[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 122 (Thursday, August 6, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8981-S8982]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 45TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WILDERNESS ACT

  Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, as founder of the Senate Wilderness and 
Public Lands Caucus, I led a Senate resolution commemorating the 
upcoming 45th anniversary of the Wilderness Act of 1964. I am delighted 
the Senate passed this resolution last night, and am very pleased that 
Senator McCain joined me in leading this effort. I also thank our other 
colleagues for their support as cosponsors: Senators Lamar Alexander, 
Evan Bayh, Michael Bennet, Barbara Boxer, Sam Brownback, Ronald Burris, 
Robert Byrd, Maria Cantwell, Benjamin Cardin, Susan Collins, Chris 
Dodd, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Judd Gregg, John Kerry, Joe 
Lieberman, Robert Menendez, Jeff Merkley, Patty Murray, Mark Udall, Tom 
Udall, George Voinovich and Ron Wyden.
  This Wilderness Act was signed into law on September 3, 1964, by 
President Lyndon B. Johnson, 7 years after the first wilderness bill 
was introduced by Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota. The final 
bill, sponsored by Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, passed the 
Senate by a vote of 73-12 on April 9, 1963, and passed the House of 
Representatives by a vote of 373-1 on July 30, 1964.
  The Wilderness Act of 1964 established a National Wilderness 
Preservation System ``to secure for the American people of present and 
future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of 
wilderness.'' The law gives Congress the authority to designate 
wilderness areas, and directs the federal land management agencies to 
review the lands under their responsibility for their wilderness 
potential.
  Under the Wilderness Act, wilderness is defined as ``an area of 
undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence 
which generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces 
of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable.'' 
The creation of a

[[Page S8982]]

national wilderness system marked an innovation in the American 
conservation movement--wilderness would be a place where our 
``management strategy'' would be to leave lands essentially 
undeveloped.
  The original Wilderness Act established 9.1 million acres of Forest 
Service land in 54 wilderness areas. The support for wilderness has 
continued through the 111th Congress with the creation of 52 new 
wilderness areas in the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009. 
Today, the wilderness system is comprised of over 109 million acres in 
over 750 wilderness areas, across 44 States, and administered by 4 
Federal agencies: the Forest Service in the U.S. Department of 
Agriculture, and the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife 
Service, and the National Park Service in the Department of the 
Interior.
  As we in this body know well, the passage and enactment of the 
Wilderness Act was a remarkable accomplishment that required steady, 
bipartisan commitment, institutional support, and strong leadership. 
The U.S. Senate was instrumental in shaping this very important law, 
and this anniversary gives us the opportunity to recognize this role.
  As a Senator from Wisconsin, I feel a special bond with this issue. 
The concept of wilderness is inextricably linked with Wisconsin. 
Wisconsin has produced great wilderness thinkers and leaders in the 
wilderness movement such as Senator Gaylord Nelson and the writer and 
conservationist Aldo Leopold, whose ``A Sand County Almanac'' helped to 
galvanize the environmental movement. Also notable is Sierra Club 
founder John Muir, whose birthday is the day before Earth Day. 
Wisconsin also produced Sigurd Olson, one of the founders of The 
Wilderness Society.
  I am privileged to hold the Senate seat held by Gaylord Nelson, a man 
for whom I have the greatest admiration and respect. He is a well-known 
and widely respected former Senator and former two-term Governor of 
Wisconsin, and the founder of Earth Day. In his later years, he devoted 
his time to the protection of wilderness by serving as a counselor to 
The Wilderness Society--an activity which was quite appropriate for 
someone who was also a cosponsor, along with former Senator Proxmire, 
of the bill that became the Wilderness Act.
  The testimony at congressional hearings and the discussion of the 
bill in the press of the day reveals Wisconsin's crucial role in the 
long and continuing American debate about our wild places, and in the 
development of the Wilderness Act. The names and ideas of John Muir, 
Sigurd Olson, and, especially, Aldo Leopold, appear time and time again 
in the legislative history.
  Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, chairman of what was then 
called the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, stated that his 
support of the wilderness system was the direct result of discussions 
he had held almost forty years before with Leopold, who was then in the 
Southwest with the Forest Service. It was Leopold who, while with the 
Forest Service, advocated the creation of a primitive area in the Gila 
National Forest in New Mexico in 1923. The Gila Primitive Area formally 
became part of the wilderness system when the Wilderness Act became 
law.
  In a statement in favor of the Wilderness Act in the New York Times, 
then-Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall discussed ecology and what 
he called ``a land ethic'' and referred to Leopold as the instigator of 
the modern wilderness movement. At a Senate hearing in 1961, David 
Brower of the Sierra Club went so far as to claim that ``no man who 
reads Leopold with an open mind will ever again, with a clear 
conscience, be able to step up and testify against the wilderness 
bill.'' For others, the ideas of Olson and Muir--particularly the idea 
that preserving wilderness is a way for us to better understand our 
country's history and the frontier experience--provided a justification 
for the wilderness system.
  I would like to remind colleagues of the words of Aldo Leopold in his 
1949 book, ``A Sand County Almanac.'' He said, ``The outstanding 
scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not the television, or 
radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who 
know the most about it can appreciate how little is known about it.''
  We still have much to learn, but this anniversary of the Wilderness 
Act reminds us how far we have come and how the commitment to public 
lands that the Senate and the Congress demonstrated 45 years ago 
continues to benefit all Americans.
  I would like to recognize the following organizations for their 
efforts to continue protecting our wild places: American Rivers, Alaska 
Wilderness League, Campaign for America's Wilderness, Earthjustice, 
Natural Resources Defense Council, Pew Environment Group, Republicans 
for Environmental Protection, Sierra Club, Southern Utah Wilderness 
Alliance, and The Wilderness Society.

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