The grizzly bear turned quickly, and I stopped.

Her hair shone silver in the sun as she turned back to her cub. They were savoring sweet huckleberries sprouted in soils enriched by the ashes of a wildfire half a century ago. A necklace of beaver ponds graced the valley below, supporting a diverse community of plants and animals while storing precious water vital to human communities downstream. I felt in the presence of something wild in a landscape that glowed with natural integrity of its living things.

I was young and on a high peak in the Bob Marshall Wilderness of Montana, not far from Glacier National Park. It’s one of many wilderness areas across America protected by the Wilderness Act, enacted 50 years ago today by Congress with broad bi-partisan support. In terms of America’s best ideas, wilderness ranks alongside National Parks.

Recently, some neo-conservationists have argued that the Wilderness Act is facing a mid-life crisis, that somehow the notion of Wilderness is an anachronism in the ‘Anthropocene’ era of human domination of the planet. They argue that we should focus on domesticating landscapes to serve economic growth of the human juggernaut rather than protecting remaining wild lands and preventing human-caused extinction of species. Other conservationists – myself included – disagree.

Read the full op-ed on National Geographic >>