Mr. President, as founder of the Senate Wilderness and Public Lands Caucus, I led a Senate resolution commemorating the upcoming 45th anniversary of the Wilderness Act of 1964. I am delighted the Senate passed this resolution last night, and am very pleased that Senator McCain joined me in leading this effort. I also thank our other colleagues for their support as cosponsors: Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Evan Bayh (D-IN), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Sam Brownback (R-KS), Ronald Burris (D-IL), Robert Byrd (D-WV), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Benjamin Cardin (D-MD), Susan Collins (R-ME), Chris Dodd (D-CT), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Judd Gregg (R-NH), John Kerry (D-MA), Joe Lieberman (ID-CT), Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Patty Murray (D-WA), Mark Udall (D-CO), Tom Udall (D-NM), George Voinovich (R-OH) and Ron Wyden (D-OR).

This Wilderness Act was signed into law on September 3, 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, seven years after the first wilderness bill was introduced by Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota. The final bill, sponsored by Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, passed the Senate by a vote of 73-12 on April 9, 1963, and passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 373-1 on July 30, 1964. 

The Wilderness Act of 1964 established a National Wilderness Preservation System "to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness." The law gives Congress the authority to designate wilderness areas, and directs the federal land management agencies to review the lands under their responsibility for their wilderness potential. 

Under the Wilderness Act, wilderness is defined as "an area of undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence which generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable." The creation of a national wilderness system marked an innovation in the American conservation movement—wilderness would be a place where our "management strategy" would be to leave lands essentially undeveloped. 

The original Wilderness Act established 9.1 million acres of Forest Service land in 54 wilderness areas. The support for wilderness has continued through the 111th Congress with the creation of 52 new wilderness areas in the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009. Today, the wilderness system is comprised of over 109 million acres in over 750 wilderness areas, across 44 states, and administered by four federal agencies: the Forest Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service in the Department of the Interior. 

As we in this body know well, the passage and enactment of the Wilderness Act was a remarkable accomplishment that required steady, bipartisan commitment, institutional support, and strong leadership. The United States Senate was instrumental in shaping this very important law, and this anniversary gives us the opportunity to recognize this role.

As a Senator from Wisconsin, I feel a special bond with this issue. The concept of wilderness is inextricably linked with Wisconsin. Wisconsin has produced great wilderness thinkers and leaders in the wilderness movement such as Senator Gaylord Nelson and the writer and conservationist Aldo Leopold, whose A Sand County Almanac helped to galvanize the environmental movement. Also notable is Sierra Club founder John Muir, whose birthday is the day before Earth Day. Wisconsin also produced Sigurd Olson, one of the founders of The Wilderness Society.

I am privileged to hold the Senate seat held by Gaylord Nelson, a man for whom I have the greatest admiration and respect. He is a well-known and widely respected former Senator and former two-term Governor of Wisconsin, and the founder of Earth Day. In his later years, he devoted his time to the protection of wilderness by serving as a counselor to The Wilderness Society—an activity which was quite appropriate for someone who was also a cosponsor, along with former Senator Proxmire, of the bill that became the Wilderness Act. 

The testimony at congressional hearings and the discussion of the bill in the press of the day reveals Wisconsin's crucial role in the long and continuing American debate about our wild places, and in the development of the Wilderness Act. The names and ideas of John Muir, Sigurd Olson, and, especially, Aldo Leopold, appear time and time again in the legislative history.

Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, chairman of what was then called the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, stated that his support of the wilderness system was the direct result of discussions he had held almost forty years before with Leopold, who was then in the Southwest with the Forest Service. It was Leopold who, while with the Forest Service, advocated the creation of a primitive area in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico in 1923. The Gila Primitive Area formally became part of the wilderness system when the Wilderness Act became law. 

In a statement in favor of the Wilderness Act in the New York Times, then-Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall discussed ecology and what he called "a land ethic" and referred to Leopold as the instigator of the modern wilderness movement. At a Senate hearing in 1961, David Brower of the Sierra Club went so far as to claim that "no man who reads Leopold with an open mind will ever again, with a clear conscience, be able to step up and testify against the wilderness bill." For others, the ideas of Olson and Muir—particularly the idea that preserving wilderness is a way for us to better understand our country's history and the frontier experience—provided a justification for the wilderness system.

I would like to remind colleagues of the words of Aldo Leopold in his 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac. He said, "The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not the television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little is known about it."

We still have much to learn, but this anniversary of the Wilderness Act reminds us how far we have come and how the commitment to public lands that the Senate and the Congress demonstrated forty-five years ago continues to benefit all Americans. 

I would like to recognize the following organizations for their efforts to continue protecting our wild places: American Rivers, Alaska Wilderness League, Campaign for America’s Wilderness, Earthjustice, Natural Resources Defense Council, Pew Environment Group, Republicans for Environmental Protection, Sierra Club, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and The Wilderness Society.