Jimmy Carter – who served as the 39th President of the United States – is being remembered around the world for his service and dedication to our country. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, and advanced democracy and human rights around the globe. President Carter’s environmental accomplishments were also noteworthy, placing him amongst America’s greenest presidents.
We have President Carter to thank for many of the protected public lands we enjoy here along California’s central coast. In 1978, President Carter signed the Endangered American Wilderness Act, the largest single addition to the country’s wilderness system since enactment of the Wilderness Act a decade earlier. His signing of the bill added 1.3 million acres of public land across 10 Western states to the country’s slate of protected wilderness areas, the largest expansion of the wilderness system to date.
President Carter’s Central Coast Land Legacy
The Wilderness Act of 1964 established a nation-wide system of protected wilderness areas, the highest level of protection for federal public lands. Around that time, local residents launched a citizen-led campaign to permanently protect a portion of the Lopez Lake watershed in San Luis Obispo County. The effort was led by Harold Miossi, a rancher active with the local Sierra Club chapter and other civic organizations. The effort gained traction in 1971 when legislation was first introduced, but languished for several years. Finally, in 1977, the bill passed the House on a vote of 380-18, and the Senate on a vote of 89-3, ultimately landing on President Carter’s desk for his signature.
Upon signing the Endangered American Wilderness Act, President Carter remarked:
This bill is critical in preserving areas that are a vital part of our national heritage and that will be enjoyed by our American people in this generation and in generations and centuries to come.
Locally, the bill protected more than 80,000 acres of the Santa Lucia Mountains in the northern part of the Los Padres National Forest, including San Luis Obispo County’s first Congressionally designated wilderness area. The newly created Santa Lucia Wilderness covered 21,250 acres of national forest land north of San Luis Obispo.
The bill also added 61,000 acres to the Ventana Wilderness in Monterey County, including a ten-mile stretch of coastal mountains from Marble Peak to Cone Peak, and three expansion areas in the interior including lands around Santa Lucia Creek, Miller Creek, and Tassajara Creek. Congress had created the Ventana Wilderness in 1969 just months after passage of the Wilderness Act, and this was the first of many expansions to the Ventana Wilderness over the past half-century. At 236,000 acres, the Ventana Wilderness is now the largest wilderness area in the Los Padres National Forest.
President Carter—a champion of urban national parks—also signed the law establishing the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in Los Angeles and Ventura counties in 1978. The area, flanked by several densely populated cities, still stands today as the largest urban national park in the United States and the largest urban national park in the world.
President Carter’s National Environmental Initiatives
President Carter’s legacy extends well beyond the central coast to places like Alaska, the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area in Minnesota, the Chattooga River in Georgia, the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, the Martin Luther King National Historic Park in Atlanta, and the Rio Grande River in Texas.
One of the most significant environmental bills President Carter signed was the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which set aside 56 million acres in Alaska as national parks, more than doubling the size of America’s national park system.
A big proponent of wild rivers, President Carter started fishing in local streams as a child. As Governor of Georgia, he frequently took canoe trips down the Chattooga River (and was the first to descend the Bull Sluice Rapid in a tandem canoe in 1974). As President, he signed bills designating more than 1,300 miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers across the country, more than tripling the size of the Wild and Scenic River system during his presidency. He vetoed 16 different pork-barrel dam projects that would have irreparably harmed free-flowing rivers.
President Carter’s legacy does not stop at protecting waterways or wilderness. He signed bills strengthening the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, the Surface Mining Reclamation Act, the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, the National Energy Act, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, and the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act.
President Carter leaves a lasting imprint on public lands and wilderness areas throughout the central coast and across the nation.
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