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Contact Jim: jdipeso@rep.org (253) 740-2066 / 2008 Archive / 2007 Archive / 2006 Archive / 2005 Archive
That Old Wilderness Magic
August 13, 2008
That old wilderness magic was in view in Seattle a few nights ago.
Republicans and Democrats, business leaders and environmentalists, hunters and vegetarians gathered at an outdoor retailer to celebrate the Wild Sky Wilderness in the north Cascades. Earlier this year, legislation designating the 106,000-acre Wild Sky was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by a Republican president.
Just as the authors of the Wilderness Act intended, protecting the Wild Sky Wilderness was a great American cause beyond the dividing lines that crisscross American society.
Not that it was easy to accomplish. For wilderness, it never is. From the day that local activists first drew the Wild Sky’s lines on maps until the day that President Bush signed his name to the authorizing legislation, nine years elapsed.
Countless strategy meetings were held and letters to Congress were written.
Backers methodically rounded up broad and bipartisan support from business owners, mayors, city councilmen, and state legislators.
Washington’s congressional delegation either openly supported the proposal or remained quietly neutral.
Boundaries were drawn and redrawn to accommodate the concerns of timber operators, snowmobilers, horsemen, float plane operators, and Boy Scout troops.
Still, it was a close call at times. The most serious threat to the Wild Sky proposal was opposition by anti-wilderness agitators, led by then-Congressman Richard Pombo of California, chairman of the House Resources Committee (since renamed the House Natural Resources Committee).
To block the legislation, Pombo dusted off the old “purity” chestnut, raising the hackneyed argument that, because there had been logging and other human activity in the Wild Sky in years past, it did not qualify for wilderness designation.
The Wilderness Act does not require qualifying lands to be free of human imprint, only that such imprint be “substantially unnoticeable.” Nevertheless, wilderness opponents have raised the “purity” dodge repeatedly and wilderness champions have been forced to swat it down repeatedly.
None other than John Saylor, the Republican congressman who was the lead co-sponsor of the Wilderness Act, stood on the floor of the House in 1973 and angrily dismissed the “purity” doctrine as bogus.
But Pombo was swept out of office in 2006, and once he left the Capitol premises, significant opposition to the Wild Sky left with him. President Bush has not actively pushed for more wilderness designations, but he has eschewed partisanship on the issue and signed every wilderness bill presented to him. Signing Wild Sky into law brought his administration’s total to a respectable 2.45 million acres.
Bipartisan conservation of America’s wild heritage was the original vision of wilderness and that’s as it should be. Out on the trail, the land that belongs to everyone takes no notice of human politics.
On a mild August afternoon in the Wild Sky, birds twitter among the Western hemlocks and big leaf maples. The remains of the previous winter’s snow gurgle down slope in an unnamed streamlet. In the distance, ridgelines march across the sky.
With luck and wisdom, the view will be the same a thousand years from now.
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