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Jim: jdipeso@rep.org
(253) 740-2066 / 2009
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A Trio of Conservation Anniversaries
June 8, 2009
June
is a month’s worth of conservation anniversaries.
On June 15, Great Smoky Mountains National Park will celebrate its
diamond anniversary. More people visit the Smokies than any other
national park.
No other place in the temperate climate zone features such a
concentrated array of diverse wildlife – more than 200 types of birds,
66 mammals, 50 native fishes, 39 reptiles, 43 amphibians, more than
1,500 varieties of flowering plants, and 100 or so native tree species.
That’s what we know so far. The 10,000 species that have been
catalogued to date might be only 10 percent of the total number of
species found in the park. Volunteers who work with the All Taxa
Biodiversity Inventory offer their time helping experts to identify,
describe, and map the park’s flora and fauna. The goal is to inventory
all of the estimated 100,000 varieties of plants, animals, and assorted
microorganisms.
Nearly 1,000 species new to science have been found so far. More
surprises in the jewel of the Appalachians undoubtedly await discovery.
Ten years before the Smokies became a park, America’s first true
wilderness preserve was established 1,400 miles to the west. This month
is the 85th anniversary of the Gila Wilderness, established by the
Forest Service at the insistence of conservation visionary Aldo
Leopold.
The Gila, now covering nearly 560,000 acres of mesas, canyons, hills,
and pinon-juniper forest in southwestern New Mexico, was the seed of
our National Wilderness Preservation System, which was authorized 45
years ago by the Wilderness Act, a law that passed with thumping
bipartisan majorities.
The Wilderness Act protects mountains, forests, deserts, and wetlands
“where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man…”
Some of those untrammeled places lie within national monuments
established by presidential authority granted by the Antiquities Act,
whose 102nd anniversary we celebrate this month.
Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush have used the
Antiquities Act to set aside “objects of historic or scientific
interest” on public lands and in marine waters under U.S. control.
The Antiquities Act is not as well known as the Wilderness Act or other
conservation laws. It made possible, however, the initial protection of
places that showcase our country’s beauty and tell its many stories,
from the remotest Arctic wilderness and tropical Pacific waters to the
historic African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan.
The coincident anniversaries of the Antiquities Act, Gila Wilderness,
and Great Smoky Mountains National Park are reminders of the rich
conservation legacies that belong to every American.
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