For a United States Wilderness Service (with teeth)

Our federal government’s concerns for Wilderness and public health are similar. Just as this nation’s health care plan for the uninsured and underinsured seems to be “don’t get sick,” the Forest Service has marginalized Wilderness advocates by failing to allocate resources and create policy that preserves Wilderness character. These managers have reduced a national Wilderness plan to the phrase “don’t preserve.” On the other hand, Michael Frome’s vision (combined with the idea of consolidating management of wild lands in the hands of one agency, a Wilderness Service) serves the health and wellness of that land through its focus on research and education.

Frome argues in For a United States Wilderness Service, “Since we pay people in government to serve mining, grazing, timber and other interests of commodity production, why not underwrite a cadre of men and women mandated to fulfill the public’s Wilderness cause?” This is wisdom. Although the transfer of public funding from the various agencies managing Wilderness today to a Wilderness Service (WS) will be fought tooth and nail by these agencies, resistance to this congressional mandate is unwarranted.

For too long, cows and airstrips have molded the landscape of Wilderness. I don’t think we know the true damage these activities have had on public land. Frome addresses this lack of consciousness, writing, the new agency “would be deeply involved in research covering ecology, economics, utilization, and human impact.” A new agency must assess the physical and spiritual damage of activities that were grandfathered into the Wilderness Act.

For too long, acts of congress have spread their jaws wider and wider in the realm of land management in order to keep up with evolving preservation ethics and still, there is no agency with a clear record of accountability to the Wilderness Act. The federal metamorphosis is illustrated well by a string of germinating agencies. In 1849 the Interior Department was created. Two agencies followed closely behind: the Forest Service in 1876 and the National Park Service in 1916. Eventually the Fish and Wildlife Service was created in 1940. These agencies share a common thread. They each arrived before the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and today manage land Congress designates as part of the Wilderness Preservation System. Yet there is another federal agency, which gives due credence to the idea that a new type of land management can begin after 1964. After all, in 1976, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, giving the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) a new set of responsibilities.

The BLM, which monitors primarily anthropocentric activities with a mission to ensure the productivity of public lands (hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, boating, hang gliding, shooting, off-highway vehicle driving, mountain biking, birding, mining, renewable and nonrenewable energy exploration, and grazing) deserves a sister agency. The American people deserve an agency that purports to represent and defend the integrity of large and “smaller tracts in urban areas still relatively untouched.” I don’t think Frome goes far enough. I’d like to read why he doesn’t, for example, envision this new independent agency administering land. Whether it is politically feasible is beside the point. We need the legislation and hearings that Frome proposes, because this ball needs to start rolling.

Part of the foundation for the four other agencies’ mismanagement of designated Wilderness is their responsibility to interests that depart from the “letter or spirit of the Wilderness Act.” The extraction industries of grazing, drilling, mining, and timber pollinate these agencies. And once the Wilderness Service Organic Act is passed, the land consolidation completed, I predict a large crown fire igniting between the WS and various agencies when wildfires are expressed on the boundaries of designated Wilderness. This has the potential of sparking a national discussion about the wildlands/urban interface that we desperately need to have. But we will need the science to inform this new debate about “the wild force of nature.” As Frome writes, “Determining how much fire can and should be allowed in a valid preservation system is a major challenge requiring extensive research and dialogue beyond current bureaucracy and politics.” I think we have a better shot at reforming the policies with a Wilderness Service that conducts the ecological studies independent of existing agencies.

When the Wilderness Act was filing through Congress, advocates of wild lands may have believed in its potential to infect agencies and their policies with “the spirit” of the capital-W. But I think that hope is unrealistic today--some Wilderness Rangers receive no formal training on management of wild lands, “fire suppression and fire use objectives…has been abdicated to fire managers,” and ranchers and pilots exist not as homo sapien visitors but as economic parasites. It’s become plain we should fight to give a new agency clear, independent responsibilities and the opportunity to defend each acre within the National Wilderness Preservation System.