Existing comment:
Wild America
"In wildness is the preservation of the world."
-- Henry David Thoreau, 1862
"Our grandchildren deserve to hear a springtime chorus of meadowlarks calling from the fenceposts, to see wave after wave of sandpipers dancing along the surf, to be amazed by nature not just in its presence, but in its multitudes."
-- The State of the Birds, 2014
On September 3, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law. This landmark legislation created a way for Congress and Americans to safeguard the country's last remaining wild spaces by designating them "wilderness areas." Today the National Wilderness Preservation System protects 110 million acres of unspoiled land and the species that thrive there. The Wilderness Act was the first in a wave of environmental reforms that swept across America in the late 1960s and 1970s. The culmination of these was the far-reaching Endangered Species Act of 1973, which offers protection to listed groups. The efforts to preserve what Roger Tory Peterson called "Wild America" stand in stark contrast to the conquering impulse that led to the demise of the passenger pigeon one hundred years ago. Thanks to Peterson and many other influential naturalists, wild America does still exist, and we need not travel to the country's remotest regions to witness it. We need only direct our gaze skyward |