Guest Voices: The Eastern Wilderness Act Turns 50!

The Eastern Wilderness Act Turns 50! 
by Katie Bilodeau, Legislative Director and Policy Analyst at Wilderness Watch

The Eastern Wilderness Areas Act celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Like handfuls of statutes that designated multiple Wilderness areas, this statute—which technically declares no statutory title despite being commonly known as the “Eastern Wilderness Act”—designated 15 Wildernesses and 17 Wilderness Study Areas in the eastern states to be managed as Wilderness until the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) evaluated them for Congress. The statute is remarkable, however, for the story leading up to its January 1975 passage. It emerged as law despite USFS attempts to severely limit Wilderness on our national forests and effectively end wilderness designation in the East.
The USFS attempted to limit the reach of the new National Wilderness Preservation System on national forests as soon as Congress passed the Wilderness Act. Congress had instructed the USFS in the 1964 Wilderness Act to spend that first decade reviewing and recommending acreage within national forests that Congress could preserve and designate as Wilderness. But the USFS, already entrenched in its get-out-the-cut culture of post-WWII America, had pushed back against the idea of a Wilderness System during congressional deliberation. The Wilderness Act imposed new obligations where the agency previously enjoyed discretion. In 1965, the USFS self-limited what it would recommend as Wilderness. The agency plucked the most restrictive criteria from language in the Wilderness Act, requiring any USFS wilderness recommendations to be areas “untrammeled by man,” to “retain[]its primeval character and influence,” and to be no less than 5,000 acres. Areas previously impacted in just about any way could not clear these hurdles. While that reduced potential wilderness acreage in the West, the USFS admitted these criteria excluded much of the East entirely.
Wilderness advocacy groups responded. They argued that the USFS misinterpreted the Wilderness Act, which was written forward-looking and phrased more broadly. An eligible area “generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature” and “has five thousand acres of land or is of a sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation…”. The Wilderness Act did not exclude “national forest lands predominantly of wilderness value” that may have been trammeled in the past. In effect, Congress had intended for more than what met the USFS’s “purity” test.
The debate on the USFS’s purity test landed before Congress as competing bills in the early 1970s. On one side—the legislation drafted and promoted by the USFS—was the Wild Areas Act of 1972. It invented alternative designation criteria because the bill explicitly concluded that almost no eastern areas could satisfy the 1964 Wilderness Act’s definition of “Wilderness.” Conservationists criticized this bill as codifying agency misinterpretation. They countered with a competing bill. 
The competing bill that proponents referred to as the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act would protect numerous areas in the East under the 1964 Wilderness Act. Proposed areas in this omnibus wilderness bill were delineated by local citizen groups with grassroots support. Proponents of the Eastern Wilderness Areas bill argued that the USFS’s new criteria in the Wild Areas bill was unnecessary for eastern wildlands because the Wilderness Act applied everywhere. The 1964 Wilderness Act had two standards. The first was practical and permissive, allowing areas with prior human impact to be considered for and designated as Wilderness. After Congress designated Wilderness, however, a stricter standard applied—moving forward, agencies must manage Wilderness to maintain an untrammeled (i.e., unmanipulated, uncontrolled) quality.
Idaho Senator Frank Church reinforced this view in a 1973 speech—“The Wilderness Act Applies to the East”—just days after he introduced the bill. Senator Church noted he was “deeply involved in [the Wilderness Act’s] construction and in the full debate it received before passing the Senate by an overwhelming margin,” and expressed concern that “this important law is being misinterpreted by some officials in the very agencies which have the duty and responsibility to apply it.” 
Senator Church noted that while the USFS would have everyone “believe that no lands ever subject to past human impact can qualify as wilderness…Nothing could be more contrary to the meaning and intent of the Wilderness Act.” He called out the agency for anti-wilderness maneuvering and trying to divide the Wilderness System into two, refashioning the current nationwide Wilderness System into a western one. Church repeated his previous statements that the Wilderness Act allows for the designation of formerly disturbed areas: “This is one of the great promises of the Wilderness Act. We can dedicate formerly abused areas where the primeval scene can be restored by natural forces. In this way, we can have a truly national wilderness system.” 
In rebutting the assertions that no areas in the East can meet the definition of Wilderness, Church highlighted the three eastern Wilderness areas with past land abuse (Great Gulf, NH; Shining Rock, NC; and Linville Gorge, NC) that Congress designated with the original 1964 Wilderness Act. This move, he noted, “was, and is, a standing and intentional precedent to encourage such areas to be found and designated under the act in other eastern locations.”
Ultimately, Congress chose the conservationists’ bill over the Wild Areas Act, rejecting the USFS’s unreasonable purity criteria and reinforcing the 1964 Wilderness Act’s practical guidance for designating Wilderness. Areas with past impact can become Wilderness. Once designated, however, the Wilderness Act protects from further manipulation. Untrammeled means, moving forward, nature decides. The unequivocal reinforcement of these values to prevent warping the 1964 Wilderness Act is what we—in the East and the West—owe to the “Eastern Wilderness Act.”