There's nothing scientific or practical about a wilderness, it's purely an emotional construct.
tree huggers wanted more and more wilderness, then live with the rules. No bicycles.
bicycles and horses don't mix well, the bikers would take over the existing trails and push equines out
the whole idea of a wilderness is to preserve, adding more sports to it isn't preserving. If bicycles get added then I want electric assist added too, then gas assist, then motorbikes added too
Aldo Leopold was the person who first presented the idea of Wilderness designation to the Forest Service. Specifically for the Gila in NM. He would likely argue that he had no scientific or practical reasoning for the designation. Apologies for the length of the quote below, but may be helpful to understand the thought process that went behind the Why of Wilderness, and what its importance is beyond what has already been discussed here.
"The most important characteristic of an organism is that capacity for eternal self-renewal known as health.
There are two organisms whose process of self-renewal have been subjected to human interference and control. One of these is man himself (medicine and public health). The other is land (agriculture and conservation).
The effort to control the health of land has not been very successful. It is now generally understood that when soil loses fertility, or washes away faster than it forms, and when water systems exhibit abnormal floods and shortages, the land is sick.
Other derangements are known as facts, but are not yet thought of as symptoms of land sickness. The disappearance of plants and animal species without visible cause, despite efforts to protect them, and the irruption of others as pests despite efforts to control them, must, in the absence of simpler explanations, be regarded as symptoms of sickness in the land organism. Both are occurring too frequently to be dismissed as normal evolutionary events.
The status of thought on these ailments of the land is reflected in the fact that our treatments for them are still prevailingly local. Thus when a soil loses fertility we pour on fertilizer, or at best alter its tame flora and fauna, without considering the fact that its wild flora and fauna, which built the soil to begin with, may likewise be important to its maintenance. It was recently discovered, for example, that good tobacco crops depend, for some unknown reason, on the preconditioning of the soil by wild ragweed. It does not occur to us that such unexpected chains of dependency may have wide prevalence in nature.
When prairie dogs, ground squirrels, or mice increase to pest levels we poison them, but we do not look beyond the animal to find the cause of the irruption. We assume that animal troubles must have animal causes. The latest scientific evidence points to derangements of the plant community as the real seat of rodent irruptions, but few explorations of this clue are being made.
Many forest plantations are producing one-log or two-log trees on soil which originally grew three-log and four-log trees. Why? Thinking foresters know that the cause probably lies not in the tree, but in the micro-flora of the soil, and that it may take more years to restore the soil flora than it took to destroy it.
Many conservation treatments are obviously superficial. Flood-control dams have no relation to the cause of floods. Check dams and terraces do not touch the cause of erosion. Refuges and hatcheries to maintain the supply of game and fish do not explain why the supply fails to maintain itself.
In general, the trend of the evidence indicates that in land, just as in the human body, the symptoms may lie in one organ and the cause in another. The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
A science of land health needs, first of all, a base datum of normality, a picture of how healthy land maintains itself as an organism.
We have two available norms. One is found where land physiology remains largely normal despite centuries of human occupation. I know of only one such place: north-eastern Europe. It is not likely that we shall fail to study it.
The other and most perfect norm is wilderness. Paleontology offers abundant evidence that wilderness maintained itself for immensely long-periods; that its component species were rarely lost, neither did they get out of hand; that weather and water built soil faster than it was carried away. Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land-health.
One cannot study the physiology of Montana in the Amazon; each biotic province needs its own wilderness for comparative studies of used and unused land. It is of course too late to salvage more than a lopsided system of wilderness study areas, and most of these remnants are far too small to retain their normality in all respects. Even the National Parks, which run up to a million acres each in size, have not been large enough to retain their natural predators, or to exclude animal diseases carried by livestock. Thus the Yellowstone has lost its wolves and cougars, with the result that elk are ruining flora, particularly on the winter range. At the same time the grizzly bear and the mountain sheep are shrinking, the latter by reason of disease.
While even the largest wilderness areas become partially deranged, it required only a few wild acres for J.E. Weaver to discover why the prairie flora is more drouth-resistant than the agronomic flora which has supplanted it. Weaver found that the prairie species practice ‘team work’ underground by distributing their root systems to cover all levels whereas the species comprising the agronomic rotation over draw one level and neglect another, thus building up cumulative deficits. An important agronomic principle emerged from Weaver’s researches.
Again, it required only a few acres for Togrediak to discover why pines on old fields never achieve the size or wild firmness of pines on uncleared forest soils. In the later case, the roots follow old root channels, and thus strike deeper.
In many cases we literally do not know how good a performance to expect of healthy land unless we have a wild area for comparison with sick ones. Thus, most of the early travelers to the Southwest describe the mountain rivers as originally clear, but a doubt remains, for they may, by accident, have seen them at favorable seasons. Erosion engineers had no base datum until it was discovered that exactly similar rivers in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua, never grazed or used for fear of Indians, show at their worst a milky hue, not too cloudy for a trout fly. Moss grows to the water’s edge on their banks. Most of the corresponding rivers in Arizona and New Mexico are ribbons of boulders, mossless, soil-less, and all but treeless. The preservation and study of the Sierra Madre wilderness, by an international experiment station, as a norm for the cure of sick land on both sides of the border, would be a good neighbor enterprise well worthy of consideration.
In short all available wild areas, large or small, are likely to have value as norms for land
science. Recreation is not their only, or even their principle utility."
