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Hello. My name is Howie Wolke. As a professional wilderness guide for more than 30 years leading backpackers through designated and proposed wilderness from the Cabeza in Arizona to the Brooks Range in Alaska and from the Appalachians to the Pacific rainforest, I can confidently report that designated wilderness areas are our healthiest lands. But they are in decline. In my early years, I viewed wilderness stewardship as a body of issues that could wait, since bulldozers and chainsaws aimed at potential wilderness seemed more pressing. So my early efforts aimed at defending roadless areas and gaining wilderness designation for the most threatened of these lands. "Eroded trails can wait," I thought. But a lifetime of wilderness exploration has convinced me that, in the face of perceptible systemic decline, taking care of existing designated wilderness is urgent. That's why I am president of the board of directors of Wilderness Watch. Wilderness Watch is an activist organization. Bar none, it is the most effective environmental group in this country. Why? Because we work to fulfill the promise of the Wilderness Act, which provides the highest level of protection for our endangered public wildlands. Wilderness areas represent not only the healthiest and most ecologically intact landscapes, but offer future generations an opportunity to experience and appreciate primordial nature. At Wilderness Watch, the mission is to preserve the quality of the land, water, and the wild character of our existing 107 million acres of Wilderness. Of course this work embraces education, but it also includes activism, advocacy, and litigation in defense of these islands of integrity in a sea of rapid environmental change. Wilderness Watch can't succeed without your support. Ours is a "lean and mean" organization, and we are only as strong as our grassroots public support. Won’t you please support our vital work to keep the wild in wilderness? Click here to join us: http://www.wildernesswatch.org/join%20us/index.html Click here to learn more about Wilderness Watch: http://www.wildernesswatch.org/index.html
Biography A writer and wilderness outfitter, Howie Wolke worked for Friends of the Earth in the late 1970s before helping found Earth First! in 1981. In the early 90s, he and his wife founded Big Wild Advocates to actively pursue wilderness designation for the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park and the Gallatin Range in southwestern Montana, near their home. He is a former president of Wilderness Watch’s board of directors.
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