The Changing Nature of Wilderness

In an article for High Country News, Marissa Ortega-Welch describes the history of the 1964 federal Wilderness Act, “which required federal public land management agencies to consider large roadless areas for an extra level of protection — what some call ‘Big W’ wilderness,” and its relationship to the nation’s first protected wilderness, the Gila Wilderness, protected well before the Wilderness Act in 1924.

Today, many wilderness areas are under threat from a variety of sources. “More frequent, destructive fires and invasive species, both amplified by climate change, are arguably eroding its naturalness; more people, and more pinging smartphones, are making solitude harder to find. As our ideas about wilderness evolve, the landscapes designated as such are also changing in profound ways.” 

Meanwhile, Indigenous Americans argue that these lands were not vacant and untouched. Ortega-Welch notes that designating the Gila Wilderness area for ‘protection’ also evicted thousands of Chiricahua-Warm Springs Apache who lived on the land and “utilized, changed, altered” it. Now, the U.S. government has begun to acknowledge the Indigenous history of ‘wilderness’ areas and, in some (very few) cases, restored land to native tribes or created co-management agreements. “In 2021, at Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco, the National Park Service signed a co-stewardship agreement with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the tribal government of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok.”