People, Recreation, Wild Lands, and Wilderness

This paper will focus on an immediate social problem, perhaps the most far-reaching and critical of all those that face the human species in this sector of its history: the quality of the environments each of us will experience during his lifetime. The immediacy of the problem, of course, arises in some part from population growth, but more significantly from our far more rapidly expanding technological capabilities. At this point the United States is capable of doing almost anything to the lands within its territories that society may desire.