How many times have you heard someone frustrated with the rat-race of life in sprawling Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, or Seattle muse that they could really use a break in the wilderness? What do they really mean when they say that? What does it mean for a piece of land, or even an aquatic habitat, to be truly wild? Some would say it means a place genuinely untouched by humankind and human activities. Yet, in a world where evidence of human influence has reached the remotest sections of the globe, from traces of pesticides in Antarctic ice floes to floating debris from cruise ships in the wild mid-Pacific Ocean, is there really such a thing as getting away from it all?

Here, in the Western United States, we are fortunate to have an abundance of land set aside as parks, preserves, monuments, wilderness areas, state/national forests, grasslands, seashores, and other managed but publicly accessible areas. Take a look at a map of any western state or province and there are so many "wilderness" places within an easy drive of almost any city, (apparently much closer and more numerous than those available to residents of Newark or Philadelphia or Baltimore or Birmingham). Indeed, one western state, Utah, has about 10% of all the national parks in the United States! But, are all of these places really untouched?

Cattle grazing, logging, off-roading and hunting are just a few of the multiple uses that characterize most public lands in the United States. While a strong wilderness conservation ethic extends well back into the 19th century with the formation of the world's first national park in 1872, (Yellowstone), the concept of wilderness did not achieve a broad-based legal mandate from congress until nearly a century later.

Legally designated wilderness areas and other wild areas are always potentially threatened by activities that occur outside (as well as within) their boundaries. For example, the Grand Canyon, carved over hundreds of millions of years ago by the Colorado River, is widely considered one of the most profound testaments to the power of nature in the West. It is, however, increasingly beset by air pollution that threatens to undermine the view which people come from far and wide to see. Another seemingly timeless and indestructible beauty, Washington State's Mount Rainier, is at risk of being loved to death; impacts from heavy visitor use and modernization of scenic access roads are undermining the conservation mission of, in this case, the National Park Service.

Finally, Yosemite National Park in California, within a days drive of tens of millions of people, is also at risk of being overwhelmed by its admirers. Visits to Yosemite have increased from 2.6 million in 1980 to 4.2 million in 1996, creating gridlock amidst the waterfalls, lakes, and towering peaks of the country's third-most-visited park. Park officials have now issued a plan to ban cars in Yosemite Valley by 2001 and replace them with a fleet of shuttle buses that would reduce the impact of the American love affair with the automobile.

It is becoming more apparent that all public lands are no longer pristine by the evidence of a drive through the great clearcuts of Washington States Olympic Peninsula, or a picnic interruption by grazing cattle on the spectacular National Forest ridge or a picture of a greater sandhill crane ruined by the zoom of an all-terrain vehicle buzzing past.

1. Recreational access for hikers, naturalists, and serenity-seekers.

2. Conservation for scientific and medicinal uses of habitats and organisms.

3. Conservation of wildlife habitats for hunters and fishermen.

4. Protection of rare, threatened, or endangered organisms from the effects of most mining, logging, dams, roads, and motorized vehicles.

1. The potential for reduction in natural-resource-based jobs in some economically depressed rural areas (though job retraining programs, guide services and ecotourism businesses are helping in many areas).

2. Hunting and fishing are allowed in most wilderness areas (except in National Parks), a drawback to some people.

3. The wilderness designation may be deceptive in some areas, since mining and livestock operations are still "grandfathered in" on these public lands if they existed prior to passage of the Wilderness Act.

4. Only a minor percentage of US public lands are designated wilderness, and these may be distant from major population centers, where the owners of most wildlands - the public - live.

The Wilderness Act of 1964 outlined specific criteria for the creation and maintenance of designated wilderness areas (administered by several different federal agencies) in the United States.

Figure 19-13 on page 501 demonstrates the distribution of public lands held by various federal agencies in the United States. It is clear from this color-coded map that most public lands are in the Western region. Pages 500-506 provide a good summary of major federal and non-federal land management organizations in the US, including a description of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Pages 457-463 offer a different perspective on the creation of wildernesses, one based on preserving habitats for specific species rather than whole communities of interacting organisms. Page 611 discusses some of the environmental effects of urban sprawl, which can be particularly detrimental when the various categories of public lands lie close to cities (e.g. the Angeles National Forest just outside Los Angeles, where trees suffer from diseases induced by the constituent chemicals in photochemical smog, page 374).

Wilderness Society

This site supported by the Wilderness Society, a non-governmental organization that works to conserve wild lands, provides a great overview of the history of the concept of wilderness, as well as descriptions of what the society considers to be the Ten Most Endangered Wild Lands in the United States, seven of which are in the West.

Grand Canyon Visibility Transport Commission

This site, containing the proposed recommendations of the Grand Canyon Visibility Transport Commission, summarizes a plan to maintain air quality in and around Grand Canyon National Park over the next 50 years. Since a clear view into this big hole is a primary reason people visit the area, it is critical to keep internal and external threats to this " visibility resource" to a minimum.

Yellowstone National Park

This section of the homepage for Yellowstone National Park describes some of the ways park officials are concerned about visitor impact to the unusual or unique natural features of this national park, the first and oldest in the world.

Yosemite National Park Articles

An article from the Fresno Bee describing some of the issues facing much-loved Yosemite National Park, including official efforts to grapple with traffic gridlock in the shadow of some of the country's most famous wild high country.

Mount Rainier National Park

This site contains management plans and press releases on outside impacts to Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State of current concern to park officials.

US Bureau of Land Management

This site presents links to a wealth of statistics and history regarding the vast public lands administered by the US Bureau of Land Management, whose holdings are almost entirely in the western United States. It is surprising at the intensity of uses described here which may or may not be compatible with the concept of wilderness.

Wyoming Wilderness

This site contains pictures, descriptions, and current status of several wilderness areas in the state of Wyoming, the least populated (by humans) state in the USA.

Columbia Cascade National Park Service

This site contains information on designated wilderness areas run by the National Park Service in the Columbia Cascades region of the northwestern USA.

US Forest Service

This homepage for the United States Forest Service contains a wealth of information on lands (not just forests), mostly in the West, that are managed by this federal agency, the originator (as mandated by congress) of the multiple use management philosophy.

Beard, Daniel P. "Dams aren't Forever." New York Times A17, October 6, 1997.

Dykstra, Peter. "Defining the Mother Lode: Yellowstone National Park vs. The New World Mine." Ecology Law Quarterly 24(2): 299, 1997.

Few, Roger. The Atlas of Wild Places : In Search of the Earth's Last Wildernesses. Facts on File: New York, 1994.

Frederick, Kenneth D. and Roger A. Sedjo, Eds. America's Renewable Resources: Historical Trends and Current Challenges. Resources for the Future: Washington, 1991.

Hartmann, Lawrence A. "Potential Impacts of Aircraft Overflights of National Forest System Wildernesses : Report to Congress : prepared pursuant to Section 5, Public Law 100-91, National Park Overflights Act of 1987." U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Forest Service, 1992.

Knight, Dennis H. and Linda L. Wallace. "The Yellowstone Fires: Issues in Landscape Ecology." BioScience 39(10): 700, 1989.

Langston, Nancy. Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares. University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1995.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press: London, 1949.

Norse, Elliott A. Global Marine Biological Diversity: A Strategy for Building Conservation into Decision Making. Island Press: Washington, 1993.

Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness : From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. Yale University Press: New Haven, 1991.