The Wilderness Act: A 'Down Payment on Forever'

Every once in awhile, Congress outdoes itself and gets something really right.

One of those somethings is the Wilderness Act of 1964, whose 45th anniversary was celebrated September 3.

The product of both extraordinary vision and practical politics, the Wilderness Act is the "gold standard" of conservation.

The Wilderness Act also is the gold standard of legislative craftsmanship. The law gives ordinary citizens across the country the tools to fight bottom-up campaigns to protect treasured places - forests and deserts, mountains and marshes, spare tundra and verdant tropics.

The passage of time shows that ordinary citizens have put those tools to spectacularly good use. The Wilderness Act included 54 initial wilderness areas covering 9.1 million acres. Today, 45 years later, there are 756 wilderness areas covering nearly 110 million acres in 44 states and Puerto Rico - nearly 5 percent of America's total land area.

Tthat achievement is a down payment on forever. There are lots more places deserving of wilderness designation - the Tumacacori Highlands in Arizona, the Scotchman Peaks in Montana, the Cheyenne River Valley in South Dakota, to name a few.

And when they are designated, the protection will last. One of the strokes of brilliance that went into writing the Wilderness Act was hardwiring preservation into the statute books.

Passing laws is hard because the Constitution's writers made it hard. The Founders wanted lawmakers to discuss and deliberate, to get the wording right. A consequence of making passage of laws difficult is that undoing passage of laws is equally difficult.

The Wilderness Act's supporters knew that. The boundaries of designated wilderness areas are written into law. The lines on the map cannot be moved so much as a foot without an act of Congress, shielding wilderness areas from bureaucratic whims and transitory political pressures.

In an era of rabid partisanship, it's also worth remembering that wilderness protection is largely bipartisan. The Wilderness Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. When it was first introduced in 1956, its Senate sponsor was Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota Democrat who was the liberal icon of Congress before the late Edward Kennedy assumed that role. The sponsor in the House was John Saylor, a Pennsylvania Republican who lived out the true meaning of conservatism through his combative campaigns to protect America's wild heritage, which Saylor called "buffers for the human spirit."