Gila National Forest: The Birth of the American Wilderness Ethic

On June third, nineteen twenty-four, a young Forest Service employee named Aldo Leopold persuaded his supervisors to designate five hundred and seventy-four thousand acres of the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico as the first administratively protected wilderness area in the United States. No roads would be built in it. No permanent structures. The land would be managed to remain, as Leopold put it, in its natural state.

The designation was not a law. It was an administrative decision, vulnerable to reversal by any future supervisor. The Wilderness Act of nineteen sixty-four, which created the legal framework for the National Wilderness Preservation System, came forty years later, and the original Gila Wilderness was formally folded into it. But the act traces its intellectual lineage to Leopold's nineteen twenty-four decision, and Leopold's decision traces to a decade of observation in the Gila's mountains and canyons.

Leopold had come to the Southwest as a game manager. His job was to eliminate predators, wolves and mountain lions and bears, to maximize the deer populations that hunters wanted. He did it efficiently. Then, in a moment he later described in an essay called Thinking Like a Mountain, he watched a wolf he had shot die in the Gila country, and he saw something in its eyes that reorganized the way he thought about land. The wolves had been keeping the deer from eating the mountains bare. Without the wolves, the deer multiplied and grazed the hillsides to collapse. The mountain, Leopold wrote, lived in fear of its deer.

The Gila Wilderness today covers approximately five hundred and fifty-eight thousand acres, slightly smaller than the original designation due to subsequent boundary adjustments. The Aldo Leopold Wilderness, designated in nineteen eighty, was split off from it as a separate adjoining unit honoring the man whose thinking it began. Together they form the largest roadless area in New Mexico.

The wolves Leopold watched die have been partially replaced. A Mexican gray wolf reintroduction program, operating since nineteen ninety-eight, has restored a small breeding population to the Gila country. The descendants of the wolves Leopold killed are back in the mountains where he first understood why they should never have been removed.