One hundred years ago, conservationist Aldo Leopold proposed designating 500,000 acres of land in the Gila National Forest as an area where no roads could be built.

This led to the first wilderness area in the United States—40 years before the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964.

Now communities across the country, including in New Mexico, are celebrating the centennial of the nation’s first wilderness.

Environmental historian and conservation biologist Curt Meine reflected on this milestone in an interview with NM Political Report. 

Meine currently resides in Wisconsin where he teaches as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, but he has worked in the southwest in the past and is familiar with the Gila Wilderness. He is also a Leopold biographer and is involved with the Aldo Leopold Foundation as a senior fellow.

He highlighted that this is not just the centennial anniversary of the Gila Wilderness. This year also marks the 75th anniversary of the posthumous publication of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. 

“That book, of course, would go on to become one of the most influential books in the history of conservation and the environmental movement,” Meine said.

He said that the two anniversaries provide the opportunity to reflect not only upon Aldo Leopold’s legacy but also upon what the nation has learned and the future challenges that the country is facing, including sustainability and rapid environmental change.

Meine said that when Leopold proposed designating the Gila as a wilderness area, there was no formal way of designating large undeveloped tracts of public land. The designation of the Gila Wilderness set a precedent for future protection of public lands.

Dynamic thinking about wild lands

Meine said that Leopold was a dynamic thinker whose views on conservation and public lands evolved over the course of his life. He said that while he can’t tell people what Leopold might think about the Gila Wilderness today, he can tell them how Leopold could have thought about it.

“First, you would have thought about it in terms of the history and the evolution of ideas and practices in conservation, and he would have recognized that what he was thinking in 1924 is a lot different from what he was even thinking at the end of his life, much less what we are thinking about now,” he said.

Meine said he personally thinks Leopold would have appreciated the greater understanding people have today about the landscape.

Meine said Leopold saw the rise of the automobile and the increase in the numbers of roads cutting across the American west to accommodate the new vehicles. Leopold became concerned that the country would lose large areas of roadless land.

At that time, Leopold was not alone in his concerns.

“He was part of a movement of people mainly in the conservation movement to protect larger roadless areas from being developed as the American industrial economy was expanding so quickly in the 1920s,” Meine said.

The idea of a wilderness area was different than earlier ideas for protecting wildlands, including national parks and national forests.

One difference is that national parks are designated with tourism in mind and are often developed to facilitate tourism.

“Leopold and his like-minded contemporaries were arguing we have to reserve at least some parts of the landscape that are not intended to be fully developed for human use, or at least not intensive human use,” Meine said.

While national parks provide opportunities for tourism and national forests provide timber and ecological benefits including clean water, Leopold and his contemporaries wanted to preserve lands like the Gila so that people can continue to “have the opportunity to experience wild places.” Those opportunities were rapidly disappearing.

He said that at the point in his career where Leopold successfully lobbied for protections of the Gila Wilderness he was particularly interested in recreational opportunities in wild spaces.

That would later change over Leopold’s lifetime and he would begin to value the cultural and historical significance of the lands as well as their ecological significance. In his later years, Leopold would increasingly refer to the spiritual values of wild lands, Meine said.

Meine also said that Leopold would “come to understand that in being conservationists or being just people who care about land, we always have to be thinking dynamically, we have to be thinking about not only [the changing ecological condition of the land], but changing cultural values.”

Changing societal views on wilderness

In the case of wilderness, Meine said that the country has long overlooked the Indigenous knowledge and experiences on the landscape. That is currently changing.

He said that starting in the 1970s and 1980s, people began questioning the concept of wilderness as an area that has been “untouched by humans.”

“Historians and others outside of the conservation movement proper were beginning to say ‘no, we have to recognize that all land has history,’….landscapes have, to varying degrees, been affected by people for millennia,” Meine said.

He said that human presence has been an intimate part of all landscapes where humans have occurred.

Leopold, while aware of the Native American presence on the landscape, did not think about the Indigenous people in the way that people do today when discussing conservation, Meine said.

Meine said that a strong critique of the idea of the pristine, untouched wilderness began to take hold in the 1990s.

He said that critique would not have surprised Leopold who understood that even the most “wild parts of our landscape” have been in some way impacted by humans.

“This anniversary maybe provides a positive opportunity for taking the next step, recognizing these histories, many of them deeply troubled and full of trauma for the Indigenous communities,” Meine said.

He said because the landscape has been protected, it also provides an opportunity “if not reconciliation, for moving ahead with a sense of shared value, a sense of the shared and the special value of these landscapes less affected relative to the rest of the landscape by the heavy imprint of humans.”

Opportunities amid climate change 

It’s not just the conversations around wilderness that have changed since Leopold’s time. The Gila Wilderness is a bit different now than it was during Leopold’s day. Vast areas have been charred by major wildfires like the Black Fire of 2022 that was the second largest fire in New Mexico’s recorded history.

“The Gila turns out to be quite a laboratory for understanding fire along with other parts of the Southwest, in part because it’s large enough and the way it’s been protected has allowed more or less natural fire regimes to play out over the decades,” Meine said. “It’s probably one of the best landscapes in all in the West for understanding the historic and cultural role of fire and how that is changing and what we need to anticipate.”

One of the reasons that these large fires have scarred the Gila landscape is climate change. At the same time, wild and protected spaces like the Gila are increasingly recognized as part of the solution to address the warming world and the loss of biodiversity.

Meine said the wilderness areas show both the limits and value of protected wild lands.

“They show the limits because obviously, boundary lines are permeable,” he said. “They exist only on maps and in our human minds. They don’t exist for the planet, the soil and the water and the climate. So climate change and other global scale phenomena…always impact what goes on in the ‘protected’ wilderness land.”

At the same time, they provide opportunities as what Leopold called land laboratories. 

“They do help us to understand environmental change in ways that we can’t on other landscapes,” Meine said.