The idea of untouched wilderness is at the core of the American experience, offering opportunity for recreation and reflection, sanctuary for wildlife, and protected landscapes as a legacy for future generations. Yet, only 2.5 percent of our federal public land outside of Alaska is given this gold standard of protection—free of roads and industrial development and forever available for hiking, hun
ting, fishing, and a wide range of other recreational pursuits. Public Lands and Rivers Conservation program of The Pew Charitable Trusts focuses on achieving lasting protection for threatened wild lands, proactively working to preserve some of the nation's last, best, wild places by working with partners on the ground to convince Congress to add them to the National Wilderness Preservation System. We provide local wilderness advocates with expertise in campaign planning and implementation, public education and outreach, and assist with opinion research, communications, and advocacy. Pew campaigners partner with state coalitions and local citizen groups to support homegrown wilderness proposals in every part of the country. Because the nation’s public lands also can be safeguarded administratively through a public process that involves citizens in land management decisions, we provide our state partner groups the tools and guidance to most effectively advocate for greater protection. This unparalleled comprehensive approach to the nuts-and-bolts inventory and public-participation aspects of land management planning is a necessary tool for our partners to win better balance for these important landscapes. The federal Bureau of Land Management oversees 245 million acres of land, largely in the West and Alaska, yet only one-fifth is now safeguarded from extractive industries such as drilling and mining—far less than the U.S. Forest Service’s conservation of half its domain. The lands managed by BLM have traditionally been viewed as a trove of resources to be extracted, but that perception is shifting as Americans recognize the recreational, scenic, biological, cultural, and historical riches of these iconic lands. To keep this natural legacy alive, we work with state partners to encourage BLM to weigh the conservation values of these areas when deciding how they should be managed. One outcome of this approach has been among the Obama administration’s crowning conservation achievements—approval of a management plan for the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska that protects critical wildlife habitat. This plan for the 23-million-acre reserve exempts from oil and gas leasing 11 million acres of critical wildlife habitat—the result of extensive public input and reliance on scientific studies, protects some of America’s greatest treasures in the Arctic while allowing for measured resource development
Since 2002, Pew has partnered with state and local wilderness groups to convince Congress to create or expand 117 wilderness areas totaling nearly five million acres across 14 states and Puerto Rico. But when the nation continues to lose 6,000 acres of open space every day—more than 2 million acres each year to sprawl and development there is much more to do. Threats to these lands have never been more pervasive. From record-setting numbers of drilling permits to increasingly high-tech all-terrain vehicles pushing deeper into the backcountry, fragile natural areas are cut up by roads and machines, and habitats are squeezed by overdevelopment. While these are public lands, jointly owned by all Americans, protecting them begins in the nearby communities with the people and businesses whose way of life is most affected by what becomes of these places. That’s where Pew begins its work, at the local level with the families who drink water from wilderness watersheds and breathe clean air from local forests, in the many small towns that serve as gateways to spectacular wild places, and with the businesses that locate near protected public lands because it means a higher quality of life for their employees. We are helping local citizens from Washington to Tennessee develop wilderness proposals and work with their members of Congress to craft legislation that will one day become law. We are assisting western advocates to thoroughly inventory BLM lands and share those findings with the agency so that decision-makers can more easily implement policies that will conserve more land than they open for development. Pew’s U.S. Public Lands program gives voice to the millions of Americans who take pride in knowing that some wild places will endure forever.
