrity, stability, and beauty of ecosystems, envisioned that the society would help form the cornerstone for the movement needed to save America’s vanishing wilderness.

Public support for wilderness has fluctuated over the past century. However, wilderness will always have an unmistakable lure to the human psyche because it provides release for our basic need for creativity, self-sufficiency, and freedom, all that civilization precludes. In Roderick Nash’s classic Wilderness and the American Mind, he suggests that wilderness itself is a large part of American identity. Wilderness provides an escape from the noise and pollution of urban areas and opportunities for spiritual renewal. Environmentally, tracts of wilderness land provide a safe haven for wildlife, protect watersheds, and improve air quality. Wilderness Areas also offer amazing vistas and opportunities for outdoor recreation.

The Wilderness Society’s current campaigns are to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other wildernesses from oil and gas drilling, to stop road building and logging on 58 million acres (23,471,767 million hectares) of forest lands, and to reduce the destruction caused by off-road vehicle use. As urban areas continue to sprawl in an everincreasing network of roads, traffic, and shopping malls, the value of wilderness to society will increase. The Wilderness Society’s long-term mission is to ensure that wild areas will remain preserved and protected for future generations.

Bibliography:

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1968);
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (Yale University Press, 2001);
The Wilderness Society, www. org (cited April 2006);
Dyan Zaslowsky and the Wilderness Society, These American Lands (Henry Holt, 1986).