Re: [RC] Bush Administration Policy on Wilderness - Heidi Smith
>Anyway...see
below. I, personally, have mixed feelings about this.
>2) THE
END OF WILDERNESS New York Times, Editorial/Op-Ed, May 4,
2003
My feelings about this are not mixed at all.
I for one would like to say a resounding "HALLELUJAH" to Interior Secretary
Norton's approach to wilderness. The whole "wilderness" concept is one of
those "feel-good" topics to folks who like the concept of having some wonderful
nature out there, but who don't have a clue what a million acres of unmanaged
land looks like. If you think you can enjoy the wilderness for
recreational purposes, think again. How do you plan to GET there?
You can't take your horse trailer in there--no roads. So you are limited
to what you can ride across in a reasonable amount of time--another issue that
is severely limited because you can't maintain trails with anything but hand
equipment. The rich few who can afford to hire packers and guides for
extended periods of time can enjoy bits of it--but not very much of it.
And as for being enjoyable--don't expect to see much in the way of wildlife
there, since the "old growth" forests (read forests at the end of their life
span--in essence forest nursing homes minus the nursing care, because no one can
get in to take care of much of anything) don't grow much in the way of browse or
forage for wildlife to eat. What wilderness is REALLY good for is fuel for
fire. Because of the lack of management, ladder fuels build up as trees
die, and conflagrations such as we saw in Idaho and Montana in 2000 are the
result. We're not talking about those nice, quick fires that go through
and clean things out--we're talking about fires that burn so hot because
there is so much fuel that they sterilize the soil so that nothing will
grow for decades. There are still areas in northern Idaho like this that
can be seen from similar fires in the early 1900's--almost a century ago.
I've flown over some of these areas here in Idaho--and three years later, there
is not even a blade of grass in many of the areas that were burned.
I'm all for managing remote areas so that they
remain that way--but the hands-off policy of the "Wilderness-with-a-capital-W"
designation is one of the most damning things that can happen to a large tract
of land. The most beautiful areas of our state are those that have been
managed with common sense so that there is a sustained timber yield, some
allowance for recreation, some allowance for grazing (which also helps to
control fuels), some allowance for hunting, etc. And a forest road going
through the area every several miles doesn't hurt a thing, either.
If you live in an area without a lot of federal
land, it is truly difficult to realize what a burden these wilderness tracts
that count their acreages in the millions put on BOTH the environment AND the
local economy. We already have agencies such as the USFS and the BLM in
place to manage such lands in the public interest--and Congress needs to let
them manage, instead of locking lands away, only to be consumed by devastating
fires every 40 years or so.
So BRAVO to Secretary Norton and to the current
administration on this issue--it's about time we had some common sense on this
issue from the federal government. Good environmentalism means good
stewardship--not locking land up and throwing away the key.
