Taming the wilderness.

When Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act in 1964 it was the first law of its kind in the world. It was a progressive notion, indeed, for an industrious, civilized country to protect large areas of roadless, resource-rich land for the sole purpose of keeping it uncivilized and, theoretically, as wild as when Europeans still believed the Earth was flat.

Upon its creation 30 years ago, the Act's National Wilderness Preservation System designated about nine million acres of federal land as Wilderness. Since then, some 87 million acres have been added to bring the total to 96 million acres - roughly four percent of all U.S. lands (two percent in Alaska). Like precious jewels locked in a safe, these last remnants of undeveloped backcountry are forever to remain places "where the Earth and its community are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor."

The law seems clear-no human development is allowed. But the reality has been different. Today, due to grandfather clauses written into the Act by Congress and to activities that ignore the law, wilderness areas are being trammeled by people, cows, military jets and other forms of human intrusion. As more wilderness bills for Idaho, Montana and California are bantered about in Congress, the issue is no longer just how much land will be chosen, but whether it will remain true wilderness.

"In 1964 when the Wilderness Act was passed, I doubt the thought crossed the mind of any [Senate Interior] committee member that it would be necessary for Congress to pass additional legislation to protect designated wilderness areas because the land managers failed to manage these lands in accordance with the letter and spirit of the law," said former U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson at a Senate committee hearing in 1992. "Protecting the integrity of the Wilderness system simply hasn't been a top priority of the agencies responsible for the system." The U.S. Forest Service (USFS), National Park Service (NPS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are charged with protecting wilderness areas. But grassroots conservation groups often end up fighting what they consider to be unsound or apathetic management practices by these same agencies.

"People think that, once land is designated wilderness, they can move on to something else, but that's usually not the case," says Jim Norton, Southwest regional director for The Wilderness Society. Take, for instance, New Mexico's Gila Wilderness - the first area designated under the Wilderness Act - and the adjoining Aldo Leopold Wilderness, named for the founding father of wilderness preservation. The stream beds and adjacent riparian areas in these sanctuaries have been so overgrazed by cattle that Norton says "a whole biotic community is gone. Originally, there was a beautiful cottonwood and willow forest along the streambeds," he says, "but the cows have literally eaten away all streamside vegetation down to the bare soil. Now there's just a few old cottonwoods left, and when they're gone there will be nothing because the cows eat all the seeds."

Back when these areas were selected as wilderness in the Gila National Forest, a private rancher held a federal grazing permit to the land, so Congress decided to let the cows stay as long as they didn't "have an adverse impact on wilderness values." But 1,000 hungry cattle and wilderness just don't mix. The Wilderness Society and a group called Gila Watch based in Silver City, New Mexico have tried for years to get the Forest Service to admit that the Gila and Aldo Leopold Wilderness areas are severely damaged from decades of overgrazing and should no longer support cattle. The agency has offered to bulldoze enough trees to create 37 new stock watering ponds and build 28 miles of fence to keep the cows out of the riparian areas. But Norton replies, "The Forest Service wants to move the mess around instead of getting the cows out of the wilderness." Gila Watch stalled the plan last year by threatening to sue the Forest Service if it didn't first conduct an Environmental Impact Study (EIS). But the outcome of this process remains uncertain.

Meanwhile, in Idaho's Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the group Wilderness Watch from Missoula, Montana has won a battle against the decades-old tradition of letting commercial outfitters maintain permanent camps. Unlike other wilderness areas where outfitters must pack in all their equipment, the Frank Church charged them a nominal annual fee of $100 to alter the wilderness in a variety of unnatural ways to accommodate their business. The camps were like little dude ranches, complete with horse corrals, piped water systems, tent frames, wood cook stoves and shacks full of gear.

Wilderness Watch filed suit over these camps. A U.S. district judge ruled in the summer of 1993 that the Forest Service was, indeed, violating the Wilderness Act and that all permanent outfitter structures in Frank Church must be removed. "We got exactly what we wanted out of the court case," says Wilderness Watch executive director Jim Dayton. "Now the outfitters will have to carry everything in and out of the wilderness just like all other visitors."

But an even bigger issue is getting Idaho's federal legislators to agree on designating more wilderness areas. With some nine million acres of undeveloped national forest land, Idaho has more unprotected wilderness than any state besides Alaska. Although Idaho Representative Larry LaRocco is rallying political support for a proposed wilderness bill, he has been thwarted so far by the timber industry and by Idaho Senator Larry Craig.

In Montana the tables are reversed. Representative Pat Williams has proposed a wilderness bill that some environmentalists feel would be better than no bill at all: Out of six million acres currently semi-protected as Wilderness Study Areas, only 1.5 acres would be designated as wilderness, leaving the rest open to development.

The Colorado Wilderness Bill finally passed through Congress last year after more than a decade of debate, but over half of the 600,000 acres of the new wilderness now face proposed military overflights. The Colorado Air National Guard wants more airspace for low-level training flights over the Greenhorn Mountain and Sangre de Cristo wilderness areas, as well as along the border of Great Sand Dunes National Monument. They would double the number of fighter jets now flying over the region, and in some areas, allow the noisy planes to cruise at treetop level.

Several citizens' groups are fighting the plan, saying that the loud, low-flying jets are unnerving to humans, damaging to wildlife, and they could trigger avalanches. Colorado Governor Roy Romer has objected to the overflight proposal, but the Guard hasn't backed down. "You don't throw something out because politicians don't like it," Guard spokesman Steve Wolf told the Rocky Mountain News. "We can't stop a federal process every time someone has a beef."

Overflights by military and commercial aircraft are also at issue in the proposed California Desert Protection Act, which would designate four million acres of BLM land in the Mojave and Death Valley areas as wilderness. Described by former Earth First! leader Dave Foreman as "the strongest wilderness bill ever in the lower 48 states," the Act could be voted into law this year. But there will be debates about overflights and the use of off-road vehicles (ORVs), which are currently allowed in Wilderness Study Areas, but would become illegal in a designated Wilderness. Given the history of political deal-making over previous wilderness bills, the supporters of the California Desert Protection Act may make some compromises to keep the legislation from dying - sort of like cutting off a person's leg to save their life. But once the deal is made, the wilderness still must be protected.

"Wilderness needs to be made a priority within the federal land management agencies - there needs to be education and research and money devoted to it, just like the agencies' other programs," says Jay Watson of The Wilderness Society. "This is all we have left - these are the last vestiges of the American landscape that are undeveloped."