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The Wilderness Society (WS) is a conservation organization claiming to be dedicated to bringing "scientific expertise, analysis and bold advocacy at the highest levels to save, protect and restore America's wilderness areas." The organization's principal objectives include: lobbying against oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge; halting logging and road building efforts on 58 million acres of unused land; and banning the use of off-road vehicles in U.S. woodlands.

Founded in 1935, the Wilderness Society claims that during its history, it has protected more than 105 million acres of American wilderness from both industrial and recreational "intrusions." Don Amador of the Blue Ribbon Coalition - a group of recreationists devoted to land preservation - reports that WS was once a member of a now-defunct coalition called the Natural Resource Summit Alliance (NRSA), to which many sportsmen referred as an organization promoting an "unholy alliance" between themselves and environmentalists. According to Amador, the NRSA - which was composed also of such environmental activist groups as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Sierra Club - was a league of "radical green groups that attempted to build a coalition with this country's [America's] outdoorsmen." Amador says that the NRSA - like its contemporary equivalent, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Alliance - pursued the goal of "get[ting] national and state sportsmen's groups to join in a project to get the Forest Service to change from providing traditional multiple-use activities, [such as ] some of the so-called 'industrial commodity/recreation uses' (i.e., logging, ranching, mining, off-roading - the four most hated uses of public lands by the greens), to more passive uses."

While WS has sought to ban logging and motorized vehicle use from America's forests, it recognizes the important role that limited fires can play in the overall health of forests. "[A]fter decades of fire suppression and other past management practices," says WS, "the reintroduction of fire to wildland ecosystems is of elemental importance." WS has introduced a "Wildland Fire Program," an interdisciplinary initiative "designed to return fire to fire-dependent ecosystems in a socially acceptable manner."

Yet while WS approves of thinning excessive undergrowth through the judicious use of controlled fires, it opposes logging enterprises that could accomplish the same objective without fire. During the Spring of 2003, President Bush urged Congress to pass his "Healthy Forest Initiative," which sought to "improve the health of our nation's forests and rangeland" by thinning out dense undergrowth and deadwood in America's woodlands. In response, WS reflexively responded as all radical environmentalist groups respond to proposed timber-cutting initiatives: with outrage and dismay. It threatened to take legal action, stating, "…we're ready to file lawsuits if necessary to stop the administration from adopting regulations and logging plans that violate environmental laws and jeopardize the integrity of our national forests and other public lands." WS's objections were based, as are those of radical environmentalist groups in general, on the planted axiom that any mechanical, profit-driven intervention by mankind in the natural world is by definition intrusive, unethical, and destructive. The use of fire to thin out forests is acceptable to WS only because it offers no financial payoff for human beings as a by-product. Radical environmentalists view their bitterest foes as capitalism and profits, not damage to the environment.

In point of fact, systematic tree felling and clearing is crucial to lowering the odds that runaway forest fires may one day engulf vast tracts of thickly wooded areas. Although anti-development groups like the Wilderness Society profess a devotion to protecting the world's woodlands, their preservation efforts often have precisely the reverse effect, endangering wooded areas that are much in need of deadwood thinning as a preventive measure against catastrophic forest fires. In 2002, some 6,937,584 acres of land were burned by forest fires, destroying 2,381 private and commercial structures, and costing $1.6 billion to extinguish. A 1999 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office states, "The most extensive and serious problem [facing] national forests in the interior West is the over-accumulation of vegetation. According to the Forest Service, 39 million acres are at high risk" of forest fires.

The issue is laid out clearly by Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, a man who left the radical environmentalist movement and, consequently, is now despised by his former allies. "We live in an era," says Moore, "when many activists believe we should leave our forests alone - an ecologically dangerous policy that sets our forests up to be destroyed not just by fire, but by insects and disease. It is especially bewildering when you consider how simple it is, through the application of time-tested forest management practices, to maintain forests in a state that reduces the chance of such outcomes. The root of the problem is that when we protect our forests from wildfires, over time they become susceptible to disease and to catastrophic wildfires as fuel loads build up. The only way to prevent this is to actively remove dead trees and to thin the forest. The active management of these forests is necessary to protect human life and property, along with air, water and wildlife. . . . Many activists have a mindset that is simply opposed to forestry. These groups favor policies that involve reducing the use of wood instead of encouraging its use as a renewable resource. We have been led to believe that when we use wood we are causing a bit of forest to be lost. This is not the case. When we buy wood we send a signal into the marketplace to plant more trees and produce more wood. One of the main reasons there is still about the same area of forested land in the U.S. today as there was 100 years ago is because we use so much wood."

Another Wilderness Society initiative is its "40 Wild Years" Internet campaign, enacted in 2004 to commemorate the Wilderness Act's 40th anniversary. The campaign's thrust is to encourage those visiting the website to sign a petition pressuring Congress to pass wilderness-related legislation of which WS approves. As noted earlier, one WS objective is to stave off oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). "Despite considerable public opinion opposing the move," says WS, "President Bush and oil industry allies in Congress remain committed to opening the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling. The Wilderness Society and other conservation groups remain on constant guard against such a move."

Implicit in such statements is the suggestion that under the proposed oil drilling in ANWR, vast tracts of pristine Alaskan land would suddenly become covered with concrete and steel. But nothing could be further from the truth. Alaska, whose population is just slightly greater than that of Washington, DC, is about four times the size of California and contains fully 60 percent of America's official wilderness areas. ANWR, located on the northeastern side of the state, comprises roughly 19.5 million acres, an area about the size of South Carolina. Of this, the proposed oil-drilling project would occupy only 2,000 acres, a patch of land about the size of Dulles Airport, or just over one ten-thousandth the ANWR region. If the entire state of Alaska were divided into 158,500 equal-sized parts, the proposed ANWR oil-drilling site would occupy exactly one of those parts. The U.S. Energy Department estimates that ANWR could yield more than 800 million barrels of oil per year, calling it "the largest unexplored, potentially productive onshore basin in the United States."

WS president William Meadows has been particularly critical of the Bush administration, which he alleges has "declared war on the environment." "The safeguards they're dismantling," says Meadows, "are the results of years of open public process, involving millions and millions of people. Our message to President George W. Bush is this: Americans demand an end to the assault. Stop the rollbacks. Protect our environment."

Demonstrating his Democratic Party loyalties, Meadows has, conversely, had many positive things to say about former President Bill Clinton. At the end of Clinton's second term, Meadows said, "From Florida to Alaska, Americans can celebrate one of the nation's greatest environmental achievements as President Clinton and the Forest Service today protected nearly 60 million acres of the nation's wild forests from logging and other development." Absent from Meadows' praise of Clinton was any mention of Clinton's 1995 "Salvage Logging Rider" initiative which proposed to double the amount of logging on U.S. national forest land by exempting the logging industry from environmental regulatory laws. Meadows also sits on the directors' board of the League of Conservation Voters, which endorsed John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election.

WS receives its principal funding from Pew Charitable Trusts (PCT), which has granted the organization nearly $3 million since 1996. WS also receives funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Turner Foundation, the Bullitt Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Energy Foundation, the Foundation for Deep Ecology, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Surdna Foundation.

Regarding the group's accounting practices, Sacramento Bee journalist Tom Knudson writes, "Many environmental groups, the Wilderness Society included . . . use a legal accounting loophole to call much of what they spend on fundraising 'public education.' In 1999, for instance, the Wilderness Society spent $1.46 million on a major membership campaign consisting of 6.2 million letters. But when it came time to disclose that bill in its annual report, the society shifted 87 percent - $1.27 million - to public education. The group also shrank a $94,411 telemarketing bill by deciding [that] 71 percent was public education."

Cybercast News Service journalist Michael Betsch reports that WS takes few pains to verify the validity of the scientific information it publishes in its educational resources. For example, when WS wanted to introduce students to Earth Day and the Wilderness Movement, the curriculum for schoolteachers (K-12) was developed by a volunteer who - as WS manager of electronic communications Kathy Kilmer acknowledged - had "no formal science background." "Environmental dogma has invaded the classroom," said Jeff Stier, the associate director of the American Council on Science and Health. "What's so troubling is that it [propaganda] starts popping up in textbooks and it appears in the curriculum, especially at the elementary school levels. . . . To have a healthy environment, we need to have better educated students today. Promoting an environmental agenda does not promote science education. Rather, it promotes a political agenda which is not an appropriate forum for the promotion of that agenda. . . . Whenever you have activist groups appealing to educators to promote an agenda, there should be cause for concern."

WS is a member of the Save Our Environment Action Center, a leftwing coalition that describes itself as "a collaborative effort of the nation's most influential environmental advocacy organizations harnessing the power of the internet to increase public awareness and activism on today's most important environmental issues."