"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
Howard Zahniser, author of The Wilderness Act
It took over sixty drafts and eight years before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed The Wilderness Act into law on September 3, 1964. Originally, 9.1 million acres of federal land was protected which has now bloomed to over 109.5 million acres today. Beings that there are 640 acres in a square mile, today's Wilderness protected lands are around 171,093.75 square miles. (For comparison sake, total acreage of California [land and water] is 163,694.74 square miles.) Wonderfully, that's quite a bit of preserved territory protected from mans' vices.
