Fifty
years ago today, on September 3, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the
Wilderness Act into law after more than sixty drafts and eight years of work.
When Johnson signed the act, he made the following statement: "If future
generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must
leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we
got through with it."
Nearly
twenty years later, March 27, 1984, 16,500 acres of rugged, wooded land between
the Eleven Point and Current rivers in Oregon and Ripley counties in the
Missouri Ozarks were “designated as wilderness and shall be known as the Irish
Wilderness.”
The
inclusion of the area once known as Father Hogan’s Irish Settlement was not
done without controversy. Mystery of the Irish Wilderness outlines the
competing camps (Sierra Club and environmentalists vs. local landowners) and their arguments that supported or opposed its inclusion.
See more photos of the Irish Wilderness on our Facebook page:
No comments:
Post a Comment