Although wilderness has been a concept of long-standing interest to scholars, historians have largely viewed the Wilderness Act of 1964 as the culmination of the wilderness movement. This project takes it as a starting point. It is a story of the land, politics, and the ways wilderness advocates have jockeyed around the idea of "wilderness" as they have worked to permanently protect the nation's public lands. They have negotiated tensions between wilderness as a recreational resource versus a scientific reserve, an idealized concept versus a pragmatic strategy, and an anti-modern critique versus a modern consumer ideal. Wilderness has never been an idle concept.; This project takes the history of the modern wilderness movement as a lens through which to view the transformation of the American environmental movement. By focusing on the internal changes at the Wilderness Society---the nation's leading wilderness advocacy organization---it explores the changing strategies, rationales, and funding sources that were important as the environmental movement became entrenched in America's late-twentieth-century culture and politics. It reveals with clarity the broader trajectory of American environmentalism: from grassroots-oriented to increasingly professional, from philosophically unified to philosophically fragmented, and from bipartisan to politicized.; Since 1964, the wilderness system has expanded tenfold from 9.1 to more than 105 million acres of federal land. The system includes more than 600 wilderness areas today. Its present scope is the product of major wilderness campaigns for the national forests, national parks, fish and wildlife refuges, and the public domain. These wilderness areas extend far beyond the high mountains of the West to include rejuvenated wild lands in the East, deserts in the Southwest, and a constellation of islands along the coasts. A dozen case studies, including areas such as Isle Royale in Michigan, Alpine Lakes in Washington, Dolly Sods in West Virginia, and Admiralty Island in Alaska, reveal the ecological changes and human history that are woven together in the wilderness system.; Drawing on the archives of the federal government, wilderness advocacy organizations, and environmental activists and opponents, this project argues for the centrality of wilderness to American environmental politics through the 1990s.
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