Quest for more wilderness has been a long journey

The quest for wilderness in Montana is like a week-long excursion through the mountains themselves: Long, slow, sometimes painful, but in the end a lasting reward.

Montana wilderness advocates have seen a particularly long wait — the last wilderness designations here were signed into law in 1978.

Are wilderness advocates doing enough? Stewart Brandborg, one of the authors of the 1964 Wilderness Act, believes more can be done.

“We’re doing a pretty poor job,” he said. “The wilderness movement better revitalize itself.”

Brandborg began his career in the late 1940s researching mountain goats in what later became the Bob Marshall Wilderness. There he learned the value of wild lands. Creatures so often identified with Montana — mountain goats, bighorn sheep, elk and grizzly bears — all must have wild places, he said.

“If you really want to keep those species, place (land) in the wilderness system,” he said.

John Gatchell, conservation director for the Montana Wilderness Association, disagrees with Brandborg’s assessment. Gatchell said it only takes one political opponent to kill a wilderness bill. He also blames a dysfunctional Congress and outside money that influences Montana elections.

Gatchell points to a 1988 bill that passed both houses of Congress only to be pocket vetoed by President Reagan as a favor to incoming Republican Sen. Conrad Burns.

Since then, wilderness advocates have worked on several other bills, most recently the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, which would designate about 700,000 acres of wilderness in Montana, adding 4,500 acres to the Mission Mountain Wilderness and about 79,000 acres to the Bob.

Another bill, the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act, would add more than 60,000 acres to the Bob and put 200,000 acres under a special primitive designation that only allows traditional farming and ranching uses.

Recent polls have shown a 70 percent approval rating for the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act, and yet the bill has gone nowhere. Even simple legislation like the North Fork Watershed Protection Act, which has bi-partisan support in Montana, has been killed in the Senate by out-of-state lawmakers.

Wilderness advocacy is a difficult task, even in national parks. During his tenure as superintendent of Glacier National Park, Chas Cartwright advocated a wilderness designation for most of Glacier’s backcountry.

“There was a fear that a wilderness designation would change the way people enjoy the Park,” Cartwright said last week. “It’s not true.”

Cartwright said he viewed the designation as “low hanging fruit.”

But the public opposed the idea.

“I certainly underestimated the difficulty in selling the idea,” he said.

Cartwright noted the environmental community itself had other priorities and building momentum was difficult. The Park, after all, does have protections in place, but a wilderness designation offers the highest protections. As it stands now, a superintendent could make land management decisions contrary to the Wilderness Act, from allowing motorized use in a backcountry region to building new structures.

Cartwright said wilderness designation is a good way to preserve a place for future generations.

“If you like the way it is now, you’re likely to like the way it is 50 years from now,” he said.

While Montana has seen a wilderness stalemate, there have been plenty of wilderness additions nationwide. Since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, more than 101 million more acres have been added to the national wilderness system.

The latest addition was the 32,500-acre Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan, which was designated in March. The designation had some key and familiar components to wilderness success — bi-partisan support and plenty of planning beforehand. Still, it took 12 years for the lakeshore area to be designated.

Cartwright said wilderness advocates simply need to keep pushing.

“The education effort has to keep happening,” he said.

Brandborg, at age 89, still holds optimism.

“I believe in wilderness,” he said. “I believe in good people.”