1934 was a big year for conservation in the southern Appalachians. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in June, and in October, on a roadside somewhere outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, The Wilderness Society was born.
The story of The Wilderness Society’s conception has been told different ways, but all versions involve a heated roadside discussion centered on the novel idea of protecting wild places from the growing threat of “recreational motoring” and its associated roads.
In Bernard and Miriam Frank’s car on that October Friday were Benton MacKaye (father of the Appalachian Trail), Harvey Broome (notable Tennessee author and conservationist), and Bob Marshall (namesake for a million acre wilderness area in Montana). This group of five was simmering on a provocative, and at that time new, idea: that some places should be left to their own devices where people could experience nature on its own terms. Setting aside large tracts of land as untrammeled wilderness provided the best way to protect nature’s wildness.
That historic day marked the beginning of The Wilderness Society, the organization most closely associated with the Wilderness Act, establishing a National Wilderness Preservation System that now contains over 100 million acres. These wilderness areas provide the core of a network of wildlands aimed at protecting nature and passing it on to future generations. As conservation science has developed, wilderness designation has repeatedly been shown to effectively protect wildlife and their habitats, clean water, and refuges from many pernicious threats.
77 years after The Wilderness Society was conceived, research ecologists met again in the Smokies to take on a new provocative idea: how do we ensure that future generations will have opportunities to experience nature under increasing pressures from climate change and other threats unknown in 1934?
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I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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