Wilderness Act of September 3,

¶ … Wilderness Act of September 3, 1964. Specifically it will discuss the Act's benefits to wildland recreation and the costs of the Act. The Wilderness Act of 1964, often referred to as simply the "Wilderness Act," was a sweeping act that created the National Wilderness Preservation System and helped raise American awareness regarding the nation's parks and wildlands. Maintaining and managing these wilderness areas can be challenging, but they benefit the public in many ways, and ensure Americans will always have some wild places left to enjoy, discover, and treasure.

The Wilderness Act created a new way of preserving lands throughout the nation, and has created millions of acres of new, protected wilderness. Managing our recreational wildlands offers a multitude of benefits. First, it preserves wild areas, endangered areas, and rare plants and wildlife located in those areas. Next, there are a myriad of recreational opportunities available in the nation's wilderness areas, from hiking and bird watching to boating, camping, and many other outdoor activities. Most of these areas are protected from development, but they can still sustain light recreational uses, and they provide an outlet for Americans to get out and enjoy the "great outdoors."

What may be even more important is how wilderness areas are created. Wildland managers can recommend wilderness areas to Congress, and often wildland management groups, such as the U.S. Forest Service or the National Park Service work together to create recommendations for areas they are already familiar with. Because the managing agencies manage each wilderness area, rather than a separate wilderness management group, the agencies are already familiar with the area, and they know why it should be protected from development and remain a wilderness. Since only Congress can designate a wilderness area, it is imperative that those who recommend wilderness lands for inclusion understand the merits of designating wilderness, and those who manage wildlands understand the nuances of the lands around them, and what makes them uniquely qualified to become a wilderness area.

Another positive aspect for managers of these wilderness areas is the many benefits the wilderness creates, and not just for the public. For example, designated wilderness areas are a treasure trove of scientific study, and the studies conducted there give information vital for protecting our ecosystems in the future. They provide educational benefits, as well, teaching the public about the positives of maintaining wilderness areas, and even providing health benefits such as clean air, water, and other ecological benefits for people and the animal world. Creating wilderness areas that the public can enjoy in their wild states has helped recreational managers share the wonder of the wildlands with the public, and has made educating the public a little easier. When the public experience the wilderness, they tend to appreciate it more, and want to take care of it, as well, and that makes recreational managers jobs just a little bit easier.

The negatives of the Act can be catalogued as difficulties in administration, designation, and management of these wild areas. For example, wilderness areas are designated inside existing public lands, so they do not create new wildland areas; they simply change the designation of existing land. This creates additional management issues for wilderness areas, including ensuring that the public does not overuse the areas, and ensuring no improvements or roads are added to the area. They also have to monitor items such as air quality in wilderness areas, and sometimes, this can place an additional burden on management staff in the managing agency.

Of course, a new designation created many more management burdens for wildlife managers. For example, management must consistently monitor the impact recreation has on areas of the wilderness, and decide whether to close those areas to recreation if it seems they are being overused. One wilderness management expert notes, "Campsite impact assessments and monitoring methods range from photographic approaches to condition class approaches to a more intensive quantitative measurement of multi-parameters" (Glidden, 2005, p. 1). Managers had to develop methodologies to measure impacts of different areas, and staff must be able to implement these methodologies consistently. There are also many other assessments and needs programs that must be managed throughout the area. This means additional management and in-field staff, and it also means that to the public, their recreational opportunities may alter from time to time in specific wilderness environments.

If too many people use areas of a wilderness, it could permanently damage the fragile ecosystem of the area, and so, that area may be closed to visitors, which negatively affects anyone who utilized the area for recreation, and now cannot. In addition, in redesignating these public lands as wilderness areas, it effectively removed some recreational opportunities from these areas, because motorized vehicles, concessions, and roads are banned in almost all wilderness areas (except for some exceptions in Alaska).

Finally, new methods of maintenance, regeneration, and needs assessment had to be developed for these areas, and guidelines had to be developed to help manage an entire new type of federal lands, split between the four agencies who maintain federal lands. (the four agencies are the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife.) the Wilderness Act sets out many guidelines, but the agencies had to actually develop the plans and methods used to analyze and manage their specific wilderness areas, and this has been an ongoing challenge to these agencies.