{"id":39464,"date":"2025-05-13T13:45:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T13:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=39464"},"modified":"2025-05-14T03:39:32","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T03:39:32","slug":"why-protecting-wildland-is-crucial-to-american-freedom-and-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/why-protecting-wildland-is-crucial-to-american-freedom-and-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"Why protecting wildland is crucial to American freedom and identity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Leisl Carr Childers<\/a>, Colorado State University<\/a><\/em> and Michael Childers<\/a>, Colorado State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As summer approaches, millions of Americans begin planning or taking trips to state and national parks, seeking to explore the wide range of outdoor recreational opportunities across the nation. A lot of them will head toward the nation\u2019s wilderness areas \u2013 110 million acres<\/a>, mostly in the West, that are protected by the strictest federal conservation rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964, it described wilderness areas as places that evoked mystery and wonder, \u201cwhere the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man<\/a>, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.\u201d These are wild landscapes that present nature in its rawest form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The law requires the federal government to protect these areas \u201cfor the permanent good of the whole people<\/a>.\u201d Wilderness areas are found in national parks<\/a>, conservation land<\/a> overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, national forests<\/a> and U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuges<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In early May 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives began to consider allowing the sale of federal lands<\/a> in six counties in Nevada and Utah<\/a>, five of which contain wilderness areas<\/a>. Ostensibly, these sales are to promote affordable housing, but the reality is that the proposal, introduced by U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei, a Nevada Republican, is a departure from the standard process of federal land exchanges<\/a> that accommodate development in some places but protect wilderness in others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless of whether Americans visit their public lands or know when they have crossed a wilderness boundary, as environmental<\/a> historians<\/a> we believe that everyone still benefits from the existence and protection of these precious places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This belief is an idea eloquently articulated and popularized 65 years ago by the noted Western writer Wallace Stegner<\/a>. His eloquence helped launch the modern environmental movement and gave power to the idea that the nation\u2019s public lands are a fundamental part of the United States\u2019 national identity and a cornerstone of American freedom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humble origins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In 1958, Congress established the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission<\/a> to examine outdoor recreation in the U.S. in order to determine not only what Americans wanted from the outdoors, but to consider how those needs and desires might change decades into the future<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the commission\u2019s members was David E. Pesonen<\/a>, who worked at the Wildland Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. He was asked to examine wilderness and its relationship to outdoor recreation. Pesonen later became a notable environmental lawyer and leader of the Sierra Club. But at the time, Pesonen had no idea what to say about wilderness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, he knew someone who did. Pesonen had been impressed by the wild landscapes of the American West in Stegner\u2019s 1954 history \u201cBeyond the Hundredth Meridian<\/a>: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.\u201d So he wrote to Stegner, who at the time was at Stanford University, asking for help in articulating the wilderness idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stegner\u2019s response, which he said later was written in a single afternoon<\/a>, was an off-the-cuff riff on why he cared about preserving wildlands. This letter became known as the Wilderness Letter<\/a> and marked a turning point in American political and conservation history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pesonen shared the letter with the rest of the commission, which also shared it with newly installed Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. Udall found its prose to be so profound, he read it at the seventh Wilderness Conference in 1961<\/a> in San Francisco, a speech broadcast by KCBS, the local FM radio station. The Sierra Club published the letter in the record of the conference\u2019s proceedings later that year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it was not until its publication in The Washington Post on June 17, 1962, that the letter reached a national audience and captured the imagination of generations of Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Wallace Stegner, right, knew the power of American wilderness landscapes. In this photo, probably from the 1950s, he pauses with his son Page and wife, Mary, on a Yosemite National Park hiking trail. Multimedia Archives, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

An eloquent appeal<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the letter, Stegner connected the idea of wilderness to a fundamental part of American identity. He called wilderness \u201csomething that has helped form our character<\/a> and that has certainly shaped our history as a people \u2026 the challenge against which our character as a people was formed \u2026 (and) the thing that has helped to make an American different from and, until we forget it in the roar of our industrial cities, more fortunate than other men.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without wild places, he argued, the U.S. would be just like every other overindustrialized place in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the letter, Stegner expressed little concern with how wilderness might support outdoor recreation on public lands. He didn\u2019t care whether wilderness areas had once featured roads, trails, homesteads or even natural resource extraction. What he cared about was Americans\u2019 freedom to protect and enjoy these places. Stegner recognized that the freedom to protect, to restrain ourselves from consuming, was just as important as the freedom to consume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps most importantly, he wrote, wilderness was \u201can intangible and spiritual resource<\/a>,\u201d a place that gave the nation \u201cour hope and our excitement,\u201d landscapes that were \u201cgood for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without it, Stegner lamented, \u201cnever again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.\u201d To him, the nation\u2019s natural cathedrals and the vaulted ceiling of the pure blue sky are Americans\u2019 sacred spaces as much as the structures in which they worship on the weekends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stegner penned the letter during a national debate about the value of preserving wild places in the face of future development. \u201cSomething will have gone out of us as a people<\/a>,\u201d he wrote, \u201cif we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.\u201d If not protected, Stegner believed these wildlands that had helped shape American identity would fall to what he viewed as the same exploitative forces of unrestrained capitalism that had industrialized the nation for the past century. Every generation since has an obligation to protect these wild places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stegner\u2019s Wilderness Letter became a rallying cry to pass the Wilderness Act. The closing sentences of the letter are Stegner\u2019s best: \u201cWe simply need that wild country available to us<\/a>, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This phrase, \u201cthe geography of hope,\u201d is Stegner\u2019s most famous line. It has become shorthand for what wilderness means: the wildlands that defined American character on the Western frontier, the wild spaces that Americans have had the freedom to protect, and the natural places that give Americans hope for the future of this planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Death Valley National Park in California contains one of the largest protected wilderness areas in the United States. National Park Service\/E. Letterman<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

America\u2019s \u2018best idea\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Stegner returned to themes outlined in the Wilderness Letter again two decades later in his essay \u201cThe Best Idea We Ever Had: An Overview,\u201d published in Wilderness magazine in spring 1983.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing in response to the Reagan administration\u2019s efforts to reduce protection of the National Park System<\/a>, Stegner declared that the parks were \u201cAbsolutely American, absolutely democratic.\u201d He said they reflect us as a nation, at our best rather than our worst, and without them, millions of Americans\u2019 lives, his included, would have been poorer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public lands are more than just wilderness or national parks. They are places for work and play. They provide natural resources, wildlife habitat, clean air, clean water and recreational opportunities to small towns and sprawling metro areas alike. They are, as Stegner said, cures for cynicism and places of shared hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stegner\u2019s words still resonate as Americans head for their public lands and enjoy the beauty of the wild places protected by wilderness legislation this summer. With visitor numbers increasing annually and agency budgets at historic lows<\/a>, we believe it is useful to remember how precious these places are for all Americans. And we agree with Stegner that wilderness, public lands writ large, are more valuable to Americans\u2019 collective identity and expression of freedom than they are as real estate that can be sold or commodities that can be extracted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leisl Carr Childers<\/a>, Associate Professor of History, Colorado State University<\/a><\/em> and Michael Childers<\/a>, Associate Professor of History, Colorado State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leisl Carr Childers, Colorado State University and Michael Childers, Colorado State University As summer approaches, millions of Americans begin planning or taking trips to state and national parks, seeking to explore the wide range of outdoor recreational opportunities across the nation. A lot of them will head toward the nation\u2019s wilderness areas \u2013 110 million […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":39465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[14862,16393,139,16394,885,891,886,860,16395,5248,1051,2796,1864,4906,4590],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39464"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39464"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39467,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39464\/revisions\/39467"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}