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

modified this mandate in one corner
where hunting was permitted, and in
another where “scientific forestry” was
to be practiced (Baxter Park Authority
1978). Baxter State Park remains New
England’s largest dedicated wilderness.
Adjacent to the park are several major
state land units and the put-in-point for
the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.
Federal Wilderness
The best-known elements of the
region’s wild forest are the federal wilderness
areas, which totaled about
200,000 acres in 1994. These owe their
origin to the establishment of national
forests and wildlife refuges earlier in
this century, largely by purchase. In late
1994, only 183,000 of the 1.6 million
acres of national forest land in the
Northeast were dedicated wilderness,
though road building and logging on
much of the remaining area will be limited.
Small wilderness patches exist on
other federal lands.
State and Local
Wild Areas
State and local governments manage
thousands of acres of forest that would
qualify for inclusion in the wild forest,
as noted in Table 2. The largest example
is the 2.7 million acre New York State
Forest Preserve in the Adirondacks and
the Catskills. Others range from the
14,000 acres of natural areas managed
by Vermont’s Department of Forests
and Parks to the 170,000 acres of designated
wildlands on Pennsylvania’s
state lands, and the preserve lands in
New Jersey’s Pinelands. They could include
Maine’s Bigelow Preserve, although
timber will be harvested there.
Future land use planning on state and
municipal lands may result in more areas
being formally designated for wildness
or wilderness.
Motors: Challenge
to Wildness
Outside of the Adirondacks, restrictive
categories of wilderness are relatively
new to the Northeast. Much of the 5
million-acre wild forest is open to mo-
torized canoes, RVs, and
snowmobiles. Wilderness
lakes are reached by aircraft
in summer and winter.
As elsewhere, motorized
woods users have
enormous political clout;
their organized opposition
accounts in large part for
the minimal acreage of
public land designated as
wilderness here. Considering
the impacts of motors
on visitor perceptions
of wildness, true wilderness
in the region will remain
a chimera unless
some way of managing the
impacts of motorization is
found. Whether this is
even possible is uncertain.
Additional designations of
“wilderness” will not be
able to provide visitors
with solitude unless this
issue can be confronted.
A Program
for Wildness
I believe that a sensible conservation
program for the region has two parts:
land acquisition and cooperative landscape
management on private land.
First, 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. A significant part
of this increase should be allocated to
wilderness. This would still be only
7.5% of the region’s land. The effort
should focus on bolstering existing
large and remote publicly owned areas,
especially those with key wildlife
values but would also involve private
groups acquiring small, key parcels. An
enlarged wild forest would be a prize
bequest for this generation to pass to
the future. While there are advocates
of single large reserves, I think a case
can be made for a more dispersed approach
that would represent a greater
diversity of ecosystems (see, for example,
Maine Audubon Society 1996).
But public wildlands will not be
enough. There are innovative ways to
serve long-term land protection goals
Figure 1—Proposed Maine Woods
National Park
that fit economic, social, and biological
realities of this diverse region. I propose
establishing designated LMAs
within which targeted public support
would be provided for private landowners
voluntarily implementing long
timber rotations, using related new forestry
practices, expanding stream and
trail protection, and giving up development
rights. At the core of each
LMA might be an area of true wilderness
or some suitable public land unit.
The design details do not concern us
here. The idea builds on an earlier proposal
by Foster (1992) for “legacy forests.”
The goal is not merely to obtain
development rights on narrow buffer
zones adjacent to public land units.
Rather, it is to secure habitat and wilderness
values over naturally meaningful
areas, perhaps quite large in size.
Private lands in the LMAs are not included
in my 7.5 million-acre proposed
total for the wild forest.
Adding acres to the region’s public
estate will not be the best solution in
every area. Also, acquisition may not
be cost-effective or politically feasible.
For the 1990s at least, it is difficult to
foresee any significant state or federal
acquisition funding. States will be in
the lead in this region, but the fiscal
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