Quickening

This chapter highlights the works of Paul Schaefer and the archives of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks (AfPA) and other early conservation organizations. It analyses how Schaefer's foundation of a diverse coalition, aimed at protecting pristine Adirondack landscapes, culminated in the creation of the Adirondack Park Agency. The chapter reveals that the quickening of activism for wilderness protection in the United States took place in Schenectady, New York. It illustrates how a group of scientists and engineers who worked in the research labs of General Electric (GE) became more aware of threats to their wilderness and drew their passion toward political action. The chapter also describes the members of the Forest Preserve Association who multiplied their impact by encouraging established groups to join their cause. Their main prospects were the Adirondack Mountain Club, which represented hikers; the New York State Conservation Council, which represented hunters; and dozens of local outing groups like the Mohawk Valley Hiking Club. Ultimately, the chapter examines the impact of the Wilderness Act and how the New York's coalition of environmental became a powerful, well-coordinated political force.

The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act at 50: Overlooked Watershed Protection

The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (WSRA) marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2018 without much fanfare. The WSRA has been somewhat overshadowed by the Wilderness Act, which preceded it by four years, and by the National Environmental Policy Act and the pollution control statutes which followed in the 1970s. But the WSRA was a significant conservation achievement, has now extended its protections to over 200 rivers, and has the potential to provide watershed protection to many more in the future. This article explains the statute and its implementation over the last half-century as well as a number of challenges to fulfilling its laudable goals of protecting free-flowing rivers, their water quality, and their “outstandingly remarkable values.” We make a number of suggestions to the managing agencies and to Congress if the WSRA’s achievements over the next half-century are to match the last fifty years, including reviving congressional interest in study rivers, updating managing agencies’ river plans to focus on non-federal lands within river corridors, and ensuring that those river plans provide the watershed protection Congress envisioned when it included a significant amount of riparian land within WSRA river corridors. We also call for a new emphasis on rivers that should be studied for their restoration potential and for more states to take advantage of the statute’s unusual pathway for state-designated rivers to gain WSRA protections. A postscript briefly explains a recent congressional proposal to expand the WSRA system, and an appendix catalogues all 226 WSRA river segments designated during the statute’s first fifty years.

Black faces, black spaces: Rethinking African American underrepresentation in wildland spaces and outdoor recreation

The Wilderness Act of 1964 defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”. It goes on to limit acceptable activities in designated wilderness areas to those associated with leisure, scenic viewing, education, and scientific inquiry. These precepts are the basis for federal wilderness management in national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, and lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management. They are derived from the interests and values held by the early environmental movement's predominantly white middle and upper class patrons, and imposed on diverse groups who may not hold the same views. This study examined how the imposition of wilderness management at Congaree National Park greatly restricted local African Americans' traditional fishing practices and how fishers made meaning of their displacement. Participants' experience of alienation is a result of their perceptions of racial discrimination in the park's preferential treatment of white visitors. This study argues that African American presence in the Great Outdoors is erased both materially and symbolically by racial bias in the Wilderness Act, a general lack of attention to black outdoor spaces, and the use of white outdoor values and pursuits as the criterion for which to assess African American outdoor ethos.