Book Review

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Citation: Vol. 6 No. 03
• Publication year: 1983

UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND LAW REVIEWVolume 6, No. 2SPRING 1983

BOOK REVIEW

John C. Bjorkman

BACKYARD WILDERNESS. By David Knibb. The Mountaineers, Seattle. 1982 Pp. 233. $17.50.

In 1964, Congress passed the Wilderness Act(fn1) "to ensure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness."(fn2) Twelve years later, Congress enacted the Alpine Lakes Area Management Act(fn3) to protect and manage a wilderness area of approximately 920,000 acres in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Backyard Wilderness is the story, from an insider's point of view, of the organizing and lobbying effort that succeeded in creating the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. As a citizen lobbyist, author-lawyer David Knibb participated in this legislative process from 1968 with the inception of the Alpine Lakes as a battle independent of its stepfather, the North Cascades National Park, through the drafting of a bill and finally its passage through Congress in 1976. Knibb is thus eminently qualified to give a personal history of this piece of major land use legislation.

Carved by glaciers thousands of years ago,(fn4) the Alpine Lakes Wilderness is "an environment of timbered valleys rising to rugged, snowcovered mountains, dotted with over seven hundred lakes, displaying unusual diversity of natural vegetation, and providing habitat for a variety of wildlife."(fn5) While Backyard Wilderness recounts the legislative conflict that created the protection for this unique alpine area, Knibb points out that the "story does not concentrate on the area but on that effort itself."(fn6) The thrust of Knibb's book, then, is the ebb and flow of the legislative fight, the battles won and skirmishes lost, all culminating in the passage of the legislation in Congress. As a caution to the novice lobbyist, or as a reminder to the experienced, Backyard Wilderness effectively describes each of the triumphs and defeats, the defiant stands, and necessary compromises required to create the Alpine Lakes Wilderness.

Knibb began his lobbying odyssey as a member of the Alpine Lakes Protection Society (ALPS), a citizen's group formed to promote Alpine Lakes legislation. ALPS' initial hurdle was the checkerboard land ownership pattern in the area slated to become the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. In...