How the Bureau of Land Management manages our National Conservation Lands over the coming years will be just as important as was designating these places for protection in the first place.
Our conservation lands face many challenges: understaffing, underfunding and shifting political priorities. The system’s lands and waters are also threatened by development, vandalism and neglect.
As one of the newest members of The Wilderness Society’s Governing Council, Dave Matthews is lending his voice to help preserve America’s treasured wilderness—including legislation to protect Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Alpine Lakes Wilderness expansion efforts near his home in Seattle. He is also calling on Congress to avoid short-sighted cuts in programs that preserve land, wildlife, and clean water.
Local Partnership Working to Preserve Water, Open Space, Recreational Benefits and Spiritual Values of Angeles and San Bernardino National Forests
LOS ANGELES – Several churches from the San Gabriel Valley will meet in the San Gabriel Mountains this Saturday - the day before Easter - to express their support for more protection of the mountain range.
If you’re ever in Seattle, the spectacular Alpine Lakes Wilderness is an absolute must-see getaway for jaw-dropping scenery. The area, accessible with just 45 minute drive from the city, is one of the country’s most visited wilderness areas, providing incredible wild mountain vistas, impossibly craggy peaks and lush old-growth forests – not to mention over 700 mountain lakes and tarns, living up to its namesake.
Celebrations are happening across the country this month to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the National Landscape Conservation System, which protects some of country’s most beloved lands and unique cultural sites.
Since its birth, the National Landscape Conservation System, which is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, has come a long way.
In January, The Wilderness Society celebrated the passage of a monumental package of wilderness and public lands bills by the Senate.
Now, the fate of the long-awaited Omnibus Public Land Management Act is teetering on the edge as it heads toward a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.
All indications say the vote will be extremely close.
As the House prepares to consider the measure this spring, The Wilderness Society is working feverishly to ensure this needed legislation makes it through the final steps.
Right now, a sweeping and long-awaited package of bills that would conserve hundreds of thousands of acres of new Wilderness and other special public lands is working its way through Congress. If passed, the omnibus lands act, would provide the greatest expansion of the National Wilderness Preservation System in 14 years.
So much work has gone into making these wilderness-friendly bills a reality, but with the end of the legislative year, many larger, controversial national issues have taken attention away from passing the legislation.
