Lake Tahoe event celebrates 50th anniversary of 1964 National Wilderness Preservation Act
Submitted by editor on Fri, 08/22/2014 - 10:22am
Attendees of the Valhalla Art, Music and Theater Festival at Lake Tahoe learn how to use a cross-cut saw, the primary tool used today to keep trails open and accessible in the Wilderness. The event celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the 1964 National Wilderness Preservation Act.
U.S. Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit staff provided saws, logs and gloves and guided over 50 participants of all ages as they cut through a 10-inch log and received the souvenir slice branded with the 50th Wilderness Anniversary logo.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 was written by Howard Zahniser of The Wilderness Society. It created the legal definition of wilderness in the United States, and protected 9.1 million acres of federal land. The result of a long effort to protect federal wilderness and to create a formal mechanism for designating wilderness, the Wilderness Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3, 1964 after more than 60 drafts and eight years of work.
When Johnson signed the act, he made the following statement: "If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."
The Wilderness Act is well known for its succinct and poetic definition of wilderness:
“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
When Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964, it created the National Wilderness Preservation System. The initial statutory wilderness areas, designated in the Act, comprised 9.1 million acres of national forest wilderness areas in the United States of America previously protected by administrative orders. The current amount of areas designated by the NWPS as wilderness totals 757 areas encompassing 109.5 million acres of federally owned land in 44 states and Puerto Rico (5 percent of the land in the United States.)
