Wilderness Act

Wilderness Act

Long title	An Act to establish a National Wilderness Preservation System for the permanent good of the whole people, and for other purposes.
Nicknames	Wilderness Act of 1964
Enacted by	the 88th United States Congress
Citations
Public law	88–577
Statutes at Large	78 Stat. 890
Codification
Titles amended	16 U.S.C.: Conservation
U.S.C. sections created	16 U.S.C. ch. 23 § 1131 et seq.
Legislative history
Introduced in the Senate as S. 4 Passed the Senate on April 9, 1963 (73-12) Passed the House on July 30, 1964 (374-1, in lieu of H.R. 9070) Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3, 1964

The Wilderness Act of 1964 (Pub. L. 88–577) is a federal land management statute meant to protect federal wilderness and to create a formal mechanism for designating wilderness. It was written by Howard Zahniser of The Wilderness Society. After over sixty drafts and eight years of work, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law on September 3, 1964, creating the legal definition of wilderness in the United States and protecting 9.1 million acres (37,000 km²) of federal land.

The Wilderness Act is well known for its succinct and poetic definition of wilderness:

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own 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." – Howard Zahniser

When Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964, it created the National Wilderness Preservation System. The initial statutory wilderness areas, designated in the Act, comprised 9.1 million acres (37,000 km²) of national forest wilderness areas in the United States of America previously protected by administrative orders.^[1] The current amount of areas designated by the NWPS as wilderness totals 757 areas encompassing 109.5 million acres of federally owned land in 44 states and Puerto Rico (5% of the land in the United States).