Sixty years ago today, on September 3, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law at a Rose Garden signing ceremony. This landmark law established the National Wilderness Preservation System, initially 54 Forest Service-administered areas that totaled 9.1 million acres.
The 1964 Wilderness Act also provided, for the first time ever, protections for Wildernesses in the federal statutes, with the goal that wilderness designation would be permanent protection. The law, thanks to Howard Zahniser (the author of the Act), lyrically provided the legal definition of Wilderness, in part 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 law was essentially nature’s Bill of Rights, ensuring that in some areas of our country natural processes would reign without the intentional interference of humans. The Wilderness Act also required that each additional area to be added to the National Wilderness Preservation System must do so through an act of Congress. Since 1964, Congress has responded to the desires of the American people and expanded the wilderness system again and again. Today, in a tremendous conservation success story, the National Wilderness Preservation System has grown to protect over 800 Wilderness areas totaling nearly 112 million acres in 44 states and Puerto Rico! So today we celebrate with deep pride and great gratitude the people, like our own late Stewart “Brandy” Brandborg, who struggled to pass the 1964 Wilderness Act for the eight long years it took.
We are also thankful for our members and supporters and all those across the country who have fought—and continue to fight—to protect our magnificent National Wilderness Preservation System, areas that will be, in the words of the Wilderness Act, “an enduring resource of wilderness” for all generations. Happy 60th Anniversary to the Wilderness Act! |
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Help us protect the Wilderness Act and America's National Wilderness Preservation System. |
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Photo: Upon signing the Wilderness Act into law on September 3, 1964, President Johnson stated, “The Wilderness Bill preserves for our posterity, for all time to come, 9 million acres of this vast continent in their original and unchanging beauty and wonder.”
Standing behind President Johnson are many of the Congressional sponsors of the law. To President Johnson’s right is Alice Zahniser, wife of Howard Zahniser, the person most responsible for writing and passing the Wilderness Act. Next to Zahniser is Mardy Murie, a famous conservationist in her own right and wife of Olaus Murie, another leader in the fight to pass the wilderness bill. President Johnson gave to each of them the pens that he used in signing the Wilderness Act into law.
Photo by Abbie Rowe, courtesy of National Park Service, Harper’s Ferry Center, Historic Graphic Collection. |
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