Celebrating courageous New England wildlands that broke the wilderness “glass ceiling”
Happy 50th birthday to Vermont’s Lye Brook and Bristol Cliffs Wilderness areas, and the Presidential Range-Dry River Wilderness in New Hampshire!
On January 3rd, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act, which had been championed for eight years by then-Vermont Senator George Aiken. Although the Wilderness Act was signed into law a decade earlier (it just had its 60th birthday on September 3, 2024) the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act is arguably an equally important law (or nearly so) here in New England and across the Eastern US.
Leading up to the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, the US Forest Service – which long opposed the legislation – suggested that only a few areas east of the Mississippi River, such as rare forests that had escaped logging since colonization, should qualify for protection by congress. Consequently, not a single area was designated as Wilderness in the Green Mountain National Forest with passage of the Wilderness Act, and only one area in the White Mountain National Forest, the Great Gulf on the northern slopes of Mount Washington, home to a remarkable old-growth forest. (The edges of this old-growth forest extend outside of the Great Gulf Wilderness area boundary and are illegally targeted for logging by the US Forest Service in the Peabody West Integrated Resource Project, endangering the very same forests protected 60 years ago by congress – Standing Trees is presently litigating this timber sale.)
Passage of the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act was a watershed moment: it sent a loud and clear statement to the US Forest Service that wildlands did not have to pass a "purity test" to qualify for wilderness designation by congress. Such a baseless standard for wilderness protection – still in use in various forms today – was the Forest Service’s strategy to reduce the impact of the Wilderness Act by minimizing the amount of acreage that could be removed from its timber base.
Rather than create a separate and unequal “Eastern” Wilderness Act, Congress maintained in the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act that the Wilderness Act of 1964 was never designed to prohibit the inclusion of heavily degraded lands in the eastern US (or anywhere else). Historic roads, logging, railroad beds, mines, and structures did not disqualify an area from designation as Wilderness.
The Forest Service's systematic misinterpretation of the Wilderness Act wasn't just an eastern US problem. Three years later, in 1978, congress acted again with the Endangered American Wilderness Act to demonstrate that western wildlands also did not need to pass a "purity test" to warrant protection.
Ahead of its time, the Wilderness Act of 1964 recognized that human impacts to the landscape have variably shaped the trajectory of ecosystems across the planet over millennia. To be certain, indigenous peoples were not named in the Act, or included in its drafting. Today, many organizations – including ours and indigenous-led groups from across the US – are working in a new National Wilderness Coalition to right these wrongs while uplifting and strengthening the Act so that it persists for generations to come.
The Wilderness Act is forward-looking: it's about rewilding. The key term in the Wilderness Act, "untrammeled” (which – much to the Act’s detriment – is also its most misunderstood concept), means "unfettered" or "unrestrained." “Untrammeled” was chosen by the bill's lead author, Howard Zahniser, to emphasize that wilderness areas should be managed to be wild and free, even if they are rarely – if ever – devoid of past or current human impacts. Often misinterpreted as untrampled, “untrammeled” is a concept that artfully conveys the future-focused nature of wilderness designation. Given Zahniser's intimate familiarity with eastern US environmental history, born and raised in western Pennsylvania and a frequent visitor to New York's Adirondacks, it's no surprise that he crafted the Wilderness Act to ensure its compatibility with heavily-impacted ecosystems.
Today, the Wilderness Act ensures that a minority of lands – totaling just 2.7% of the contiguous United States – are allowed to evolve and adapt without significant human intervention. These wildlands safeguard biodiversity, protect clean water, store vast amounts of carbon, provide retreats from the burdens and distractions of daily life, and serve as living laboratories for scientists.
But first and foremost, wildlands simply "are." Their “community of life” exists for its own sake. Like a human, bird, salamander, or tree, a wildland needs no justification or rationalization.
In early drafts of the Wilderness Act, Howard Zahniser, “described wilderness as a place where ‘man himself is a member of the natural community,’” writes Marissa Ortega-Welch in High Country News. As evidenced by this legislative language, which tragically was later removed, the intent of the Act was to foster equity between human and other-than-human life in at least a few corners of the nation. Nevertheless, notes Ortega-Welch, “the concept of wilderness is criticized for reinforcing a false separation between humans and nature. How might we see wilderness areas differently if that single phrase had survived?”
Today, despite the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act and the Endangered American Wilderness Act, the US Forest Service continues to systematically misinterpret the Wilderness Act to restrict the amount of public lands that receive protection from road building, logging, mining, and drilling. Although congress can designate nearly any publicly-owned, federally-managed lands as Wilderness, the US Forest Service has demonstrated a unique ability to narrowly define wilderness to serve its own ends.
When revising its land management plans and evaluating areas for wilderness designation, the Forest Service grades potential wildlands using rubrics designed to disqualify virtually any candidate landscape. Can you see old roads? What about signs of past logging? Are there structures present? Such questions are used to whittle away at the pool of future wildlands, even though congress has demonstrated time and time again that such questions are legally, morally, and ecologically irrelevant. The test of time has shown that wildlands have a profound capacity for self-healing and renewal; past impacts have little bearing on the landscape in the arc of the lifetime of a single tree, if not in the lifespan of a human. One visit to virtually any wilderness area in New England is enough to see that even deforestation can be overcome with the humble gift of space and time.
With only 20% of New England’s two National Forests in wilderness areas, there is much more to designate. No wilderness areas have been protected since 2006. Meanwhile, the majority of logging projects in the Green and White Mountain National Forests over the past two decades have targeted “Inventoried Roadless Areas” that are the most likely candidates for future wilderness designation by congress. Coincidence? I think not.
New England’s two National Forests provide less than one percent of the region’s total timber harvest volume on an annual basis, but the damage caused by logging is significant. For example, road construction, skid trails, and timber harvest impact an average of 8,000-acres per year of the White Mountain National Forest. Extrapolated over the next 50 years, that means half of the National Forest could be cut, stunting the recovery of critically-important ecosystems.
Like many other New Englanders passionate about rewilding, I gaze longingly across Lake Champlain and the Hudson Valley at a state that long ago put the majority of its public lands on a “forever-wild” path. The injustice is hard to bear. To the west of this great philosophical divide in New York, three million acres of public land – nearly equal in size to the State of Connecticut – has been protected from logging and development for more than a century. In contrast, east of that divide in New England, just 1.32 million acres, or 3.3% of the region’s total land area, is protected from logging and development across both public and private land.
Wildlands and Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities, a New England-wide vision for conservation, has long advocated that at least 10% of the region should be managed as Wildlands. At the state level, Vermont’s Act 59, passed in 2023, mandates that approximately 10% of Vermont should be managed to restore old forests, per the guidance of Vermont Conservation Design. Even a recent report that argues for dramatically increasing timber harvest in New England, so that most wood products consumed within New England would be sourced within the region’s borders, suggests that “[i]n principle, a full 20% of the region (8 million acres of forest) or more could be dedicated to Wildlands while still achieving the sustainable wood production targets.” Importantly, the same report notes that “the first step of ecological forestry is to designate sufficient Wildlands.” If we take the authors at their word, New England cannot claim to be practicing so-called “ecological forestry” unless and until we triple the expanse of “capital-W” Wildlands, region-wide.
The golden anniversary of the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act is a chance to reflect on a momentous milestone, but also to ponder the halting progress that has been made towards realizing our regional wildlands visions. We cannot afford another 50 years of equally tepid progress, especially in the realm of public land protection, where many of New England’s largest unprotected wild areas are located, harboring significantly more carbon and higher-quality habitat than is often found on heavily-logged private lands.
May the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act long serve as an inspiration. And may we all find the courage and strength to continue the pursuit of rewilding over the next 50 years, despite the steep trail ahead.
This essay is dedicated to Doug Scott, lifelong wilderness champion and historian, gracious mentor to rising leaders in the wilderness movement, and author of an excellent resource that should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the subject, The Enduring Wilderness.