The Enduring Wilderness: Protecting Our Natural Heritage through the Wilderness Act

by Doug Scott

A look at protecting America's wilderness and an explanation of the Wilderness Act.

184 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2004

About the author

Doug Scott is a policy director of The Campaign for America's Wilderness. He holds a forestry degree from the University of Michigan, where he did his graduate research on the history and drafting of what became the Wilderness Act of 1964. Scott began his own work for wilderness preservation soon after the Wilderness Act became law. As a volunteer activist while in graduate school, a Washington lobbyist for The Wilderness Society, and northwest representative for the Sierra Club, he was in the forefront of many of the important wilderness preservation campaigns as a strategist and lobbyist. Some of these include the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Act (1976), the monumental Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (1980), statewide wilderness laws for dozens of states in the 1980s, and the California Desert Protection Act (1994). In the 1980s, Scott was conservation director and, later, associate executive director of the Sierra Club, and in 1996 he received the club's highest honor, the John Muir Award. Scott was also a member of the board of directors of Environmental Teach-In, Inc., which organized the first Earth Day in 1970. He now speaks frequently on college campuses, at training programs for federal agency personnel who administer wilderness areas, and at gatherings of wilderness advocacy organizations.

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are many books detailing the efforts of wilderness advocates from the likes of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and Terry Tempest Williams. But few, if any, document the decades long struggle to save what little is left of our American frontier through the legal process of congressional law. This is a must-read for lovers of wilderness and citizen action groups.