1982: George Hendee on Wilderness Management

George Hendee and two colleagues wrote the book, literally, on wilderness management in 1978. In the following passages from a 1982 paper, Hendee describes a number of challenges and guidelines for land managers of the nation's wilderness areas. Hendee responds to the "purity question" addressed by Forest Service Chief Edward Cliff in 1963 (see Timeline), the addition of many eastern wildernesses, and pressures caused by wilderness areas' increased popularity. Finally, Hendee attempts to resolve the paradox of "wilderness management."

"Clearly, the importance of wilderness preservation has increased; it certainly has received greater priority and the NWPS is larger than the Congressional authors of the Wilderness Act of 1964 anticipated... But the Wilderness Act proved to be more a beginning than an end of the thrust for Wilderness. In particular, the amount of acreage eligible for wilderness classification increased as the size, and naturalness and solitude requirements decreased, as the Wilderness concept was refined for its applicability to National Forest roadless areas...

Thus the wilderness concept was liberalized and expanded, particularly in the East; some areas are included that only a few short years ago were thought to be unqualified because they were too small or deficient in naturalness and solitude. Of course, this can leave managers with a major challenge...how to manage and protect wilderness in the East with the same enthusiasm and positive results as we've achieved in the west where we have more experience... For example, whereas most western areas represent a residual--land remaining after allocations to all other uses--many areas in the East have experienced logging, homesteading and ORV use and have evolved to wilderness status as a highest and best use. Furthermore, the rate of increase in use of wilderness in the Southeast is growing more than twice as fast as the two and one-half percent rate of increase per year average for all national forest wilderness...

For many years people have argued that Wilderness management is a paradox since Wilderness conditions are the antithesis of managed conditions. That concept is valid and thus Wilderness management actions are justified only to the extent necessary to maintain thresholds of naturalness and solitude that distinguish an area as Wilderness... The challenge is to do only what is necessary to maintain that condition.

Merely leaving an area alone is not management and can result in a loss of naturalness and solitude as a plethora of influences impact an area. Heavy recreation use is one obvious influence, but unnatural conditions can also evolve from exclusion of fire, habitat manipulations from grazing livestock, physical impacts from mining, scientific research, snow or water measurement, access to inholdings, and so forth...

Through the Wilderness Act of 1964, our society elected to preserve selected primeval areas in a National Wilderness Preservation System. But it is obvious that Wilderness areas vary in their primeval qualities--in their naturalness and solitude... The concept of nondegradation allows us to accommodate this diversity without compromising the overall standards of the Wilderness System...

Management then seeks to prevent further degradation of current naturalness and solitude in each Wilderness, and to restore substandard conditions to minimum levels...

The issue of Wilderness purity has plagued management for years. The nondegradation principle offers resolution to this issue by embracing a range of purity depending upon prevailing conditions in each Wilderness."

Source:

"Principles of Wilderness Management: A Look Beyond the Manual," John C. Hendee, Assistant Station Director, Southeastern Forest Experiment Station, paper presented to the U.S. Forest Service Eastern Region Wilderness Management Workshop, Gorham, New Hampshire, October 1982.