Sutter presents on Wilderness Act

On Tuesday night, Paul Sutter, a professor at the University of Colorado, gave a presentation titled “Driven Wild: The Interwar Origins of Modern American Wilderness Advocacy.”

Sutter started the presentation with some background about the Wilderness Act. It is an act, passed on Sept. 3, 1964, which created a way for Congress to designate “wilderness areas”. The designation “wilderness area” means that no roads, vehicles or permanent structures are allowed. Activities like logging or mining are also prohibited.

There is one wilderness area in Northwest Nebraska. It is “Soldier Creek Wilderness Area” and is located near Crawford.

Next, Sutter began to delve into the history of the Wilderness Act. According to Sutter, the wilderness conservation movement began in 1916 when the U.S. National Park Service was created. This was a time when automobiles were becoming more and more available. As a result of this, more people were flocking west to visit the nation’s newly created National Parks. Highways and other infrastructure were being improved to accommodate the new rush of traffic. The National Parks and the surrounding cities embraced the newly formed relationship between wilderness and the automobile because they were gaining vast amounts of revenue from the visitors. The parks and border towns began to grow.

People visiting the national parks would park and camp wherever they wanted; not only in the parks, but also as they were traveling to the parks. This is what spurred the battle between the national parks and private landowners. In the early 1920s cities began to build free-municipal auto campgrounds. These eventually morphed into what we know as motels.

Wilderness conservationists began to raise their concerns for the land in the national parks because the tourists were driving wherever they wanted. During this time, more roads were built and national parks began building campsites within the national parks.

This sparked another interest with the wilderness conservationists because they were opposed to the infrastructure; they said it was ruining the landscape.

This was the advent of the real wilderness movement. Conservationist Bon Marshall set out to find land in America that was untouched by humans. He labeled these areas a potential wilderness.

He worked with other conservationists such as Aldo Leopold, a forester by training, to begin the framework for the Wilderness Society.

Leopold is considered the founder of the Wilderness society, which in 1964 finally passed the Wilderness Act. Many of the areas that Marshall had previously surveyed were protected under the Wilderness Act.

The Wilderness Act did not pass without controversy, but conservationists prevailed, and today we can enjoy nearly 110 million protected acres.