Forty-one years ago I first visited Marquette on my way to embarking on the boat for Isle Royale National Park. At age 22 I had no idea the voyage would change the course of my life. No, sadly, there was no shipboard romance with a Lauren Bacall look-alike, but my encounter with Isle Royale set me on the course to my career working for preservation of a decent sampling of America’s extraordinary heritage of wilderness.That 1966 Isle Royale backpacking trip came after I, a kid from the Pacific Northwest, had been in forestry school in Ann Arbor, feeling sorry for myself for being so far from the Oregon Cascades. Yet, having trekked around the grand wilderness areas of Oregon and Washington, I was not prepared for the world-class wilderness environment I discovered on Isle Royale. That same summer I also got a look at what is now the Sylvania Wilderness near Watersmeet as well as the McCormick Wilderness.Once, in simpler times, it seemed America’s heritage of wilderness areas such as these could take care of themselves, protected simply because no one wanted to develop them. Back then, there were many blank or roadless areas on the map—but soon the blank areas began filling in. Alarmed that this trend would leave “no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition,” Congress enacted the Wilderness Act in 1964, declaring a national policy “to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.”Four decades later, Congress has extended protection under this law to many areas on our federal lands across America [to learn more, check out www.wilderness.net]. Over the years, Congress has given this special protection to the undeveloped expanses of Isle Royale and part of the Seney Wildlife Refuge, as well as to Sylvania, McCormick, and several other areas in the Upper Peninsula. These total nearly 250,000 acres—so just 2.5 percent of all the land in the U.P. is now protected as federal wilderness. Hardly a land grab! For perspective, more than 14 percent of all the land in California is protected under the Wilderness Act, the most recent areas added in a law President Bush signed in November, with broad bipartisan support in that state, including from Gov. Schwarzenegger.Sadly to me, the subject of preserving wilderness, including perhaps additional areas in the U.P., can become confused by some pure mythology. Wilderness protection does not “lock up” resources or “lock out” people. If you hear old chestnuts like that, beware; those who throw them around usually have some other motive. Sure, timber harvest and road-building is excluded from these areas (or they would cease to be wilderness), but these areas serve many other multiple use values. Consider the watershed protection value of these areas, for example. And then there is recreational use.We preserve wilderness for people and these popular areas are used in diverse ways by millions of Americans. Wilderness areas are places where you can find an increasingly rare bit of peace and quiet, beyond the end of the road, the whine of motors, and the clank of machinery. Think of these natural lands as a kind of sanctuary from the clamor of 21st century life, places where families can introduce children to nature at its most natural, even if on a walk just a short distance from the road. In wilderness, hunters and anglers find highest-quality sporting adventure in true Daniel Boone spirit.Many think of wilderness as a kind of natural cathedral, with deep spiritual values. Here you can spend an hour or a week getting reacquainted with the great wild garden of God’s original earth. Americans overwhelmingly support protecting wilderness areas for many reasons, but none more important than because we share a sense of moral responsibility to future generations to leave them some samples of that natural earth. President Teddy Roosevelt, the pioneering Republican conservationist, spoke of this when he urged Americans to conserve resources not merely for people now alive, but for “the number within the womb of time, compared to which, those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to…unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations.”When we preserve wilderness, we are choosing to restrain our tendency to sprawl across wild landscapes and use up natural resources. We are choosing instead to serve the interests of those still “within the womb of time.” Doug Scott is policy director of the Campaign for America’s Wilderness [www.leaveitwild.org] and author of The Enduring Wilderness: Protecting Our Natural Heritage through the Wilderness Act (Fulcrum). He will be giving a public talk about “Protecting Michigan’s Wild Places: Past, Present, and Future” at the Federated Women’s Clubhouse in Marquette after a social hour and book signing beginning at 7:00pm Friday, March 16th. For more information on the event, call 228-4656 Or consult the website of event’s sponsor, the upper peninsula environmental coalition, at www.upenvironment.org
