Comment from Amy Mower

I’m writing to oppose any revision to the National Park Service’s wilderness stewardship policy under Director’s Order 41, that would weaken protection for wilderness study areas, lands with wilderness characteristics, or recommended, proposed, and eligible wilderness. I have hiked and backpacked in several Wilderness Areas in the State of Washington, including the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, the Enchantments, and several Wilderness Areas in the North Cascades near Mt Baker and near the North Cascades National Park. In those areas, as well as adjacent to those existing Wilderness Areas, are also many areas that would include wilderness study areas, lands with wilderness characteristics, or recommended, proposed, and eligible wilderness. Each category of lands provides wildlife corridors and habitat protections, as well as silence and contemplation for hikers, writers, fishermen and hunters, as well as indigenous peoples. All of these categories of lands must continue to be protected for all Americans in perpetuity. The National Park Service’s wilderness stewardship policy under Director’s Order 41 is not as simple as the phrase “non-binding guidance” makes them sound. The National Park Service’s wilderness stewardship policy under Director’s Order 41 carries out the agencies’ duty, rooted in the Wilderness Act and the statutes governing these lands, to keep wild and roadless country managed so as not to impair its suitability for wilderness designation until Congress decides its fate. The National Park Service’s wilderness stewardship policy under Director’s Order 41 holds a finite inheritance of wild land intact so that a future Congress can retain the option to protect it permanently. Once roads, motorized use, or logging are admitted into these places, as contemplated in the proposed Revisions, the wilderness character that makes them eligible is destroyed, and no future Congress can vote it back. The loss is permanent in a way that almost nothing in public lands policy ever is. The agency has offered no reasoned justification for reversing decades of settled protection. A change of this magnitude, made without a documented basis and against the clear weight of public objection, would be arbitrary and capricious. I ask that the existing standards under the National Park Service’s wilderness stewardship policy under Director’s Order 41, be preserved in full, that no revision lower the standard of care for these lands, and that our wild lands continue to be protected as they have been.