Wilderness turns 40.

Byline: The Register-Guard

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law 40 years ago, he offered this exhortation: "If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."

So it is we remember a visionary president and Congress who understood the importance of protecting our pristine wilds. So it is that we can savor these lands, which are still as stunningly beautiful and untouched as they were four decades ago. They remain sacred places where Americans can escape the noise, clutter and mechanized mania of modern society - places where our spirits can be refreshed and souls restored.

The Wilderness Act not only set aside these lands but preserved them in a different manner from national parks, which incorporate visitor centers, campgrounds and paved roads, or national forests, where logging and mining operations are common. The act defines wilderness as land that is to remain "untrammeled," a little-used word that means unconfined, unshackled and unrestrained.

In approving the act, Congress designated 9 million acres as wilderness. Since then, the inventory has grown to nearly 106 million acres - 105,695,176 to be exact - across 44 states.

Since the act was signed into law, most presidents and Congresses have carried the wilderness torch with an appropriate sense of stewardship, regardless of political leanings. President Reagan owns the record for signing the most laws designating new wildernesses - 43 in total. President Carter added the most land - more than 66 million acres, the bulk of it in Alaska.

President George W. Bush ranks a distant last place, having signed a mere four wilderness bills so far. That's hardly surprising from a president who not only has shown little interest in wilderness expansion, but has worked to undermine a Clinton-era roadless rule that protects nearly 60 million acres of national forests from logging, mining and oil and gas development.

While the nation's supply of wilderness has increased since 1964, more is needed. Less than 5 percent of U.S. land is preserved as wilderness, more than half of that in Alaska. Oregon, in particular, needs additional wilderness. While it currently has 2.3 million acres of wilderness, that represents only 3.6 percent of federally owned lands in the state. By contrast, 13 percent of federal lands in Washington is designated as wilderness. The figure is 10 percent in California.

Two decades have passed since the last major wilderness expansion in this state. The last came in 1984 when Reagan signed the Oregon Wilderness Act, which gave permanent protection to 930,000 acres. Since then, wilderness designations have come in drips and drabs, such as the Opal Creek area east of Salem and Steens Mountain south of Burns.

Two years ago, Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer proposed a 400,000-acre addition that died for lack of bipartisan support. Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden, another Democrat, proposed adding 160,000 acres in the Mount Hood National Forest. But so far, Wyden's proposal has met with a disappointingly lukewarm response from his Republican counterpart, Sen. Gordon Smith, who has yet to demonstrate his predecessor Mark Hatfield's passion for wilderness.

The job of protecting wilderness is far from done. Regrettably, it appears Oregon and the rest of the nation will have to wait for a different president, one with a passion for serving the nation's wild soul instead of industry interests, before the work begins again in earnest.