Letter to the Editor - PBS film misrepresents wilderness areas

Dear Editor:

The rebroadcast of the 2019 film “Wild by Law and Nature,” produced by Montana PBS, deserves comment because the film misrepresents wilderness and the issues involved.

A big problem with the film is that there is no mention that Congress passed the Wilderness Act and the Land and Water Conservation Fund at the same time in order to provide for both preservation and recreation on separate and distinct public lands.

The word “untrammeled” is misused. One speaker even misrepresented wilderness as “untouched by man.” Merriam-Webster defines the noun “trammel” as “something impeding activity, progress, or freedom: RESTRAINT.” Merriam-Webster defines “untrammeled” as “not confined, limited, or impeded.”

The Wilderness Act of 1964 refers to wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,” where people do not restrict the land, the flora, the fauna, the water — where Nature is free to be natural.

Wilderness allows multiple uses, just not most commercial uses and not mechanized use.

In Montana the National Forest Service manages over ten million acres of land with road access. Yet in the film, multiple recreationists claim that mechanized, even motorized, access is needed to the less than one million acres of roadless Wilderness Study Areas. Some of the WSAs are managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which also manages vast lands open to mechanized use.

To the commercial and mechanized side, ten million plus acres is not enough despite mechanized tools and toys making recreation on foot or horse unsafe, and also fragments wildlife habitat, disturbs wildlife, causes soil compaction and sedimentation of streams, introduces invasive species, and increases fire danger.

Tracy Stone-Manning provided the most accurate and significant statement in the film: “We just are not making any more undisturbed land on this planet.”

Sincerely,

Anne Millbrooke

Bozeman, formerly of Havre