GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK — On Sept. 3, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Wilderness Act, which established the National Wilderness Preservation System “for the permanent good of the whole people,” as written in the law.
On Wednesday, Grand Teton National Park (GTNP) shared its connection with the Wilderness Act on Facebook, in honor of its 61st anniversary.
“As early as the 1920s and ’30s, folks like Aldo Leopold, Arthur Carhart and Robert Sterling Yard began advocating for a national wilderness system,” the post reads. “In 1935, the Wilderness Society was formed.”
On its website, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) describes Leopold as “widely considered to be the founder of wildlife management.” In 1924, while working for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), he helped establish the Gila National Forest wilderness, the first official wilderness area. According to the USFS, Carhart was a landscape architect from Iowa who also worked for the USFS, from 1919 to 1923. The National Park Service (NPS) describes Sterling Yard as a newspaperman and publisher, who publicized the national parks through journalism. Sterling Yard and Leopold are considered two of the eight founding members of the Wilderness Society, which was officially established in 1935.
According to the GTNP Facebook post, Olaus Murie was named director of the Wilderness Society in 1945. Olaus and his wife Margaret “Mardy” later purchased the Murie Ranch with his brother Adolph and wife Louise.
The ranch, now within the boundaries of GTNP, became a base camp for conservation leaders, per the NPS. The Muries hosted numerous Wilderness Society meetings at the ranch, and they worked to establish a National Wilderness Preservation System as well as a number of wilderness areas. Olaus argued for ecological boundaries to keep ecosystems intact when legislating park areas, instead of drawing arbitrary boundaries.
In 1945, Howard Zahniser joined the Wilderness Society as executive secretary and editor of its magazine, The Living Wilderness. Working together with Olaus and Mardy Murie, Zahniser helped pen the legislation that later became the Wilderness Act. The act was finally introduced in congress in 1956.
Mardy Murie received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, the highest civilian honor in the United States.
GTNP does not have congressionally designated wilderness, but the park does have land that is eligible for wilderness protection. Under NPS policy, it is all managed like designated wilderness.
The Wilderness Act defined wilderness as a place where nature is “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor and does not remain.” The following attributes of wilderness included in the act were shared by GTNP:
- Land that keeps its primeval character — free of permanent structures or human habitation
- Areas shaped mostly by natural forces, not human ones
- Places where human impact is minimal or unnoticeable
- Spaces that offer solitude or primitive, unconfined recreation
- Large enough to remain unimpaired (typically 5,000 acres or more)
- Landscapes with scientific, scenic or historic value
