In 1924, the Forest Service established the first wilderness area anywhere in the world, the Gila Wilderness on the Gila National Forest. Leopold worked tirelessly to save one of the last remaining blank spots in the region where he worked: the Gila River headwaters in New Mexico. The “blank spots on the map,” as he called them, were disappearing, even on the national forests. Leopold saw the wildness vanishing before his eyes. One of them was Aldo Leopold, who started his career with the Forest Service and worked for the agency for 17 years, mostly in the Forest Service’s Southwestern Region. The young foresters who went to work for the Forest Service more than a century ago were keen on wilderness values. Wilderness is part of who we are as a people, and from the very outset the Forest Service was dedicated to protecting America’s wilderness heritage. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in 10 years set foot in it.” One of the great American writers of the West was Wallace Stegner, and he put it this way: “We need wilderness preserved …because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.
That’s because wilderness is key to our cultural heritage as Americans. Although we didn’t call it wilderness back then, the wildness of the American frontier was part of what we were protecting on the national forests. We at the Forest Service were in the forefront of what might be called the early wilderness movement. Through their efforts, the first conservation agencies were formed, including my agency, the Forest Service. Through their efforts, the first protected areas were set aside-the first national parks … the first wildlife refuges … the first forest reserves, which became the national forests. People like President Theodore Roosevelt … like John Muir … like Gifford Pinchot, who went on to become the first Forest Service Chief … people like these, the early conservationists, sounded the alarm. In good part, that’s why conservation was born. From 1630 to the early 20 th century, America lost about a quarter of its entire forest estate, mostly in the East and two-thirds of that loss came in the period following the Civil War. … The lumbermen … regarded forest devastation as normal and second growth as the delusion of fools.”Īs a result, rampant deforestation was underway, just as it is in some developing countries today. In the words of the early conservationist and forester Gifford Pinchot, “To waste timber was a virtue and not a vice. Little thought was given to reforestation, much less to sustainable forestry. At the turn of the 20 th century, people still thought of forests as an inexhaustible resource. But by 1900, the bison was everywhere extinct except in small parts of the Great Plains.Īnd the same thing was happening with America’s forests. The American bison once roamed by the millions from the Rockies to the eastern woodlands colonial explorers found bison as far east as what is now Washington, DC.
The fate of the buffalo was one obvious sign. Now that the frontier was closing, Americans were growing more aware that our natural resources were limited-and that we were losing them. The frontier was always a place of wide-open spaces and unlimited resources.
We were founded in 1905, not long after the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the western frontier. The Forest Service is more than a century old. Finally, I will outline the approach that the Forest Service is taking to meet the challenges. Then I will discuss some of the challenges facing wilderness in the United States. I think you will see that the Forest Service and wilderness are closely intertwined.
What I would like to do today is to start with a little wilderness history. So people in this part of the country are keenly aware of the importance of wilderness, and I commend the Frank Church Institute for devoting its annual conference to the topic of wilderness and the challenges associated with preserving it. The Selway‒Bitterroot Wilderness alone is almost the size of Delaware. This totals 4.5 million acres, some 3.9 million of them on the national forests. Idaho has five wilderness areas on national forest lands, six on public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and one managed by the National Park Service. This part of the country has an especially rich wilderness heritage. So it’s a special pleasure to be back in this part of the country, which I still regard as my home. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be here today.Īs you know, I grew up in Boise and I served much of my Forest Service career in Idaho. Thank you for that generous introduction.
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