Boulder River, Greater Yellowstone. Photo: Jeffrey St Clair.
The great purpose is to set aside a reasonable part of the vanishing wilderness, to make certain that generations of Americans yet unborn will know what it is to experience life on undeveloped, unoccupied land in the same form and character as the Creator fashioned it… It is a great spiritual experience… Unless we preserve some opportunity for future generations to have the same experience, we shall have dishonored our trust.
Frank Forrester Church III (1924 – 1984; Idaho’s Senator from 1957 to 1981)
Wilderness landscapes face overwhelming physical threats from extractive industries, and other settler-colonialist enterprise. Domestication colonizes the soul by destroying the solitude needed to experience the divinity of Mother Nature.
Idaho and Montana are blessed with more “inventoried roadless areas” on public lands than all other western states because they escaped the “Omnibus Wilderness bills” of the 1980s. Each state, except Idaho and Montana, “released” (liquidated) over 80% of their potential for ruling class wealth accumulation during the Reagan era. The bumper-stickers proudly read: “We’re selling our children’s inheritance.”
Millions of wilderness acres were liquidated, lost. In the Northern Rockies region our state congressional delegations tallied the worst environmental voting record in the nation – worse than Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana combined. From the ashes of “Omnibus” hell, a way forward emerged, one that honored that generational “wilderness trust” Sen. Frank Church and Montana’s Sen. Lee Metcalf had championed.
In Montana and Idaho, grassroots wilderness activists joined forces with world-class conservation biologists Frank and John Craighead and Lee Metzgar, to create a revolutionary, holistic ecosystem approach to protecting large mountainous public landscapes to recover wide-roaming mammals like grizzlies and wild rivers for migratory bull trout. The vision of a “Wild Rockies” bioregion was articulated, studied, debated and mapped.
Mike Bader and others crafted statutory language, preparing the legislative replacement for the dysfunctional state-by-state wilderness paradigm. There is a rich history of wilderness-ecosystem advocacy that most of today’s conservation “influencers” (paid actors) are simply unaware of. In their ignorance they regurgitate the same nonsensical narratives that doomed wilderness in California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming in the 1980s.
Organizations like The Wilderness Society, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Forever Wild,Defenders of Wildlife, National Wildlife Assn., and others sold their souls to the devil for a few shekels. They continue to lobby for bills that protect less than 20% of the same de facto wilderness they all rallied 100% to protect under the 2001 “Clinton Roadless Rule.” Agents of the “bloodline” colonizing class of land thieves, all.
The Wild Rockies bioregion is a significant remnant of our global and national wildlands heritage. These wild ecosystems contain the largest block of wilderness lands in the U.S. outside of Alaska.
To preserve the ecological integrity of the Northern Rockies ecosystem, The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) designates as wilderness over 6 million acres of wilderness in Montana, 9 million acres of wilderness in Idaho, 5 million acres of wilderness in Wyoming, 750,000 acres in eastern Oregon, and 500,000 acres in eastern Washington – all on federal public land. In addition, NREPA will protect over 3 million wilderness acres in Yellowstone, Glacier and Grand Teton National Parks.
“End wilderness colonization; 100% of de facto wilderness needs Wilderness Act protection now,” said Alliance for the Wild Rockies director Mike Garrity.
NREPA designates all the remaining roadless lands in the Northern Rockies as wilderness, the strongest enduring protection the federal government can confer on public lands.
More information about S. 1531 can be found at: wildrockies.org. Contact your members of Congress and urge them to cosponsor and vote for NREPA.
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