“Rather than weakening the protections that the Wilderness Act provides, we could try to reinvigorate a spirit of humility toward wilderness. We could practice restraint, understanding that designated wildernesses have deep values beyond our human uses of them.
Must we get everything we want in the outdoors?“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed …” — Wallace Stegner, now celebrating its 60th birthday, was to set aside a small proportion of public land in America from human intrusion. Some places, the founders said, deserved to be free from motorized, mechanized and other intrusions to protect wildlife and wild lands.
The protections of the Wilderness Act include a ban on logging, mining, roads, buildings, structures and installations, mechanized and motorized equipment and more. Its authors sought to secure for the American people “an enduring resource of wilderness” to protect places not manipulated by modern society, where the ecological and evolutionary forces of nature could continue to play out mostly unimpeded.
Unfortunately, bikers in the Sustainable Trails Coalition are not the only recreational interest group that wants to weaken the Wilderness Act to. Some, for example, are pushing Congress to allow climbers to damage wilderness rock faces by pounding in permanent bolts and pitons rather than using only removable climbing aids. In addition,want exemptions from the ban in wilderness on commercial trail racing.
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