What areas are most deserving of wilderness protection?
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the early days
In the early ‘90s, John Wallin landed a job at the Patagonia store in Washington, DC, eventually working for the outdoor clothing company at their distribution center in Reno, Nevada. Even though Fortune magazine has called Patagonia the “coolest company on the planet,” they let John stay for almost seven years. Go figure!
Oh, just kidding… One of the coolest things Patagonia does is encourage their employees to do environmental internships. Employees can leave their jobs for up to two months to work full-time for the environmental group of their choice, and Patagonia pays their regular salaries and benefits while they’re gone.
John and a bunch of his co-workers jumped at the chance. Before long, about 25 people participated in an internship with Friends of Nevada Wilderness to inventory potential Wilderness in Nevada. Using GPS units, cameras and topo maps, they mapped portions of Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs). In a state with 48 million acres of BLM-managed land, the undertaking was massive.
The job was so big, in fact, that John soon realized he needed to dive in for the long haul. He quit his job and founded the Nevada Wilderness Project in May of 1999. And even better, his bosses at Patagonia were supportive… not because they were glad to see him go, but because that is actually one of the acceptable outcomes of Patagonia’s internship program.
They gave him office space in their Reno distribution center, a phone line and one of the best desks Patagonia owns: a huge, library-style, double desk – one of those heavy wooden desks where two people sit facing one another. It's a twin to
the desk Yvon and Malinda Chouinard used when they were getting their company off the ground in the late 1960s. That desk helped the Nevada Wilderness Project get off the ground in 1999, and we still use it today.
So the Nevada Wilderness Project began organizing at the grassroots to help write and pass federal legislation to designate land in Nevada as Wilderness. Approximately every two years, we saw success.
Since 1999, 2,530,188 acres have been designated Wilderness (that’s 3,953 square miles - or equal to two Delawares), with another 500,000 acres of National Conservation Areas. This includes:
Click on those Acts mentioned above to read more about how they were formulated, championed and finally came to pass. (It’s good reading… for real!)
All of the legislative efforts in which we've been involved—and are likely to be involved with in the future—required incredible patience and an understanding that Wilderness is not the engine that makes these congressional imperatives possible. Growth is what makes these bills possible. It was—and remains—a tough pill to swallow.
To ignore congressional intent and the demographic and cultural changes sweeping the West would have put our Wilderness lands at risk. Waiting for better times, better congressional representation or just something “better” was not an option. We chose to engage in challenging debates because we strongly believed that not doing so would only result in losses for Wilderness.
We’re proud of our history, but we also believe it is important for us as people and an organization to grow, adapt, take a few risks and embrace change. Call us silly, but we’re actually optimistic about the future and energized by the new mission we adopted in 2009. If you like what you’ve read here, please join us. We wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with public lands protection in Nevada without grassroots support, and we know it’s essential for our success in the future.
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