The Wilderness Act called for “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” In 1964, it was one of three pieces of legislation—along with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act—that essentially determined what kind of country we were going to be.
The Wilderness Act protected about 5 percent of the country’s land, encompassing more than 100 million acres in 44 states.
That total may soon rise.
On Feb. 26, the Protecting America’s Wilderness and Public Lands Act was passed in the House of Representatives. One of the bills in that package was the Central Coast Heritage Protection Act.
If passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Biden, the act will protect 290,000 acres in the Los Padres National Forest and Carrizo Plain National Monument as new wilderness or potential wilderness and two new national scenic areas covering 35,000 acres, establish the 400-mile Condor Trail from LA to Monterey, and secure wild and scenic river status for 159 miles of streams.
It took eight years for the Central Coast Heritage Protection Act to get where it is today, and Rep. Salad Carbajal tenaciously kept the bill alive during a hostile political era, when the proposed legislation passed the House twice but failed in the Senate. The act is now strongly supported by the Biden administration, which has adopted the goals of “30×30”: protecting 30 percent of the nation’s landscape and coastal waters by 2030.
But the deal is not done. Your assistance is required. Thank our Senate champions and urge them to do all they can to persuade their colleagues to vote for the Senate version of the Protecting America’s Wilderness and Public Lands Act, which includes seven other bills covering a total of 2.7 million acres and more than 1,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Washington.
And thank Rep. Carbajal.
Andrew Christie
Sierra Club, Santa Lucia chapter
This article appears in Mar 11-18, 2021.