In the February/March issue of OVR magazine—a fine publication to which I contribute regularly—my colleague and friend Chris Collard published an article with the attention-grabbing, all-caps headline of LAND GRAB. The gist of the article was that well-funded organizations are in the process of blocking off more and more vehicular access to public land, and that an “alarming” amount of such land in the U.S. is designated as wilderness, thus “lost” to everyone except those “traversing it on foot.”
Chris wrote, “Some refer to the ‘more wilderness’ advocates as environmentalists. I believe a better term is the Anti-Access Crowd (AAC).”
As it happens, I am one of those people. So I thought I would offer some perspective, and, since I doubt OVR would be willing to print it, I’ll leave it here to be shared or condemned. Chris and I agree on a lot of things and disagree on a few, so I hope our friendship will survive this example of the latter.
I’ll state up front that Chris notes his support for some wilderness areas. However, he makes it clear he would prefer a lot less than there is now.
Chris writes that he believes, “The folks driving the Wilderness Act had legitimate science supporting their position, and valid concerns . . .” but then claims that “the arena has drastically shifted from a genuine effort to protect this nation’s wild places to a game of deep-pocket monopoly . . .”
Chris then notes that there are now more than 800 designated wilderness areas in the U.S. Continuing, “To put this in perspective, the public has lost access to 112 million acres of land. This is an area larger than the state of California, plus Massachusetts. Another 12 million is in the crosshairs as Wilderness Study Areas. Alarming, right?”
Well, yes, it is alarming—but not in the way Chris thinks. Let’s put those figures into context.
First, over half of all designated U.S. wilderness—57 million acres—is in Alaska. That leaves about 54.5 million acres of wilderness in the lower 48.
Alarming? You bet it is. Because those 48 states comprise 1.9 billion acres, not counting water. That means less than three percent of the land in the contiguous United States is protected in perpetuity (we hope) against mining, logging, and road building. If we include Alaska the figure is still under five percent. Is it really a tragic “land grab” to preserve one out of every twenty acres in our country in something reasonably approaching its natural, pre-corporate-resource-extraction state? I don’t believe so. Russia has no wilderness areas. China has no wilderness areas. The concept is American, through and through, and I am proud of it.
How evident is this pride among the general public, and how strong is the support for wilderness? When the U.S. Forest Service conducted its own nationwide poll, it found that 69.8 percent of respondents were in favor of more wilderness in their own states. Among non-metropolitan residents, 43.5 percent were in favor of more wilderness, and 34 percent said the current amount was about right. Just 7.4 percent thought too much had been protected.
Zogby International found that support for wilderness cuts across party lines, noting that 54 percent of Republicans support more wilderness in their own state, as do 66 percent of Independents and 75 percent of Democrats. Another poll tallying those who support more wilderness in their own states found the following: Alaska, 73 percent; Utah, 80 percent; Nevada, 56 percent; New Mexico, 57 percent; Vermont, 73 percent. It seems the “Anti Access Crowd” comprises a significant majority of the American public—the people who own that land.
In fact the entire “locked out” argument completely misconstrues the intent of the Wilderness Act, which was to preserve areas where “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” In other words, a wilderness is an area where our own recreational convenience is considered secondary to the welfare of the habitat and the wildlife. Again, a concept in which we should take exceptional pride.
It’s important to note that, with very rare exceptions, the 12 million acres Chris describes as “in the crosshairs” as potential wilderness is already roadless—that’s one reason (but only one) why it’s under consideration. You and your 4x4 can’t be “locked out” of an area into which you can’t drive anyway. If every single one of those 12 million acres winds up being designated wilderness—a virtual impossibility—it would raise by less than half a percentage point the land already protected.
Chris goes on to note the numerous road closures in National Forests in recent decades due to “pressure,” as though those were somehow part of the Anti Access Crowd’s land grab. In fact those closures are almost exclusively the result of drastic budget cuts that have affected all our land management agencies—and if you want to know which side of the congressional aisle those cuts came from, just look up the voting records of your representatives in Washington.
Chris states that wheelchairs are not allowed in wilderness areas. This is patently false. From the appropriate section at fs.usda.gov: “. . . nothing in the Wilderness Act prohibits wheelchair use in a wilderness area by an individual whose disability requires its use.” In fact even certain motorized wheelchairs are allowed. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard, “What about the handicapped?” as an argument against roadless areas. These dog-whistle remarks invariably come from decidedly un-handicapped people. Roseann and I have had the opportunity to work with several groups of handicapped people on environmental issues. Not once—not once—have I heard such an individual or group complain because they’re not allowed to drive into wilderness areas, and several of them expressed anger at being co-opted for someone else’s argument.
This brings up another misconception: that to appreciate a wilderness one must don a 50-pound backpack and hike in 20 miles with freeze-dried food and a filed-down toothbrush. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have taken more day hikes than I can remember into the fringes of wilderness areas, content to know that in front of me is unspoiled landscape. There are hundreds of wilderness areas I will never visit, but I’m grateful they are there. Another important—nay, critical—point: Study after study has shown that wilderness areas serve as vital refugia for both animals and plants. A study published in the journal Nature noted that species in wilderness areas are half as likely to face extinction. Does it surprise anyone that wildlife prefers and does better in areas without roads?
Far from being anti-accessism run amok, protection of roadless areas is more important now than it ever has been. The proliferation of not just 4x4 trucks and SUVs, but millions of all-terrain vehicles and side-by-sides, many of them ridden or driven by owners with zero training, awareness, or care, is having a devastating impact on backcountry roads, trails, and, in far too many instances, off those trails. I was disappointed to see Chris devote just two sentences to the problem of “bad apples,” taking the usual approach that it’s a tiny percentage of users. Yet he goes on to (quite justifiably) boast about all the trail cleanup projects undertaken each year by clubs and other 4x4 groups. If the bad apples are such a tiny percentage of users, why do we need so many trail cleanup days? Anyone who spends time on trails is aware that the abuse is increasing, not decreasing. Many hundreds of miles of the trails that are closed off by land agencies are closed due to continued, rampant abuse and degradation, not because of lobbying by the “Anti Access Crowd.”
Meanwhile, I can’t remember the last time I got an email requesting my help on a trail cleanup in a wilderness area. I wonder why?
The motorized abuse of the backcountry has affected me in more ways than simple aesthetics. I am a hunter. Roseann and I try to eat as much wild game as possible because we abhor the cruelties of the U.S. corporate meat industry. In the last ten to fifteen years I have lost count of the stalks I have had ruined when a “hunter” with a rifle strapped to the handlebars of his ATV has scattered all the game nearby. And on two occasions I have had a deer in sight and was stalking close enough to make a clean shot when an ATV rider spooked it. It’s not an exaggeration to say those incidents took food out of my mouth. This is one reason I became of the first members of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a group that promotes fair chase and wilderness pursuits.
Finally, I was disappointed Chris did not address a prime factor behind the loss of land for all types of backcountry recreation: population growth and development. In the last 50 years in southern Arizona we’ve lost far, far more land in which to drive and hike to unchecked urban sprawl than we have to whacko environmentalists. Perhaps we should all be working together to preserve more of all types of public land, instead of fighting among ourselves.
Let’s not ignore the fact that there are those on the lunatic fringe of the environmental movement who would ban all 4x4 use—just as there are those on the lunatic fringe of the 4x4 crowd who don’t believe wilderness areas should exist at all, who would unhesitatingly blaze trails into every one if they thought they could get away with it (I’ve seen the results). It’s up to us, the majority of intelligent people, to come together in the big gray area in the middle. There’s just one thing to remember: Once a wilderness is gone—once a road is bladed through, a mine blasted out, or trees clear-cut—it is gone forever. I’d like to hang on to what we have.
And yes, I’d be happy if we had more.
