SPARE America's Wildlands

An Introduction

A hundred years ago, two men who barely knew each other climbed up into the Sierra Nevada wilderness and spent four days hiking the meadows and tracking the wildlife. They saw elk and marmots, lupines and harebells. They didn't shave. They slept on beds of pine needles. When they came down from the mountains, President Theodore Roosevelt and Sierra Club Founder John Muir were good friends. And when they parted, they made a pact: they would work together to save America's wilderness.

America had already lost most of the buffalo, tallgrass prairies, Eastern old-growth forests and grizzly bears. Bold, immediate action was called for - and taken. Between 1901 and 1909, Roosevelt oversaw the establishment of five National Parks including the Grand Canyon, more than 50 wildlife reserves and almost 99 million acres of forest reserves.

Now, a century later, our nation again needs bold and urgent action to protect America's remaining wildlands. Despite the progress we have made since 1900, we continue to lose ground - and forests, marshes and mountains faster than they can be restored or rescued. The remedy? What the Sierra Club is calling SPARE, an aggressive and comprehensive five-part program to save our national - and neighborhood - wildlands.

The number of threats to our wild places and open spaces has increased dramatically in the last 100 years. Pollution, development, suburban sprawl and off-road vehicles have added to the historic, continuing impacts of logging, mining and overgrazing. It's no wonder the rate of wildlands destruction is accelerating and the list of special places in peril is exploding. Our spectacular landscapes of national importance - like the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, Maine Woods, Everglades, Northern Rockies, Utah wilderness and Sierra Nevada - are all threatened. And so are what President Clinton calls our "small but sacred green and open spaces closer to home" - places like the Humbug Marsh near Detroit, the MoKan Prairie outside of Austin, Oxon Cove and Eagle Cove on the Potomac, the Hanford Reach in Washington state and the Eddyville Dunes in Iowa.

In this report, "SPARE America's Wildlands: The Sierra Club Plan to Protect Our National and Neighborhood Wild Places and Open Spaces," we offer stories and snapshots of the American landscape. Six of them are about national treasures and 52 are about those special, wild places closer to home. All of them are beautiful, all of them are threatened and all of them can be saved.

Each place profiled in this report is unique, but the threats they face are ubiquitous. For example, development and suburban sprawl jeopardize Florida's Everglades, Connecticut's Traprock Ridges, Las Vegas' Redrock Canyon and California's Orange County foothills. Pollution still plagues Illinois' rivers, the Hudson in upstate New York, the Fox River in Wisconsin and the Beaver River in Oklahoma. Mining threatens Missouri's 11 Point River, Arizona's San Francisco Peaks and Alabama's Terrapin Creek.

Lands as diverse as the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, the Utah wilderness and Colorado's Vermillion Basin are all threatened with the devastation of oil and gas drilling. Off-road vehicles are a problem in Montana's Pryor Mountains and South Carolina's Jocassee Gorges. Overgrazing is destroying wildlands in the Nebraska National Grasslands and on Steens Mountain, Oregon. And commercial logging is devastating our forests, including California's Sequoia National Forest, the Maine Woods, Minnesota's Superior National Forest, Tennessee's Cherokee National Forest and Alaska's Tongass National Forest.

But the purpose of this report is not to dwell on the threats to America's wildlands. Our goal is to offer solutions. Our aim is to educate people about what can be done to save open spaces, leave trees standing, keep communities intact and connect concerned citizens with neighbors who are working to protect our wildlands.

The SPARE America's Wildlands program includes five common sense approaches that would stop the destruction of our wild places and open spaces, and rescue what remains. They are:

Smart Growth - managing suburban sprawl

Preservation - designating lands as permanently protected parks, refuges and wilderness

Acquisition - purchasing land to protect it, both in urban areas and remote wild regions

Restoration - recovering what's been lost and rebuilding healthy natural systems

End Commercial Logging - stopping timber industry logging of National Forests and other federal public lands.

More than a century of conservation campaigns by the Sierra Club has taught us that these approaches work. We also know that in many places it will require a combination of solutions to avert the threat and remedy the problem. But the hardest lesson we have learned is that no place - despite its official designation, environmental value or storied past - is ever completely protected. The oil companies and logging industry and developers never give up. And as our nation grows, the pressures to drill, log and build in these special places will increase.

For us, the real key to saving America's national and neighborhood wildlands is tenacity. That's why, 100 years after Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir broke camp in the Sierra Nevada, the Sierra Club's 65 chapters and 450 groups are still fighting to save that mountain range and the rest of America's wild places and open spaces.

As Muir noted, "Every good thing, great and small, needs defense."

The Sierra Club's Wildlands Campaign

The Sierra Club's Wildlands Campaign - one of the organization's four national priority campaigns - is committed to protecting our vanishing wild heritage, building public support and demand for wildlands conservation and ensuring an additional 100 million acres of wilderness is legally shielded from development and industrial exploitation by 2003.

The Wildlands Campaign is dedicated to protecting America's wild places - and the beauty, solitude, clean water, wildlife habitat and recreation opportunities they provide - by promoting a program of smart growth, preservation, acquisition, restoration, and putting an end to commercial logging in our National Forests and other public lands.

The conservation goals and efforts of the Wildlands Campaign are supported and implemented by the more than 550,000 Sierra Club members in 65 chapters and 450 groups across America. The Sierra Club, which was founded more than a century ago by John Muir, is America's oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization.

For more information about the Sierra Club Wildlands Campaign, contact:
Melanie Griffin melanie.griffin@sierraclub.org
Mark Pearson mark.pearson@sierraclub.org

Photo courtesy Sierra Club Archives

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