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by Hilltromper staff

Sept. 3, 2014—On this day in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act and set a new standard for protection of wild lands from human impact. In unusually poetic officialese, the bill defined wilderness thusly: "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized 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."

Ahhh. No phone, no lights, no motorcars. No bicycles, even. These "roadless areas" would permit no motorized vehicles or structures. Immediately 9 million acres of land were set aside as wilderness. One of the new areas was in California. The Mount Dana–Minarets Primitive Area in the eastern Sierra was rechristened Minarets Wilderness (now Ansel Adams Wilderness).

Today 110 million acres of U.S. land are designated wilderness—5% of the nation's territory. Here are some fun facts for your next cocktail party.

1. Although the Wilderness Act didn't pass until 1964, the first Wilderness was designated long before. Environmentalist, ecologist and forester Aldo Leopold got the ball rolling in 1924 when he convinced the National Forest Service to prohibit road development on 500,000 acres at the headwaters of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico. The Gila Wilderness has since seen the successful reintroduction of elk, bighorn sheep and the Mexican wolf.

2. Sept. 3, 1964 marked the culmination of a 19-year effort. The so-called father of the Wilderness Act, Howard "Zahnie" Zahniser, started working for the Wilderness Society in 1945. He died in May, 1964, two days after testifying at the final congressional hearing on the bill. His widow, Alice, stood at Lyndon Johnson's side when the law was signed.

3. Wilderness used to be a bi-partisan issue. The Wilderness Act was carried in the Senate by Clinton P. Anderson, an ardent Democrat from New Mexico, and in the House of Representatives by John P. Saylor, a stalwart Republican from Pennsylvania. It passed unanimously in the Senate and with just a single dissenting vote in the House.

4. Wilderness as an antidote for technology. Signing the bill, President Johnson said: "If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning."

5. Half of the nation's wilderness is in Alaska. According to Wilderness.net, 52% of U.S. wilderness resides in the Land of the Midnight Sun. That includes the biggest wilderness, the 9-million–acre Wrangell–Saint Elias Wilderness.

6. The smallest wilderness in the U.S. is ... Rocks and Islands Wilderness off the California coast, at just under 6 acres.

7. California is almost as wild as Alaska. Totally. In California, 15% of the state's total acreage is wilderness. In Alaska it's 16%.

8. They put a dollar figure on it. In 2001, economists J.B. Loomis and Robert Richardson estimated that wilderness provides $3 billion a year in carbon storage, watershed protection and other "ecosystem services."

9. See those mountains across Monterey Bay? Wilderness! The Ventana Wilderness in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Los Padres National Forest was established in 1969. It has been expanded five times, most recently in 2002 with the Sam Farr-penned Big Sur Wilderness and Conservation Act, and now includes 240,026 acres.

10. There's work to be done. A 2001 analysis by the Campaign for America's Wilderness found that at that time, some 316 acres of de facto wilderness—roadless lands that have not received "capital-W" Wilderness protection—are under management by the US Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Parks Service.

Do you know about the good work our friends at the Ventana Wilderness Alliance are up to?

And: Check out VWA's Wild & Scenic Film Fest on Saturday, Sept. 13.