First and Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100

•Released during the 100th anniversary year of the Gila Wilderness, the first designated wilderness area in the United States.
•The Gila Wilderness is on a scale with Yellowstone or Yosemite in terms of its vast untrammeled wildness—and as extinction and climate change threaten our planet, nowhere are the effects more pronounced than in the American Southwest. This anthology will inspire both imaginations and action to protect the sensitive beauty of the Gila.
•Hightower Allen is former features editor of Outside magazine, where her work received the National Magazine Award for Excellence, and has published book reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post.
•Notable contributors to this anthology include Beto O’Rourke, Michael P. Berman, Philip Connors, Martha Schumann Cooper, Martin Heinrich, Pam Houston, Priyanka Kumar, Aldo Leopold, Laura Paskus, Sharman Apt Russell, Jakob Sedig, Leeanna T. Torres, Jonathan K. Tsosie, and JJ Amaworo Wilson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Torrey House Press
• Release date: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781948814560

Book preview

BEDROCK

Everything depends on our ability to sustainably inhabit this earth, and true sustainability will require us all to change our way of thinking on how we take from the earth and how we give back.

—Deb Haaland

US Secretary of the Interior

More than Politics—It’s Personal,

Medium, September 26, 2017

ALDO LEOPOLD

THE WILDERNESS AND ITS PLACE IN FOREST RECREATIONAL POLICY

Leopold published this article in the Journal of Forestry in 1921 and subsequently included it in his proposal to the US Forest Service to create a designated wilderness area in the Gila National Forest. Leopold’s conception of wilderness would continue to evolve, but as editors David E. Brown and Neil B. Carmony write in the 1990 collection Aldo Leopold’s Southwest, it led directly to the establishment of America’s first wilderness area in 1924, and eventually to one of the most profound pieces of conservation legislation of the 20th century—the Wilderness Act of 1964.

WHEN THE NATIONAL FORESTS WERE CREATED THE first argument of those opposing a national forest policy was that the forests would remain a wilderness. Gifford Pinchot [the first chief of the Forest Service] replied that on the contrary they would be opened up and developed as producing forests, and that such development would, in the long run, itself constitute the best assurance that they would neither remain a wilderness by bottling up their resources nor become one through devastation. At this time Pinchot enunciated the doctrine of highest use, and its criterion, the greatest good to the greatest number, which is and must remain the guiding principle by which democracies handle their natural resources.

Pinchot’s promise of development has been made good. The process must, of course, continue indefinitely. But it has already gone far enough to raise the question of whether the policy of development (construed in the narrower sense of industrial development) should continue to govern in absolutely every instance, or whether the principle of highest use does not itself demand that representative portions of some forests be preserved as wilderness.

That some such question actually exists, both in the minds of some foresters and of part of the public, seems to me to be plainly implied in the recent trend of recreational use policies and in the tone of sporting and outdoor magazines. Recreational plans are leaning toward the segregation of certain areas from certain developments, so that having been led into the wilderness, the people may have some wilderness left to enjoy. Sporting magazines are groping toward some logical reconciliation between getting back to nature and preserving a little nature to get back to. Lamentations over this or that favorite vacation ground being spoiled by tourists are becoming more and more frequent. Very evidently we have here the old conflict between preservation and use, long since an issue with respect to timber, water power, and other purely economic resources, but just now coming to be an issue with respect to recreation. It is the fundamental function of foresters to reconcile these conflicts, and to give constructive direction to these issues as they arise. The purpose of this paper is to give definite form to the issue of wilderness conservation, and to suggest certain policies for meeting it, especially as applied to the