As summer approaches, millions of Americans begin planning or heading to state and national parks to try to explore outdoor recreation opportunities across the country. Many of them will head to the wilderness areas of the United States - 110 million acres, mostly in the West, protected by the strictest federal protection rules.

When Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964, it described wilderness areas as places that evoke mystery and miracles: "The Earth and its living communities are not created by humans, and the man himself is a visitor who does not leave behind." These are wild landscapes that present nature in the most primitive form.

The law requires the federal government to protect these areas “for the permanent benefit of the entire people.” Wild areas have been found in national parks, the U.S. Land Administration, National Forests, and protected lands supervised by U.S. fish and wildlife refuges.

In early May 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives began considering allowing federal land to be sold in six counties in Nevada and Utah, five of which contain wilderness areas. On the surface, these sales were meant to promote affordable housing, but the reality is that U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei is a proposal made by Republicans in Nevada, and the standard process of communicating with federal land is a standard process that adapts to developments in certain places but protects wilderness.

Whether Americans visit public lands or know when to cross the wilderness boundaries, as environmental historians, we believe that everyone will still benefit from the existence and conservation of these precious places.

This belief is an idea that eloquently expressed and popularized by the famous Western writer Wallace Stegner 65 years ago. His eloquence helped to launch the modern environmental movement and gave the idea that American public land was a fundamental component of American national identity and a cornerstone of American freedom.

The origin of humility

In 1958, Congress established a review committee on outdoor recreation resources to examine outdoor recreation in the United States in order not only determine what Americans want, but also consider how these needs and desires may change for decades.

One of the members of the committee is David E. Pesonen, who worked at the University of California, Berkeley’s Field Research Center. He was asked to examine the wilderness and its relationship with outdoor recreation. Pessonin later became a well-known environmental lawyer and leader of the Sierra Club. But at that time, Pessonin didn't know what to say to the wilderness.

But he knew someone who did so. Pesonen was impressed with the wild landscape of the American West in Stegner's 1954 history, "beyond the first meridian: John Wesley Powell and the second opening in the West." So he wrote to Stegner, who was seeking help at Stanford University to express the idea of ​​the wilderness.

Stegner's response was written one afternoon, about why he cared about preserving the wilderness's ready-made riffs. The letter, known as the "Wild Letter", marked a turning point in American politics and protection history.

Pesonen shared the letter with other members of the committee, which also shared it with the newly installed interior director of the room, Stewart Udall. Udall found its prose so profound that he read it at the 7th Wilderness Conference in San Francisco in 1961, a speech aired by local FM radio station KCBS. The Sierra Club published the letter in the minutes of meeting litigation later that year.

However, it was not until June 17, 1962 that the letter attracted national audiences and attracted the imagination of generations of Americans.

Eloquent appeal

In the letter, Stigner connects the idea of ​​the wilderness to the basic part of American identity. He called the wilderness “thing that helps to form our character, which certainly shapes our history as a nation…the challenges that our role as a person form…() helps to set Americans apart until we forget it in the roar of industrial cities, and are more fortunate than other men.”

He believes that without a wild place, the United States will be like every other industrialized place in the world.

In the letter, Stegner is not concerned about how the wilderness supports outdoor entertainment on public lands. He doesn't care if there were roads, trails, homesteads and even natural resource extractions in the wilderness area. He cares about Americans protecting and enjoying the freedom of these places. Stegner recognizes that protecting and restraining oneself from consuming is as important as freedom of consumption.

Perhaps most importantly, the wilderness is “an invisible spiritual resource,” he wrote, and this place brings “our hope and excitement” to the country, “even if we have never been involved in it for a year, it is good for our mental health.”

Without it, Stigner lamented, “Americans will never get rid of the stink of noise, exhaust, humans and cars in their own country.” To him, the country’s natural cathedral and vaulted ceilings of pure blue sky are sacred spaces for Americans, just as many structures they worship on weekends.

Stegner wrote the letter in a national debate about the value of wild places facing future developments. "As a nation, we will have something that will appear if we let the remaining wilderness be destroyed," he wrote. Stegner argues that if unprotected, those wildernesses that helped shape American identity will fall on the same exploitative forces he is considered unbound capitalism that nationalized over the past century. Since then, every generation has an obligation to protect these wild places.

Stegner's letter to the wilderness became a call for a rally through the Wilderness Law. The closing verdict of the letter was Stigner's best: "Even if we never drive to look forward to its superiority, we only need that wilderness country. Because it can reassure ourselves of our sanity, it is part of hope, it is part of hope."

This sentence is "the geography of hope" and is Stegner's most famous line. The meaning of wilderness has become a shorthand: the wilderness that defines American characters on the Western border, the wild space that Americans have protected, and the natural place where Americans hope for the future of the planet.

The "Best Idea" in the United States

Stegner returns to the topic outlined in The Wild Letters twenty years later: the article "We Have the Best Idea of ​​All Time: Overview" published in the Wild magazine in the spring of 1983.

Stegner announced in response to the Reagan administration’s efforts to reduce the protection of the national park system that the park is “absolutely the United States, absolutely democratic.” He said they reflected that we were a country with the best of us and not the worst of us, and without them, millions of Americans would have been poorer in their lives (including him).

Public land is more than just wilderness or national parks. They are places for work and play. They provide towns with natural resources, wildlife habitats, clean air, clean water and recreational opportunities, and are spread throughout metropolitan areas. As Stegner said, they are a place to heal cynicism and common hope.

As Americans travel to public lands, Stigner's words still resonate and enjoy the beauty of the wilderness protected by wilderness legislation this summer. With the number of visitors increasing every year and the historic low agency budgets increase, we think remembering these places are precious to all Americans. We agree with Stegner that the wilderness on public land is more valuable to the expression of American collective identity and freedom than real estate that can be sold or extracted.