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Sunday, September 19, 1999
Protection of Wilderness Areas Started in State
By Mike Taugher
Journal Staff Writer
The idea of wilderness has always been a part of the human psyche.
To the ancients, the untamed landscape held terror.
And for the eons that followed, wilderness was a place to be feared or conquered.
But it was in New Mexico 75 years ago that the idea of wilderness took a dramatic turn -- it became a place to be treasured and preserved.
It was at the urging of Aldo Leopold -- who during the span of a remarkable career was a writer, ranger, ecologist and head of the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce -- that the U.S. Forest Service designated the Gila Wilderness as the world's first officially protected wilderness area.
That was in 1924. Forty years later, Congress opened the way for more wilderness areas to be officially protected with passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. There now are about 103 million acres of federal land preserved as wilderness in the country -- more than half of that in Alaska.
In New Mexico, about 1.6 million acres -- or about 2 percent of the state's land area -- have been designated as wilderness.
Wilderness activists say New Mexico's wilderness area should be roughly doubled. And they say the time is right to campaign for an expansion.
"Wilderness is an American idea," said Bob Howard, chairman of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance. "It was first done in America, and it was first done in New Mexico, which I think we ought to be proud of."
The American West's wilderness areas were mostly selected for their scenic value. Many of those "ice and rock" wilderness areas also were relatively inaccessible or not commercially valuable, according to wilderness advocates. In other words, these were the places that were not only pretty, but were also likely not to be valuable to loggers, miners and ranchers.
Now, however, wilderness advocates say there are other reasons to preserve land, including less scenic, more accessible lands.
But there are opponents to new wilderness designations. Organizations representing ranchers, loggers and miners say designating new wilderness would take scarce land out of production.
And in recent years, others, including rock-climbers and off-road vehicle enthusiasts, have spoken out against wilderness areas.
It is political opposition from those groups that could be the most formidable obstacle to new wilderness designations in the years to come.
In recent decades, scientists have begun to realize the importance of preserving more varied biotic communities. They have called for preservation not just of alpine tundra ecosystems, but also less glamorous desert and range ecosystems -- places that might host plants that could become important to researchers trying to develop life-saving drugs, for example.
And some scientists have also begun to take seriously the relationship between landscape size and the ability to preserve biological diversity. The key, according to the theory of island biogeography, is to protect landscapes big enough to provide habitat for healthy populations of large predators, which in turn regulate the distribution of other plants and animals.
"Scientists now have pretty definitive proof that we can't have a healthy (Earth) unless we have a lot more wilderness than we already have," Howard said.
The New Mexico Wilderness Alliance is in the process of conducting an extensive inventory of New Mexico land, looking for places that are still relatively untrammeled and that might be worth wilderness protection.
That inventory is likely to take a couple of years to complete, Howard said. He predicts it will result in a recommendation to roughly double New Mexico's wilderness acreage.
Then, Howard said, the alliance would try to get federal legislation to designate those places as wilderness.
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