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In that Act, a planetary first, the Congress established a National Wilderness Preservation System and included within it an initial 9.1 million acres. The Wilderness Act applies only to federal public lands and reserves to the Congress the right to designate wilderness on those lands. Today, permanent wilderness protection exists in every federal public management system-forests, parks, wildlife refuges, the public domain lands of the American west--and the wilderness system has grown to over 105 million acres. Some advocates say there is a like amount, or even more, that fully deserves protection as wilderness
Wild places in the eastern U.S. weren't forgotten, though they would later pose certain challenges. The 1964 Act designated two wilderness areas on the Pisgah National Forest: 7,655 acres in a place called the Linville Gorge and another 13,400 acres at Shining Rock. But in 1964, wilderness in many minds seemed mostly to mean the expansive public lands, mostly mountains, of the America west; eastern wilderness was more the exception than the rule.
Because of settlement patterns, there were few places in the east that hadn't seen human use and settlement of some sort over the years since Europeans arrived. Populations were larger there and had been in place longer. Much of the land had been logged or farmed. The public estate was smaller, much of it reacquired over the years from one failed private enterprise or another.
Eastern populations continued to grow in the years following the Wilderness Act, to become more mobile and to demand more wild places in which to escape urbanization. At the same time, critics charged that the U.S. Forest Service was taking an excessively narrow view of wilderness suitability, imposing a sort of "purity standard" that disqualified lands ever logged or cleared and tilled from wilderness consideration. Thus growing demand confronted an artificially constrained potential supply.
If there was confusion-willful or otherwise -- about what the 1964 Act meant and intended, the Congress eliminated it with the passage of the Eastern Wilderness Act in 1975. Though the 1975 Act doesn't employ just these words, the Congress in effect stated its intention to consider lands that were wild again, not just those that had been wild forever.
With the 1975 Act, which the Congress carefully specified would apply only east of the 100th Meridian, the dam broke. The Act designated 16 new wilderness areas in the east, most in the southeast. They included 15,000 acres of land in the Nantahala and Cherokee National Forests as the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness and 3,600 acres in North and South Carolina and Georgia as the Ellicott Rock Wilderness. The Congress also created 17 wilderness study areas (areas meant to be managed in such a way as to protect their wilderness values until the Congress decides their future), including an 1,100-acre wilderness study area on the Pisgah called Craggy Mountain.
In an enormous leap forward for eastern wilderness, the North Carolina Wilderness Act of 1984 designated several more areas as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. On the Nantahala:
* 3,680 acres were added to the Ellicott Rock Wilderness;
* 10,900 acres became the new Southern Nantahala Wilderness; and,
* 2,980 acres were added to the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness. |
