Despite the challenges and problems facing park wilderness in the twenty-first century, the level of protection for nature in a national park with a congressionally designated wilderness is as high as protection provided for any landscape in the world. This generalization is defensible when one looks at the national park wilderness situation as a whole. Some argue that defining a chainsaw as an appropriate tool in a park wilderness is far from ideal. There is no denying that the Park Service should have wilderness management plans in place for its wilderness areas. Nor can it be claimed that any park wilderness is entirely protected from the effects of activities beyond the park boundaries. The National Park Service can and must do a better job of managing its wilderness. Still, in a world of burgeoning human population and technological power, national park wilderness is as “natural” as any place can be.
The story told here offers several insights into this achievement. Historians have made much of the fact that wilderness preservation was not the driving force behind the original national park idea. Yet from the beginning there were those who thought that parks should protect wild nature. Beginning with Yellowstone National Park, many visitors traveled to national parks to enjoy and seek inspiration and insight into nature from the experience of wildness, and many thought the primary purpose of the parks should be to protect that wildness. The seed of the wilderness preservation movement was planted before the first national park appeared, and national parks proved fertile ground in which the idea could grow.
The politics and bureaucratization of conservation in the early twentieth century fertilized the soil of wilderness preservation, adding a healthy dose of competition over the idea of wilderness to the emerging seedling. Arthur Carhart, Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, and Bob Marshall—all from outside the National Park Service—cultivated the idea of wilderness. Bureaucratic competition gave impetus to exploration of it, and gradually the idea that wild nature could and should be given long-term protection gained strength. People and organizations often talked around each other about the idea, bandying about terms like “wilderness” and “primitive” and “primeval” in their efforts to claim the wilderness as their own. Wilderness has always meant different things to different people. Gradually a consensus on what “wilderness” should be emerged, at least sufficient to result in the political will to legalize the designation. The Park Service played a role throughout this process, reluctantly at times. From its beginning, people in the agency believed in the wilderness idea as a goal of national parks, though they might not have been in the leadership of the wilderness preservation movement. The most prominent wilderness philosophers have not come from the Park Service, yet many dedicated park professionals have worked behind the scenes, within the organization, to further the wilderness idea. John Roberts White, George Wright, Harold Bryant, Lowell Sumner, Tom Vint, Ted Swem, John Kauffmann, Boyd Evison, and Wes Henry are a few of the Park Service heroes of this story. Over the years, many were drawn to the ranks of the Park Service by their attraction to wild nature, and most spent their careers quietly working to protect wilderness while doing all the other work that rangers, interpreters, managers, scientists, and landscape architects must do. Collectively they met the recreational needs of the American public while maintaining the wilderness quality of much of the national park system.
Conservationists have always been critics of the Park Service and also often its friend and advocate. Conservationists are idealists while government agents are of necessity less so. Public servants have multiple constituencies to serve. Throughout the park wilderness story, conservationists pushed the Park Service to be more protective of the parks they—the conservationists—were usually instrumental in bringing under Park Service stewardship. Since conservationists had fought the hard political fight to achieve the park, they had an interest in its management. They were not always as sympathetic to the service's political and bureaucratic constraints and difficulties as they might have been. A cursory reading of park and wilderness history and of the conservation archives yields the impression that the Park Service was opposed to wilderness, and this is not the case. Sometimes it was complacent about its role. At other times it was confused, and often its priorities were skewed in other (some would say wrong) directions, but it always attempted to hew to its mandate to “leave unimpaired” the resources in its care. If it often failed at this task, it was because the world changed faster than it could, and it was always subject to political pressures from above. This is not an excuse for its less than stellar performance on the wilderness front but an explanation of it.
Sometimes the Park Service leadership had legitimate reasons for what seemed its anti-wilderness stance. Conrad Wirth's initial rejection of the Wilderness Act made sense. He was rightly concerned that the politics of wilderness preservation might threaten protections already provided by the Organic Act. But that was not his principal concern, and he was disingenuous in his claims that it was. What he and many others were concerned about was the loss of agency autonomy, the lessening of bureaucratic discretion and power that would come with congressional wilderness mandates. He and his Park Service colleagues honestly believed that they knew, from their years of professional experience, what was right for the national park system. Politicians and conservationists should not, they thought, dictate to them how they should manage the lands under their care. When Howard Zahniser responded to Wirth's legitimate concerns, the director could not bring himself to soften his resistance.
As one studies the history of the Wilderness Act and of ANILCA, admiration grows for the stalwarts who, wherever they fell on the issues, worked with incredible dedication toward their goals. Fortunately, in the opinion of this author, some of the most intelligent and persistent of these stalwarts were on the side of wilderness preservation. Some were in the Park Service and many were not, but together they prevailed in a high-stakes fight for a part of the American heritage that was at very great risk. This fight continues.
At the end of this story new challenges to national park wilderness are appearing, and they are very different than in earlier periods. It seems likely that all large, wild national parklands in the United States have been designated as national parks. Few new national parks, wild or otherwise, seem in the offing. A few major national parks still lack action on wilderness recommendations, as at Yellowstone, Glacier, and Grand Canyon. There are many conventional wilderness battles yet to be decided. The new challenges are conceptual. Can there be different types of wilderness that move away from the romantic ideals of “untrammeled” wilderness so dear to the hearts of Howard Zahniser and, before him, Robert Sterling Yard and John Muir? Can measures to protect wilderness values be achieved outside wilderness boundaries when those boundaries fail to protect the values? The park wilderness story so far suggests that the idea will continue to evolve. As the human population grows, demand to bring all natural resources into the marketplace will increase. The struggle over parks and wilderness will continue, and the National Park Service will be in the middle of it. No one can predict how this struggle will turn out, but if there are more wilderness advocates in the mold of Muir, Yard, and Zahniser in that future in alliance with park people like White, Sumner, Swem, and Evison, then there will be park wilderness for many generations of Americans to enjoy.