California Protected Areas - National Wilderness Preservation System

National Wilderness Preservation System

There are 148 wilderness areas in California totaling just over 15,000,000 acres (61,000 km2). The largest is Death Valley Wilderness at 3,055,413 acres (12,364.82 km2), the largest federally designated wilderness in the continental United States, and the smallest is the Rocks and Islands Wilderness at 5 acres (20,000 m2). The wilderness areas are managed by the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service. It should be noted that rarely, if ever, are designated wilderness areas stand alone protected areas, and thus their areas are, in all likelihood, already accounted for in the various agencies' inventories.

Read more about this topic:  California Protected Areas

Famous quotes containing the words national, wilderness, preservation and/or system:

    “It is no part of the functions of the National Government to find employment for the people, and if we were to appropriate a hundred millions for his purpose, we should only be taxing 40 millions of people to keep a few thousand employed.”
    —James A. Garfield (1831–1881)

    “He sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye.”
    —Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 32:10.

    “The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
    —Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)

    “Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people’s own failure as individuals.”
    —Václav Havel (b. 1936)