An ad hoc group, known as the North Dakota Wilderness Coalition, has put together a sensible and modest proposal to designate some 68,000 acres of public lands in North Dakota as permanent wilderness.
It's a purely wonderful idea whose time has come. If we don't act now, it's an idea whose time will be soon be gone forever. As far as I can determine, there is no rational reason to oppose the proposal. Nobody's ox is gored.
The proposed Prairie Legacy Wilderness will not be a contiguous unit. The coalition has designated six parcels for wilderness status, five diffused across the Badlands of western North Dakota, and a sixth in the Sheyenne National Grasslands southwest of Fargo. Why scatter the parcels in this way? Alas, we have so thoroughly domesticated all the rest of the wild lands of North Dakota that these are more or less the only remaining primitive islands in a sea of development, mostly oil development.
In the early 1970s, North Dakota possessed more than 500,000 acres that were deemed by the U.S. Forest Service (the National Grasslands) as suitable for wilderness protection. By 1977, that number had been cut in half. Today, there are about 40,000 prime acres suitable for wilderness protection acres left. Time is running out. As we stare over the brink toward an energy boom "an oil, coal, natural gas, wind and uranium rush" that will dwarf the three or four that have come to North Dakota before, we need to select a few precious acres of what is left and say: Not here!
The proposed wilderness areas are Bullion Butte in Billings County (9,720 acres), Kendley Plateau in Billings County (16,810 acres), Long X Divide in McKenzie County (10,670 acres), Twin Buttes in Golden Valley and Billings counties (13,590 acres), Lone Butte in McKenzie County (11,510 acres) and the Sheyenne Grasslands in Ransom and Richland counties (5,410) in southeastern North Dakota.
North Dakota is already graced by a few slivers of wilderness land. Chase Lake and Lostwood National Wildlife Refuges each contain a few thousand wilderness acres. The two units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park embrace a little wilderness, too, on the west bank of the Little Missouri River. These little parcels of already designated wilderness represent merely one-tenth of 1 percent of North Dakota's land base. If the coalition's humble and thoughtful proposals become law, another one-tenth of 1 percent of North Dakota will become wilderness.
Can we stand that much wildness in our midst? One-fifth of 1 percent of our total land base?
Our neighbors all have chosen to protect more wilderness than we do. South Dakota contains 77,570 acres of wilderness in two units; Montana 3,443,038 acres in 15 wilderness areas; Minnesota 816,268 acres in three units; Wyoming 3,111,232 acres in 15 units; Idaho 4,005,754 acres in six wilderness units; and Colorado 3,390,635 acres in 41 units.
Think of what this proposal really amounts to. A handful of little patches of wild land would be preserved forever as prairie, plains and Badlands remnants, as reminders of what the northern Great Plains once were. Why would anyone oppose a wilderness plan so intelligent, so well thought through and so carefully targeted?
And yet there are people who will oppose this proposal not on its merits, but merely because they cannot stand the idea that the conservation community would win a little victory in the land use wars of North Dakota and the American West. I hear the phrase damned environmentalists almost every day of my life. Some will oppose the plan because the word wilderness is such a loaded term at this dispirited, resource-hungry moment in American history. Look how this single, profoundly American word makes North Dakota's political leaders squirm. Some will oppose the proposal because it violates the seemingly sacred American notion that nature exists to be exploited, extracted, developed and improved. Or because it is somehow disturbing that we could decide just to leave a parcel of our land alone, forever, just for the sake of leaving it alone.
Why do we need wilderness? Here's why.
On a tiny percentage of our public lands, we need to remind ourselves of what America looked like before we began to slice and dice it with our industrial tools. A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt called upon us to preserve some bits of the America of Daniel Boone and Lewis and Clark. He wanted Americans of every generation to have a chance to reduce life to its lowest terms and sleep on the ground out where the wind rustles through the trees at dusk.
Forever.
We need to protect a few scattered sanctuaries where we can go to refresh the human spirit without being reminded of the amenities and the infrastructure and the daily hum and drum of our lives. It can be argued that we don't need much such space, but we certainly need some. Roosevelt called American wilderness places "our cathedrals," our Notre Dame, our St. Peter's, our Parthenon, and he insisted that we treat them as lovingly as Europeans maintain their sacred grounds.
Above all, we need to show, even if only in this modest and symbolic way, that we have the capacity to restrain ourselves as we come to terms with the landscape on which we have chosen to live. Acts of restraint, as every theologian knows, dignify our experience, and bring a greater measure of purpose and integrity to everything we do. Fully 89 percent of North Dakota is farmed and ranched. Only 2.7 percent is owned by the federal government. Over in our neighbor Montana, the feds (that is, we the people) own 29.9 percent.
This seems to me like a proposal that everyone can support, if only because it is so extremely modest. There are no "takings" here. Some state lands would have to be transferred to federal jurisdiction; a few acres of private inholding would need to be purchased to secure the integrity of the parcels. Nobody's barn has to be torn down. Carefully regulated grazing and hunting still will be permitted on the wilderness acreage. If there is oil under these small parcels, it can almost certainly be reached by slant drilling.
Nobody can argue that this proposal represents a slippery slope or a Trojan Horse designed to open the door to bigger, wilder proposals that will follow if this one is successful. There is almost no land left in North Dakota that can qualify as wilderness. If this proposal succeeds, it's the end of the wilderness story: just two-fifths of 1 percent of North Dakota, while the other 99.6 percent can continue forever to be not wilderness.
At this point in American history, most wilderness proposals require real sacrifice. They represent hard choices that have to be made in our attempt to balance the magnificence and sublimity of the American West against other important values like economic development and the sanctity of private property. This North Dakota proposal, to redesignate 68,000 acres already in the public domain as wilderness rather than roadless, is as painless a wilderness plan as ever has been advanced.
Let's get it done. Now. While there's still time.
Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@aol.com.
