| June 14, 2005
Dear Mr. Chairman: We are writing to urge you to hold oversight hearings on the 1964 Wilderness Act. In the more than 40 years this law has been on the books it has never been subject to thorough review and oversight. Yet, as you know, presently nearly one in every six acres of land owned by the United States has been designated as wilderness. Millions of additional acres are set aside as wilderness study areas (WSAs) awaiting determination by Congress whether to formally designate them as wilderness or release them back to their original management status. Wilderness advocacy groups are demanding that millions of additional acres outside these WSAs also be designated as wilderness. Their goal is to at least double the size of the National Wilderness Preservation System. If they succeed, one in every three acres of federal land would be formally designated as wilderness. In many places, the fight over how much wilderness to designate is among the most bitter and divisive land management policy debates. Rather than coming closer to accommodation and compromise as time goes by, in most states the positions of the two sides in the wilderness debate are becoming more rigid and unyielding. In addition, the concept that wilderness is the “best” land management designation seems to be gaining increased numbers of adherents in the federal land management agencies themselves. This belief, which approaches the status of an ideology for many, is biasing federal land management policies even to the point that agencies are bending the law and virtually ignoring the direction of Congress that most of the public’s lands and resources be managed for multiple uses. Any management overlay scheme that affects so many millions of acres of public lands, creates so many management problems and generates such controversy certainly should have thorough oversight and review after more than 40 years. But, in the case of wilderness, this oversight is especially necessary and overdue. This is because we now
In fact, science now understands that the only constant in nature is that it is always undergoing processes of change. Left totally alone, the future state of any particular piece of land will be determined by the largely random interactions of a number of environmental variables such as wind, fire, erosion, insects, disease, invasion of noxious weeds and climate. Rather than achieving an ideal balance of nature in the absence of human activity, there are multiple potential future states of that parcel of land depending on the interaction of these forces. Advances in the understanding of the role Native Americans played in shaping their environment also reveal a racist element in the philosophical foundation of the Wilderness Act. The Act assumes that the continent at first white contact was subject only to the “primeval forces of nature.” It ignored any possible impact that Native Americans could have had on the continent because it assumed they were too unsophisticated and too few to affect these basic forces of nature. We now understand that both of these assumptions are false. At first white contact, this continent was already heavily influenced by human activity. Because they still cling to these fundamental misunderstandings of sound science and cultural history, wilderness advocates continue to claim that wilderness was intended by Congress to be a land and resource protection management designation. They make this claim even though the clear intent of Congress was that wilderness should be primarily a recreation and not a land protection designation. All of this has very profound implications for a federal wilderness management scheme that by law is largely “non-management.” One of the most significant of these is whether, given the inevitable trade offs that result from wilderness designation, it is responsible stewardship of any of the public’s lands and resources to manage them as wilderness. This is especially true when these trade offs against other resource values and considerations are being made largely to satisfy the recreation demands of a very small number people. We believe that these and related issues should be thoroughly explored by the committee in a series of oversight hearings. Based on our analysis, we are convinced that this oversight will demonstrate the need to reform the Wilderness Act to reflect sound science and to make it a more responsible land management designation. Western Counties Alliance is ready to assist you and your staff in whatever way we can in this effort. Sincerely,
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