Abstract
During his project, Idaho Wilderness and Democracy: Experiments in Visualizing Citizen Testimony, CDIL Fellow Adam Sowards worked with librarians to clean, visualize and interpret citizen input from various hearings related to the legislative hearings concerning the Wilderness Act and the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation. Wilderness Preservation System and required federal agencies to review all roadless areas and recommend whether they ought to be protected as wilderness. The subsequent Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE) processes (courts found the first RARE process insufficient and ordered a second, known as RARE II) conducted by the U.S. Forest Service generated an enormous archive, the largest input from citizen hearings in American history (Marsh 125). Because of their unwieldy size, historians have barely examined them, relying instead on the published writings of leaders from the standard conservation organizations.