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

A group of hikers in the Adirondack high country. (Photo by Gary Randorf, The Adirondack Council.)
space or preserves by towns and nonprofit
groups (USDA Econ. Res. Serv.
1995) are also part of the wild forest.
A listing of major wild forest units
can be made, however (see Table 2).
State parks and game lands are not included,
though many would qualify. We
could add more than a million backcountry
acres on the national forests,
fish and game lands, state parks, and
private nonprofit reservations that will
retain a generally unmanaged character.
This total of, say, 5 million acres
comes to about 5% of the region’s land
area. Of this, only a fraction is true designated
wilderness. This is well below
the Brundtland Commission’s suggestion
for 12% and compares to an estimate
that true primary forest covers
0.4% of the Northeast (including Delaware,
Maryland, and West
Virginia) (Davis 1996).
Services and Values
of the Wild Forest
Large portions of the wild forest were
created for utilitarian purposes to pre-
serve game, fish, and clean water supplies,
or to conserve channel storage
and prevent floodplain encroachment
(see Table 3). Protecting water supplies
was a major argument for federal acquisition
of the White Mountain National
Forest and for creating the
Adirondack Park. Recreation, bird
watching, tourism, and open-space values
have been high on the list of objectives
in virtually every instance. The
… I would attempt to increase the acreage in the publicly
owned wild forest by 50% by the year 2020—from
5 to 7.5 million acres.
pure “preservation” motive, best expressed
in Baxter State Park, is also seen
in dozens of the tiny parcels of woods
and marsh held by the Nature Conservancy,
other private nonprofit
groups, and some private owners.
Pioneering in
Conservation Policy:
Forever Wild in the
Adirondacks
In 1827, Governor DeWitt Clinton
told the New York legislature that future
generations would regret the
squandering of the forests. In 1864,
28 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WILDERNESS/Volume 2, Number 3, December 1996
George Perkins Marsh advocated a
major reserve.
It is desirable that some large and
easily accessible region of American
soil should remain, as far as
possible, in its primitive condition,
at once a museum for the instruction
of the student, a garden for
the recreation of the lover of nature,
and an asylum where indigenous
tree, and humble plant that
loves the shade, and fish and fowl
and four-footed beast, may dwell
and perpetuate their kind … .
The collateral advantages of
the preservation of these forests
would be far greater. Nature
threw up those mountains and
clothed them with lofty woods,
that they might serve as a reservoir
to supply with perennial
waters the thousand rivers and
rills that are fed by the rains and
snows of the Adirondacks … .
(Marsh 1964)
As early as 1872, a state commission
was set up to look into establishing
a park. In 1880, remaining virgin
growth in the Adirondacks covered
about 1.6 million acres (Sargent 1884).
In 1885, a forest commission was created
to administer the park and acquire
lands. The “Forever Wild” character of
state-owned lands, and the “Blue Line”
surrounding the entire park were made
a part of the State Constitution by public
referendum. Currently, the “Forever
Wild” encompasses about 2.7 million
acres of designated wilderness, and a
larger area of forever wildlands.
Baxter State Park
A major wilderness is Baxter State Park
in northern Maine, which protects
Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus
of the Appalachian Trail (see Figure
1). (A proposal to extend this trail
to Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula is under
development.) The park was purchased
over a period of years by the late Governor
Percival P. Baxter and donated
to the state (Hakola 1981).
Governor Baxter specified that the
park be managed in its natural state, as
a “sanctuary for birds and beasts.” He