Utah Issues
What Can You Do?
Volunteer for a service trip in one of the Utah forests.
Help build the campaign. Contact Tim Peterson, Utah Forest Wilderness Program Director, to learn how.
Check out our Utah Forest Wilderness blog for the latest info on the campaign, including spotlight features on areas that deserve protection.
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Protecting wildlands has long been a controversial issue in Utah — even before Congress passed the Wilderness Act of 1964.
Notoriously pro-development in its policies, Utah was the only western state in the continental U.S. to not gain a single acre of wilderness from the landmark act. The legislative history since then does no justice to Utah’s spectacular wilderness resource, having designated a paltry 1.1 million acres in just 4 bills over nearly 47 years since the passage of the Wilderness Act. Even the state of Florida, at just 26 percent federal ownership, has more designated wilderness than Utah at more than 1.4 million acres. At about 70 percent federal ownership, Utah still contains wilderness quality lands on BLM and Forest Service lands in excess of 14 million acres.
Our challenge is to work in a very difficult political climate to make Utah’s contribution to the National Wilderness Preservation System better reflect the truly wild nature of the state’s exceptional backcountry. More than just increasing the number of acres for the sake of a statistical “victory,” the protections we support must be meaningful and not overly compromised in terms of either language or areas released from existing administrative protections.
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