Andrew Young | Charlottesville, VA
Andrew Young is a staff attorney with the Allegheny-Blue Ridge Alliance and Water Monitoring Coordinator with the Cowpasture River Preservation Association.
Why does wilderness matter to you?
I spend a lot of time in meetings, on permits, and in the weeds of policy, law and enforcement. Wilderness is where none of that stress has to follow me. I can walk, listen, observe, and think straight. It also keeps me grounded in why I do this work. When you’re standing next to a massive old tree, or a cold, clear headwater stream in a place that hasn’t been desecrated by roads, you just get it. If we lose the last intact places, we will not get them back in our lifetime, and they will likely be permanently degraded.
Why does wilderness matter to your community?
For our rural Virginian and West Virginian communities, wilderness and roadless areas are an upstream insurance policy. They hold cold water, they keep sediment down, and they keep hydrology functioning the way it is supposed to. People here fish, hunt, hike, camp, and make a living off visitors who come for clean water, unparallelled recreation opportunities, and to experience truly wild places (especially for the Eastern USA). When those places get carved up by roads, it shows up downstream fast: warmer water, more sediment and runoff, more slope instability, more headaches for drinking water systems and for aquatic life, more invasive species, and less tourism dollars coming in. Protecting wilderness is one of the cheapest, most common-sense things we can do for the rivers, communities, and ways of life that we care about here in Appalachia.
Share a story about a special experience you have had in wilderness.
In the Cranberry Wilderness of the Monongahela National Forest, after hiking ~6 miles in, my wife, dogs and I found a perfect campsite on the North Fork of the Williams River. It was the first time in years that I heard absolutely no trace of the outside world. We were so deep into the heavily forested mountain canyon that we couldn’t even hear the airplanes above. In the middle of that first night we heard the bloodcurdling scream of a bobcat. Besides that it was dead quiet. And Not just any quiet, it was an otherwise overwhelming, amazing sense of silence that most people on the East never get to experience. There were no human sounds, it felt like transporting back in time to a total primordial experience. After 4 days of this we walked out and it felt surreal to see a road, bathrooms and water running out of a sink. It was a culture shock of sorts. Even though we had only been 6 miles from civilization, it felt like the most isolated place on Earth when we were down in that holler.
What are your hopes for the future of wilderness?
My hope is pretty basic: keep protecting the places that are still intact and dutifully enforce the protections we already have. I also hope we stop treating wilderness like it’s only for a certain kind of person. These places belong to everyone, including local communities who live next to them and rely on the water that comes out of them. If more people have experiences in wilderness, it’s harder for decision makers to trade it away quietly. I want the next generation (and every future generation) to have the option of finding a place that’s still truly quiet and still truly wild. It is our birthright as Americans to have Wilderness areas in our public lands!
