Thank you. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be here today.
It is fitting that we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act here in New Mexico, where wilderness got its first start. The Forest Service was founded in 1905, not long after the closing of the western frontier. The wildness of the American frontier was part of what we were protecting on the national forests.
Aldo Leopold and Arthur Carhart were both Forest Service employees in those early years, and they worked tirelessly to give wild places on the national forests special protections. In 1924, acting at its own discretion, the Forest Service established the first wilderness area anywhere in the world, the Gila Wilderness here in New Mexico. In 1926, another area was designated for special protection. Today, we know it as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area on the Superior National Forest in Minnesota.
In 1939, Bob Marshall—yet another Forest Service employee—drafted the first comprehensive regulations for protecting wilderness areas. By the 1960s, the Forest Service had built a system of wilderness, wild, and primitive areas extending to 14.6 million acres. The Forest Service’s 9.1 million acres of wilderness and wild areas became the core of America’s National Wilderness Preservation System following the Wilderness Act of 1964.
Today, we stand on the shoulders of conservation giants like Arthur Carhart … like Aldo Leopold … like Bob Marshall. They had the courage to lead the early wilderness movement, and we follow in their footsteps today.
Fifty years ago, Congress established America’s National Wilderness Preservation System. The system guaranteed that all federal lands designated as wilderness will be managed under common guidelines. That led to collaboration among the four federal agencies that manage wilderness as we pursued consistent approaches and common goals.
In that same spirit, working together, we established the Interagency Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute. For 21 years now, these centers have demonstrated that no single agency can accomplish alone what we can accomplish together by collocating employees and collaborating across agencies. This model of effectiveness and efficiency was the right thing to do in 1993 … and it’s the right thing to do today as we move forward with wilderness stewardship in the 21st century.
So we have a record of success in wilderness stewardship, but we also face tremendous challenges, not only in wilderness areas, but across landscapes of all kinds.
- Climate change is gradually disrupting entire ecoregions, shifting plant and animal assemblages for generations to come. When the climate changes, many things change with it: temperature, precipitation, snowpack size, and runoff.
- Add to this population growth, land use changes, water shortages, water pollution, air pollution, invasive species, and a host of other challenges, and America’s land managers are in a whole new problem environment.
Already, we are seeing major disturbances—devastating droughts, huge wildfires, and widespread insect outbreaks. All these stresses and disturbances are affecting America’s forests and grasslands on an unprecedented scale.
And wilderness, too, is seeing the effects. Wilderness also faces special challenges, some of them involving visitor use, others involving iconic species such as bighorn sheep. The challenges are truly daunting. In 2003, the Forest Service conducted a survey of units with wilderness areas, and we found that less than 18 percent of our wilderness areas were managed to standard based on a set of 10 performance elements.
In 2004, we responded to that shortfall through our 10-Year Wilderness Challenge. The Challenge was designed to bring together line officers and wilderness managers and focus them on addressing the biggest, most pressing wilderness stewardship needs. It was a huge boost to wilderness management and an effective vehicle for engaging our partners because it provided a plan of action and funding through the National Forest Foundation.
Today, I am proud to announce that we’ve met the Challenge—that 99 percent of Forest Service wildernesses in the Challenge met the goal—that only 4 wildernesses out of 406 didn’t meet the mark. That’s a tremendous accomplishment, and I wholeheartedly thank the Forest Service employees and our partners who worked so hard to get us here. Thanks to them, the Forest Service wilderness program is strong and ready for the future.
The Interagency Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute were instrumental in that effort. Now the centers have set the stage for us as wilderness managers, working together, to realize an interagency vision of sound wilderness stewardship. The Forest Service wholeheartedly embraces the 2020 Vision.
On this 50th anniversary, we are renewing our commitment to interagency leadership so that wilderness managers and our partners and volunteers have the tools, the skills, and the science they need for wilderness to endure. I am proud to declare the Forest Service’s ongoing commitment to interagency collaboration and coordination by signing this document. I would now like to invite my colleague Dan Ashe, Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to share his observations.