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Air Resource Management Program - Wilderness Act

Wilderness refers to areas formally protected by the 1964 Wilderness Act or its extension to eastern lands by the 1975 Eastern Wilderness Act and to the public domain by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (PDF, 1.19 MB). See a map of all wilderness areas.

The 1964 Wilderness Act identified management goals for all wilderness areas. It requires wilderness areas to be administered “for the use of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness.” The National Forest System wilderness implementing regulations state, “Wilderness Resources shall be managed to promote, perpetuate, and, where necessary, restore the wilderness character of the land.”

The Forest Service manages 154 national forests, 20 national grasslands, and 1 national prairie for a total of 193 million acres of federal land in the National Forest System. Since the Wilderness Act of 1964 was signed into law, Congress has designated 37 million acres of National Forest System land as wilderness. Learn more about wilderness.

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Wilderness Character Monitoring

The central mandate of the Wilderness Act is to preserve wilderness character. Wilderness character monitoring aims to assess the trend in wilderness character over time to demonstrate accountability for the legal and policy mandates to preserve wilderness character. Wilderness character is a holistic concept based on the interaction of biophysical environments primarily free from modern human manipulation and impact, personal experiences in natural environments relatively free from the encumbrances and signs of modern society, and symbolic meanings of humility, restraint, and interdependence that inspire human connection with nature. To learn more, read the Wilderness Character Monitoring Technical Guide.

Wilderness character monitoring divides wilderness character into elements in a hierarchical framework (page 28).

  • Air quality is an important component of evaluating the Natural Quality of wilderness character. See Table 1.3.1 for a summary of monitoring question, indicators, measures, and measure types (page 79).

There are several key implementation attributes for each measure, including local and national tasks (page 347).

Wilderness Stewardship Performance

The Forest Service’s primary responsibility under the Wilderness Act is to preserve wilderness character. The Wilderness Stewardship Performance framework tracks how well the agency meets baseline performance elements for preserving wilderness character. This is accomplished by tracking the number of wilderness areas meeting these elements. To learn more, read the Wilderness Stewardship Performance Guidebook.

For the Air Quality Values Element, the impact of air pollution on wilderness resources has been monitored and evaluated to inform relevant environmental analyses and permitting processes. See the Scoring and Deliverables Table for a summary (page 25).

Wilderness Air Quality Values include visibility, ozone, lichen, and surface water quality. See page 26 for more information on data and supporting resources.

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