P3-Vol 2.No3 Dec 96 - International Journal of Wilderness

EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION
WILDNESS AND WILDERNESS IN THE
NORTHEASTERN UNITED STATES—
Challenge for the Coming Century
BY LLOYD C. IRLAND
[Editor’s Note: Wilderness policymakers and environmentalists have struggled over wilderness designation
in the East for several decades. While lands in the East generally have been impacted by settlement and
development, many are in advanced stages of recovery on a path toward naturalness. Whether such lands
ultimately could fit in the wilderness system, or could be better protected under some other designation, will
be an important issue for debate.
In this article Lloyd Irland presents data on wilderness and natural area opportunities in the East with a
proposal about how the protection of wilderness values might be extended. IJW looks forward to reader
comments on his proposals about this timely issue. —John C. Hendee]
Abstract: In the northeast part of the United States (New England plus New York,
New Jersey, and Pennsylvania), centuries of cutting, farming, and development
have virtually eliminated virgin landscapes from the region. Of the region’s 100
million acres, 15% of the rural land is being farmed. Only 12% of the forest land is
publicly owned, so wider efforts to retain wildness and protect biodiversity face
severe challenges. While there is little true wilderness, about five million acres (5%
of the land) would fit in a more loosely defined “wild forest.” I propose a long-term
program of cooperative Landscape Management Areas (LMAs) that can retain
important wildness and biodiversity values with lower cost and less political polarization
than large acquisition programs. This program would augment a 50%
increase in publicly owned wild forest, including some true wilderness. Managing
motorized recreation poses a major social challenge to the region’s wilderness
community, because motorized uses are well established in most existing and
potential wild forest units.
S
INCE THE DAYS OF THOREAU, NORTHEAST-
ERNERS have appreciated wild forest landscapes. They
pushed for state forests and parks as early as the 1880s
with the citizen-led effort to create the Adirondack Park
(Nash 1982; Graham 1978). Local citizens pressed for federal
acquisition of land in the White Mountain National
Forest. Maine contains a splendid example of a privately
created wilderness: Baxter State Park. The few remaining
scraps of virgin forest are mostly outside the region’s large,
formally designated wilderness areas (see Table 1). Supportive
as they have been of public land systems, Northeasterners
have not seen fit, outside of the Adirondacks, to allocate
large areas of public land to wilderness preservation. This is
partly because motorized river and trail uses are well established
and vigorously defended almost everywhere. Today,
about 12% of the region’s forest land is publicly owned.
The forest has regrown so completely that few hikers
realize that many a trail side vista was once farmed, abusively
cut, or burned. Regionwide, 17 million acres of cleared
land returned to forest from 1909 to 1992—an area equal to
Maine’s present forest area. Spreading forests and successful
public programs have led to rebounding populations of eagle,
Article author Lloyd C. Irland.
fish, bear, and other animals traditionally associated with wild
country. Deer, once virtually eradicated in many parts of the
Northeast, are now so abundant that they are suppressing
natural regeneration and injuring habitat for other wildlife
in some areas. The region currently rates low on lists of endangerment
“hotspots” (Noss and Peters 1995).
The Wild Five Percent
The boundaries of the wild forest are difficult to define. The
wild forest includes a range of forest lands in public and
conservation ownership, whose primary objective is the
maintenance of natural conditions. Defining the wild forest
in strictly ecological terms as vestiges of truly undisturbed
forest, important in its own right, does not define the wild
forest (Crow 1990; Davis 1996). Large acreages of the wild
forest are devoted to such uses as watershed protection. Perhaps
a half-million acres of such lands are found in the region,
and these lands may be available for limited timber
cutting. But because they form large green blocks in the
midst of cities and suburbs, they fill most of the functions of
the wild forest. Likewise, the tiny parcels owned as green
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WILDERNESS/Volume 2, Number 3, December 1996 27