The Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Wilderness Act Turn 50

(White House) Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson signed two landmark bills, ushering in a new era of conservation.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund Act codifies the simple premise that when we take something from the earth, we have a responsibility to give something back. Using revenues from offshore oil and gas development, the Land and Water Conservation Fund has made critical investments in nearly every county in the United States. The LWCF has been used to increase access to the outdoors for hunting, fishing, and other recreation, to protect iconic places like National Parks and Civil War battlefields, and to advance over 40,000 local projects.
Thanks to the Wilderness Act, more than 109 million acres of wild land have received our country’s strongest protections, ensuring that future generations can continue to enjoy these places as they are today, and as they were hundreds of years ago. Designated wildernesses promote clean air and water, provide habitat for iconic wildlife, and protect places of incomparable natural beauty for all Americans to experience and enjoy.
But more than that, these laws protect what the novelist Wallace Stegner called “the geography of hope,” a vision of the American continent in all its vastness, its wildness, its natural power. “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” Stegner wrote in 1960. “We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.”
read moreSource: www.whitehouse.gov