If you pay attention to the doings of our national government, you’d certainly conclude we live in unusually fractious times, all about harsh rhetoric among politicians struggling for partisan advantage. But some politicians are doing very good things-and in a thoroughly bipartisan way. A case in point: preservation of a decent sample of the original America, our heritage of wilderness landscapes. Over the years, Congress and presidents of both political parties have worked together to extend protection of wilderness areas to some 107 million acres, all parts of the public lands we all own in common. You may be able to look up, as you read this, and see one of our protected wilderness areas on the horizon: the more than half a million acres of wilderness protected within Joshua Tree National Park. This special protection for the wildest parts of the national park was signed into law in October 1976 by President Gerald Ford, who had earlier told Congress that preserving such wilderness areas “serves a basic need of all Americans, even those who may never visit a wilderness area-the preservation of a vital element of our heritage.” Teddy Roosevelt, himself a committed conservationist, felt that conservation was a deeply moral obligation. Preserving generous samples of our wild heritage, he felt, was not merely for “the people now alive, but (for) the unborn people,” those “within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction.” This deeper purpose for preserving wilderness has great public appeal, reflected in polls that invariably show an overwhelming majority of Americans support preserving more of our wilderness heritage as something we simply ought to do for the benefit of the generations that come after us. If ever there were something on which Republicans and Democrats can agree, this is it. Wilderness preservation is a bipartisan commitment of our national leaders. This has been true since the first wilderness legislation was sponsored in Congress in 1956-by the liberals’ liberal, Sen. Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota Democrat, and a conservative Republican, Rep. John Saylor of Pennsylvania. The result: the historic Wilderness Act of 1964, widely heralded as one of America’s five or six most important environmental achievements. In California, the bipartisan honor role begins with a Republican, Senator Thomas Kuchel, a leading champion of the Wilderness Act, and comes up to date with Sen. Barbara Boxer whose vision to protect over two and a half million acres has resulted in the designation of new wilderness in several parts of California. Most recently, her partnership with Representative Mike Thompson resulted in the enactment of a law to conserve more than a quarter million acres of new wilderness areas along California’s rugged north coast. California’s bipartisan champions for wilderness also include Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rep. Hilda Solis and Riverside County’s own Rep. Mary Bono. Rep. Bono is refining new Wilderness and Wild and Scenic River legislation for Riverside County based on a bill she wrote late in the last session of Congress. She is doing an exemplary job, just as when she spearheaded the creation of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument in 2000. Working in the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt, Rep. Bono is carefully consulting with a wide range of local stakeholders to work out a wilderness plan that meets the needs of today and tomorrow. Her visionary efforts are helping to ensure that Riverside County’s most scenic natural treasures will be passed on unspoiled for future generations to use and enjoy. This story is still unfolding. But we are heartened by the work that Rep. Bono, Senator Boxer and their colleagues are doing, across partisan lines, for wilderness preservation. Teddy Roosevelt would have one word for their efforts: “Bully!”Bill Havert is executive director of the Coachella Valley Mountains Conservancy in Palm Desert; Geary Hund is Desert and Monuments Program director with the Wilderness Society in Idyllwild; Doug Scott is policy director of the Campaign for America’s Wilderness in Seattle and author of “The Enduring Wilderness: Protecting Our Natural Heritage through the Wilderness Act” (Fulcrum Publishing 2004).
