Amber waves of sea oats line the dunes of Cumberland Island, Ga., a barrier island wilderness. The coastal island’s ancient live oak forests, bearded with Spanish moss, predate Christopher Columbus. Its virgin-white sands once held the footprints of explorers touching fresh shores for the first time. It’s hard to imagine a place wilder, freer, more American.

Our country’s identity is woven into wilderness areas like Cumberland  wild lonely places with their frothing seascapes, lush forests, red rock canyons and snow-swept summits. Ever since we set foot on this continent, wilderness has helped form our character and shape our history as a people. Wilderness has nurtured and challenged us, forging characteristics we consider uniquely American — self-reliance, rugged individualism, ingenuity, curiosity, courage. Even today, millions of American pioneers venture into wilderness to explore their personal and physical frontiers.

According to the 1964 Wilderness Act, wilderness is a place “retaining its primeval character and influence” where “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” Wilderness areas protect wildlife habitats and allow ecosystems to function naturally, unmarred by machines, roads or residences. They are the only public lands permanently protected from logging and most other extractive uses.

Only 4 percent of the contiguous United States is designated as wilderness  most of it west of the Mississippi. A smattering of 144 relatively small wilderness areas protects the last pristine pockets of nature in the East. Despite their size, Eastern wilderness areas contain the country's richest diversity of species and habitat, including Joyce Kilmer’s old-growth forests, Okefenokee's cypress swamps and the sandy shores of Cape Romain, S.C. These wild places provide a taproot into the landscape of our beginnings. They fuel our imagination and ignite our spirit.

Ironically, politicians are using our rekindled patriotism to destroy America's wilderness. Under the guise of homeland security, President Bush continues to try to exploit the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the most complete and undisturbed ecosystems on earth.

But the Arctic isn’t the only wilderness jeopardized by oil and gas exploration. The Bush Administration plans to open the Southeast’s Atlantic and Gulf shores to more drilling, threatening at least a dozen wilderness islands and coastal areas from North Carolina to Louisiana. Just last week, the federal government began leasing 1.5 million acres off Florida for petroleum drilling.

In addition, Bush’s energy plan calls for the construction of 1,300 more power plants and increased use of coal. Already, power plants — especially coal-fired facilities — spew more pollutants into the air than any other point source. These pollutants are killing red spruce and Fraser fir forests in wilderness areas along the Appalachian spine and poisoning wild trout streams throughout the Southeast. If we are to preserve wilderness, the air over our heads and water in our rivers must be as wild as the land beneath our feet.

We don’t need more fossil-fueled electric plants to glut America’s energy appetite. With a sustained commitment, homegrown, renewable energy sources could power America indefinitely. Nor do we need the insubstantial supply of Southeastern offshore oil to win the war on terrorism. We will have lost something as a country, and as a people, if we allow the last American wilderness areas to be destroyed in the process of fighting that war.

Democracy also loses in Bush’s battle against wilderness. Take the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, for example, which would protect 58.5 million acres of wild public lands from road building and commercial logging. In the most extensive public comment period in U.S. Forest Service history, 90 percent — over 1.4 million Americans — supported the Roadless Rule. Even in such conservative Southern states as Alabama, South Carolina and Virginia, the numbers of citizens speaking in favor of the Roadless Rule were indisputable: 95.9 percent, 96 percent and 98 percent, respectively.

But the Bush administration suspended the Roadless Rule earlier this year, allowing logging and road building to continue as usual in America’s wilderness areas.

Real patriots don’t drill, dig and destroy wilderness. Even in a time of war, the long-term values of wilderness far outweigh any short-term exploitation. Not only does wilderness protect watersheds, recharge aquifers, filter pollutants, produce medicines, promote biodiversity and offer living laboratories for scientific research, but wilderness also boosts local economies better than any extractive land use.

According to the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition, 85 percent of revenue generated from Southern Appalachian forests comes from recreation, more than 30 times the amount generated by logging. And that figure doesn’t account for the priceless solitude, silence, scenery and serenity of a wilderness experience. In the long run, wilderness provides the best measure of homeland security.

We have rallied to protect America the Powerful. Now America the Beautiful needs to be defended with the same patriotic fervor. Wilderness constitutes the last landscape of raw, unfettered freedom, and we must safeguard that freedom for future generations. Wilderness is as American as apple pie, food for our soul. We need every scrap that’s left.

(Will Harlan writes about the outdoors. He is currently completing a book about Georgia’s Cumberland Island. Readers can contact him at wharlan@hotmail.com)

 

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The Smoky Mountain News