Olympic National Park

The Size of Wilderness

One of the primary challenges to designated wilderness areas is their size. With some exceptions the wilderness act requires at least 5000 acres before an area can be designated wilderness. 5000 acres sounds substantial, but it is only 7.8 square miles—an easy day hike. There are 645 wilderness areas. Of them 360 are smaller than 30,000 acres. For scale consider that Walt Disney World is about 30,000 acres. In fact, the landscaping alone at Disney World occupies around 3,500 acres—larger than 49 of the wilderness areas. The Olympic wilderness is substantially larger at 876,669 acres, but not large enough to be worry free. The now famous spotted owl has recently been receiving unexpected competition in the park from the larger, more aggressive bared owl, which threatens to displace it. Scientists suspect that the clear cut around the boundaries of the park have removed a buffer between old growth and open ground allowing the barred owl to make successful forays in the denser regions of the wilderness.

In such small isolated pockets wilderness does not have a defense against ecological shocks. A drought, fire, or invasive insect can destroy an entire species in one blow. Consider the trees in the Smoky Mountains. In only a few years the appetite of the balsam wooly adelgid has all but wiped out the Fraser fir tree. Even in a place as large as the Smoky Mountains the disappearance of a major overstory species is a shock from which the ecosystem cannot easily recover. The dilemma faced by the wilderness areas in the continental US is something to think about when deciding how much land is necessary in the last remaining viable wilderness areas left in our country, those in Alaska, which are under enormous political pressure due to the resources they contain.