History
During the 1950s and 1960s, as the American transportation system was on the rise, concern for clean air and water quality began to grow. A conservation movement began to take place with the intent of establishing designated wilderness areas. Howard Zahniser created the first draft of the Wilderness Act in 1956. It took nine years and 65 rewrites before the Wilderness Act was finally passed in 1964. The Wilderness Act of 1964 (Public Law 88-577), which established the NWPS, was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3, 1964. The Wilderness Act mandated that the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service review all federal lands under their jurisdiction for wilderness areas to include in the NWPS. The Great Swamp in New Jersey became the first formally designated wilderness refuge in the United States. It had been declared a wildlife refuge on November 3, 1960. In 1966 it had been declared a National Natural Landmark and, in 1968, it was given wilderness status. The Bureau of Land Management was not required to review its lands for inclusion in the NWPS, however, until in 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act was passed by Congress. This resulted in the creation of hundreds of wilderness areas within already protected federally administered lands, consisting of approximately 9.1 million acres (3,700,000 ha).
This act clarified the landholdings of the bureau of land management and set up a deadline for review of the lands by November 1980. This deadline corresponds to the dramatic spike of acreage added for that year and also explains why 1980 became the year with the most wilderness acreage added in the United States by far. As of August 2008, a total of 704 separate wilderness areas, encompassing 107,514,938 acres (43,509,752 ha) had been set aside. With the passage of the Omnibus Public Lands Act in March 2009, there are now 756 wilderness areas. The Elkhorn Ridge Wilderness, which was officially initiated into the system on January 13, 2011, is the newest area protected by the act. This came five years after the 2006 law that designated the area to the system due to restorations on 1,565 acres of land reacquired from the public.
Read more about this topic: National Wilderness Preservation System
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