Martin Luther King Jr. Day (US)
On this day in 1935, Robert Sterling Yard (a National Park Service publicist), Benton MacKaye (“Father of the Appalachian Trail”), and Robert Marshall (the U.S. Forest Service’s chief of recreation and lands) formed the Wilderness Society with the goal of protecting America’s wilderness from industrial influences. Nearly 30 years later, the Wilderness Act was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The act reserved nine million acres as wilderness, “area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Since then, 104 million acres have been protected by the National Wilderness Preservation System.