50 years of the Wilderness Act: Balancing restrictions with new technologies

When the Wilderness Act was passed in 1964, NASA was sending astronauts into space guided by an IBM 360 computer with 1 megabyte of memory. That’s enough to hold one minute of a video on today’s iPhone. And that’s a conundrum for people like Pat Tabor. His Swan Mountain Outfitters lead paying customers into the Bob Marshall Wilderness for camping and hunting trips. That’s considered a “proper” commercial service under the special provisions clause of the Wilderness Act. But shooting a video of the experience with a smartphone for a movie about his company is not. “Now with the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, it calls into question the viability of what we’re doing,” Tabor said. “There are immense restrictions that come into play when a place is designated wilderness. The language in the Wilderness Act speaks of commercial activity ‘to the extent necessary.’ That means commercial services. But what’s the extent of that?” Chris Ryan spent 34 of her 35 years at the U.S. Forest Service in wilderness management. She recently retired as wilderness program manager at the Region 1 headquarters in Missoula. Like a surprising number of people interviewed for this story, Ryan happened to have a paper copy of the Wilderness Act handy when she spoke on the phone. “It states, ‘Commercial services may be performed within the wilderness areas designated by this Act to the extent necessary for activities which are proper for realizing the recreational or other wilderness purposes of the areas.’ ” Ryan quoted. “In legislative history, when Congress was debating the Wilderness Act, that provision was added because of outfitters and guides. They were guiding trips into the backcountry since the 1800s. Outfitting and guiding were so well established in 1964, Congress wanted to make sure it wasn’t prohibited.” The Forest Service has the job of deciding where the “extent necessary” line lies for most Montana wilderness. It has OK’d still photography, so photographers can shoot calendar images and postcards without a special permit. But a commercial video camera crew would need a permit, following an extensive and expensive review...more