About the Wilderness Campaign

Did you know that only two percent of the land in the Lower 48 is protected under the designation of Wilderness while the overwhelming majority of our nation’s land is open to development and industrial uses?

Additional Resources

• About Wilderness
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Wilderness Quotes
• Wilderness Act
• Managing Wilderness
• Wilderness Eonomics
• Wilderness Timeline
  

Wilderness is the highest form of protection for our federally owned public lands. No roads or permanent structures are allowed in wilderness, nor are activities like logging or mining, or most vehicular traffic.

If we are to be good stewards of the landscapes that make this nation so geographically wondrous, we must be willing to conserve those last wild areas.

Here at The Wilderness Society, we’re fighting to preserve wilderness not only because these are wondrous places of solitude and places where we create lasting memories with our families but because Wilderness clears our air, filters our water. Wilderness provides home and sanctuary to wildlife, including threatened and endangered species. Wilderness is a natural retreat from the stress of our everyday lives, a place for recreationists and hunters and fishers to enjoy.

What The Wilderness Society is doing

We work across the nation in partnership with local grassroots groups on long-term, strategic campaigns to build support for wilderness and other conservation designations on the local and Congressional levels. We also work to promote all of the wonderful values and experiences Wilderness provides by connecting communities, families and organizations to these treasured landscapes.

Through these partnerships, we’ve seen the National Wilderness Preservation System grow to 107 million acres. Campaigns to protect as many as two million additional acres of Wilderness are now moving their way through Congress.

Currently, we are leading efforts to protect dozens of new wilderness areas, many of which you may already know and love, such as the canyons of southern Utah, the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest, the Greater Yellowstone region and California’s Sierra Nevada mountains just to name a few.