How The Wilderness Society Was Founded

The History of The Wilderness Society

When their car came to a screeching halt somewhere outside of Knoxville, the four passengers were in hot debate. The men got out of the car and climbed an embankment where they sat and argued over a handwritten draft of a constitution for a new conservation group.

Three months later, in January, 1935, the men met again in Washington, DC to found their new organization. The men included Robert Sterling Yard, whose writings had helped to create the National Park Service, Benton MacKaye, the "Father of the Appalachian Trail," and Robert Marshall, chief of recreation and lands for the Forest Service, among others.

"All we desire to save from invasion," they declared, "is that extremely minor fraction of outdoor America which yet remains free from mechanical sights and sounds and smell."

For a name, they finally settled on The Wilderness Society.

Among the co-founders was Aldo Leopold, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin. In Leopold's view, The Society would help form the cornerstone for the movement needed to save America's vanishing wilderness.

And save it we have.

Howard Zahniser, The Society's Executive Secretary, wrote the Wilderness Act, which defines Wilderness and provides for its legislative protection.  After an eight-year legislative journey, that monumental Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the rose garden of the White House on September 3, 1964. It enabled Congress to set aside selected areas in the national forests, national parks, national wildlife refuges, and other federal lands as units to be kept permanently unchanged by humans; no roads, no structures, no vehicles, no significant impacts of any kind.

"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." (from the Wilderness Act)

The 1964 Wilderness Act designated nine million acres as wilderness. Since then, The Society has helped pass more bills, contributing a total of 109 million acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System.

Among the highlights: the Alaska National Interest Lands and Conservation Act of 1980, which designated 56 million acres of spectacular beauty; and the California Desert Protection Act of 1994 which protected eight million acres of fragile desert lands. 

We have also been a part of the establishment of nearly every major public lands bill since our founding, including the National Forest Management Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the National Trails Act, and the National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act.

More about The Wilderness Society and its councilors.