Fifty years ago today, the U.S. government passed the Wilderness Act of 1964, an act that set aside areas “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
Besides creating a definition of wilderness, the bill also protected 9.1 million acres of federal land, including areas in East Tennessee.
Wild South, a regional conservation organization, will honor the bill’s definition of wilderness by hosting “Tennessee Wilderness: Celebrating 50 years of People, Place, and Promise” tonight from 6-9 p.m. at the East Tennessee History Center.
The event will include speakers Bill Meadows, former president of the Wilderness Society; Charles Maynard, United Methodist Church minister and storyteller; and a keynote address delivered by Mary Wagner, associate chief of the U.S. Forest Service.
On a practical level, a wilderness designation means there is no logging, no road-building and no housing development. Recreational activities like hunting, fishing and hiking, however, are encouraged.
For the organizations sponsoring the event, the long-term effects of the bill are personal.
Sandra Goss, executive director at Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning, grew up in Tennessee and has spent a lot of time in its wilderness areas, including her favorite, Bald River Falls in Monroe County.
“To go to a place that is undisturbed by man, it’s awe-inspiring,” Goss said. “These places in many areas are just like they were a hundred years ago.
“That gives me shivers down my spine.”
East Tennessee has personal ties to the federal act through Knoxville native and UT alumnus Harvey Broome, who co-founded The Wilderness Society and helped persuade Congress to create the National Wilderness Preservation System as a part of the 1964 bill. He was also present when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill into law.
When the Wilderness Act of 1964 was passed, Will Skelton was a law student at UT. Now a member of the Sierra Club, a broadly-focused, local environmental organization that is co-sponsoring tonight’s event, Skelton has used the framework of the 1964 bill as a foundation for future land protection.
He serves as the Sierra Club representative in the Tennessee Wild coalition, a group currently pushing Congress to pass a bill setting aside an additional 20,000 acres of wilderness in Cherokee National Park.
“If it wasn’t for the setting aside of these lands, sooner or later everything would look like west Knoxville,” Skelton said. “By having these areas we are protecting a little of our national heritage.
“Our descendants will have the same thing we had — a really wild area, a natural area to go to.”
Bill Hodge, director of the Southern Appalachian Wilderness Stewards, a program of The Wilderness Society, said Tennessee’s mountains “hold a special kind of magic” that needs to be protected.
“Wilderness designation is America’s way of leaving some places where nature is still in charge,” Hodge said, “where we can disconnect from an ever busier life, and reconnect with nature.”
