How has the Wilderness Act affected your life?

It’s 50 years since the United States passed the Wilderness Act into law. The act set aside millions of acres as wilderness, and specifically mandated wilderness status for the BWCA in Minnesota.

The language of the act, which enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Congress, is positively poetic compared with most legislation: “A wilderness,” it says, “in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Yet the act remains controversial in some quarters. Critics point out, for example, that visiting the wilderness is expensive, and that the act’s restrictions on the use of motors favors those with time and money.

Today’s question: How has the Wilderness Act affected your life?