End of American "Wilderness"?

I wonder what you all think of potentially disturbing development:

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<a

href='http://nytimes.com/2003/05/04/weekinreview/04EGAN.html'>http://nytimes.com/2003/05/04/weekinreview/04EGAN.html</a>

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Apparently, this means an end in the U.S. to the formal designation of

"wilderness" - and the protections against drilling, mining, etc.,

associated with it - in public lands.

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What do you all make of it?

Shortsightedness & arrogance on the part of so called "conservatives." Why conserve

places and things for your grandchildren when you can exploit them for

quarterly profits today?<P>

Why is it that when you take home deliverly of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the Journal has an address label with your name on it, and the New York Times doesn't?

I know my post could be construed as "off-topic" -- however I think it was relevant to our discussion in a larger sense because many of us are nature fans and like to take photographs of nature. Now, the article in the Times raises many interesting questions, for instance, who is in control of federally "protected" lands (the executive or the legislative branch?), who has a right to use these lands and how they are to be used, and, when you get right down to it, <b>whether our photographic resources will be available to future generations</b>. That, I believe, is at least tangentially relevant to the discussion. Reading about the problems many of us have had recently when we are photographing urban areas (as clearly shown by a recent thread), I find some support for construing my post as "at least tangentially relevant". So I am just wondering if anybody has some better legal background than I do, and can help sort out what this new ruling implies for us.

I must have missed the relevant query in the article that wondered who is responsible for designating wilderness, be it the executive or legislative branch. That said, and despite what environmentalist donation-seekers will tell you, CONGRESS is responsible for designating wilderness. The president merely signs the bill

This sickens me. How people can think we don't have enough of everything else, but we some how have enough wild places. Ellis is right. Short sighted and selfish.

Todd, the President doesn't <i> merely signs the bill.</I> If you take a look at the

Federal Land Policy Management Act, section 603 spells out what the executive

branch's responsibilities are in regard to BLM wilderness recommendations.

<Blockquote>President shall advise the President of the Senate and the Speaker of

the House of Representatives of his recommendations with respect to designation as

wilderness of each such area, together with a map thereof and a definition of its

boundaries. Such advice by the President shall be given within two years of the

receipt of each report from the Secretary....</Blockquote>

 

This is what they no longer wish to do--make recommendations to congress to

preserve areas as wilderness. No recommendations, no acts for the President

to <I>merely sign.</I> While the oil, gas, mining, and recreation industries will

continue to

pour money into researching the suitability of land for their purposes, the

Department of the Interior is no longer going to research the same area's value as

wilderness. In essence the people who would like to preserve land for future

generations no longer have an advocate in the government. This is a gross imbalance

and in my opinion is negligent.

I looked more closely at my Wall Street Journal Label. It has 4 stars above my name.

 

On the old Playboy magazines, the number of stars on the cover told whether the centerfold was a virgin or not and what she would or would not do.

 

My guess is that the stars on the Wall Street Journal are different editions depending on how important you are. Four being the lowest. Bush and other members of the trilateral commission probably get an edition with one star.

 

This theory is backed up by the fact that while the local paper and New York Times are thrown by kids in junk cars with the radio turned all the way up, my wife who is an early riser, has never seen how the Wall Street Journal is delivered!!!

 

Even more suspicious is the fact that my neighbor who lives across the street also gets the Wall Street Journal, and is the CEO of a fortune five hundred company. His must be at least a two. As easy as it would be to make a mistake, I have never gotten his paper! Someone is obviously going to a lot of trouble to make sure certain information doesn�t fall into the wrong hands.

 

I am going to try to steal his copy. I know it is dangerous but I figure if we can get their plans, we can save the wilderness. Wish me luck. If you don�t hear from me again you will know what happened.

I'm with Ellis Vener on this one. There is no excuse for such horribly irresponsible

environmental policy.

Many of the pseudo "save the environment" organizations are big business; and pay themselves enormous paychecks; and use little to actually do any good. Check the details of these organizations; before one donates money. A local guy here is living like a king; he files many petty lawsuits; and is a hero when businesses get thrown a monkey wrench to stop their legal operation. This robber baron attitude of "protecting the environment"; and skimming money; is abit sickening. Environmental protection issues are a huge business; there is alot of money flowing around. Check where the money is really going. Many are getting quite rich; in the quest to save the planet.

I think there are two important issues that need to be raised. First, the new status means that no additional wilderness areas will be designated. What we already have will continue to exist. The contention of the current administration that the relative amount of wilderness in the Federal public lands is about right.

 

One reason for this is that many people who live near and use public lands feel that they have no control over how those lands are managed. Sometimes, local control has lead to abuses: over-grazing on many of the BLM controlled rangelands is but one example. And yet I can still understand the wrath many repsonsible users feel when their chosen mode of recreation is precluded by wilderness designation. In Alaska, ANILCA requires that traditinoal access methods be preserved. It hasn't worked perfectly, but it helps. That has not been the case in the Lower 48. Personally, I can understand how middle-aged folks feel when they loose access to lands because they do not have the physical ability to hike the distances required. From their perspective, how much more inaccessible land is required?

 

Our problem is one of balance. How much for each user? I think as the baby boomer population reaches middle age and beyond, we should expect a growing sentiment to increase access to public lands by a variety of means - cars, horse, snow machine etc. Rather than being marginalized by shrill crys to block such action, and thereby alienate what may now be a majority of our society, we should also consider what can be done to make lands more accessible, and yet preserve the ecosystem. Limited road access, which is not possible in a wilderness, does not necessarily destroy an area.

 

Mineral exploration is another issue. But many people in the west who oppose extractive mineral devopment on public lands also oppose additional wilderness. By working with these people, we can provide a high level of protection to the ecosystems on the public lands that will remain without wilderness designation.

It is a very sad state of affairs .

We keep giving power to corporate whores , we know they are ,

we keep giving our votes to people we know will have at heart ( if

they have one ) the interest of big guys and we still believe this

is a democracy .

They call themselves Conservatives , ( actually , i call myself

Conservative ) when everybody agrees that this country is in a

moral bankruptcy , when it has been run for ages by them .

When we vote , instead of voting with our ideals , we vote as

politicians , ( i will not vote for Nader , because if i do that vote will

be in favour of Bush ) , so that instead of starting a process of

innovation we spiral down in this state powerlessness .

The majority of us is misinformed by the media , we know they

lie , but few of us shop around for news .

Democracy , like all forms of governments , can be succesful

only if it checks itself out over and over .

We have given carte blanche to these arrogant , shortsighted

criminals , and we complain....

Go figure.....

Excuse me but can any of you tell me which nation on earth sets aside more land for wilderness than does this country?

 

I warrant that if any one man sat out to truly experience all of the wilderness areas of the US it could not be done in a lifetime ... I don't mean just passing through them either.

 

You guys sound very alarmist. Not one acre of wilderness is going to be designated no longer wilderness. It's not like we have a shortage around here. I drove about a hundred and twenty miles around three counties today looking for things to point a camera at and guess what. It was really wild. I'd say about 99.5 percent of it was completely devoid of human life. And it was not a wilderness area.

well, it depends how you measure it, but Canada for one...

Yes Tim but but that's because nobody wants to go up there and freeze their ass off long enough to actually threaten it.

 

You sure they actually designate it wilderness or it just IS wilderness?

if you just take something simple like National Parks, then Canada has more land designated. Then you have Provincial and Territorial Parks, various scientific reserves and so on. In the US you have State Parks, BLM lands (who, of course allow a lot of development) etc etc - so it's hard to make a direct comparison.

 

And yes, of course there are huge swaths that aren't designated that are still wilderness... :-)

 

Where I live, the Northwest Territories, split in two a few years ago to form the NWT and Nunavut Territory (each half, of course, still bigger than Texas...) and probably 90% is still wilderness, even though only a percentage is designated.

 

Even then, much of it is getting encroached upon (though not nevcessarily in designated areas) - logging on Vanouver Islands unique rain forests, oil and gas up here, diamonds upo here as well (though a failry small footprint and no noxious chemicals like gold needs - right here in Yellowknife we have the worlds largest underground dump of arsenic trioxide, locked in permafrost that's now melting... on the edge of N Americas 8th (I think) largest lake, that feeds N America's second longest river system...)

 

and so it goes.

Scott, these are the top numbers from the UNEP (United Nations Environment

programme) survey on wilderness areas. Commonwealth of Independent States (34%

wilderness), Canada (65%), Australia (30%), Denmark's Greenland (99%), China (Tibet)

(24%), Brazil (24%), Algeria (59%), Mauritania (69%) and Saudi Arabia (28%).

 

Also, driving around and noticing a lack of humans is not exactly observing

wilderness. For one thing, you were driving around. I assume on roads. I also assume

this was in Central Texas where the primary land use is grazing and farming. No

matter how few humans you saw, farm land and areas used by free range cattle are

not wilderness.

 

I understand feeling that there have been enough lawsuits and tree-sittings, but I

have also been in enough wilderness areas to see clear cut forest right up to the

border of the designated wilderness and realized the only thing that stopped a whole

sale flattening of some truly unique places was that it was purposely preserved by

somebody in the government with some foresight and the understanding that if left

unchecked, industry will consume all the raw materials in its grasp and that it never

values land above the worth of the raw materials that exist on it. The government can

act as a counter balance to industry and weigh the value of raw materials with the

environmental impact of development, but it seems this is a role it no longer wishes

to play.

****The government can act as a counter balance to industry and weigh the value of raw materials with the environmental impact of development, but it seems this is a role it no longer wishes to play.****

 

So when do we subdivide Yosmite?

 

Sounds silly doesn't it. The environment is very well protected in this country and that is not going to change in our lifetimes. What our grand children do is up to them but I think the seeds of environmentalism are pretty well sown and will continue to be.

 

The West is no longer increasing in population you know. No not that West. I mean the western world. If you want to protect the environment so much just stop all immigration. Think about it.

Same newspaper had related article http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/05/politics/05DONO.html

about Bush campaign fundraising. The extractive industries are getting their payback for campaign contributions to an administration that is all too willing to undercut environmental protections. As with the "Old Man" of New Hampshire, we better take alot of pictures of the landscape since those images will remind our grandchildren of our shortsidedness.

If only the 19th century Mexican gov't had enough foresight to ban immigration into their northern territories, the Bush's would still be in Conneticutt (george junior's birthplace) swilling martinis at local country club instead of shilling for the extractive industries.

Bruce wrote: "Our problem is one of balance." I disagree for the most part, knowing that the "balance" ideal is one of the biggest falacies of our age. Fact is that on side of the equation you have a limited land mass, on the other side is a burgeoning population and economy based on growth/ever expanding resource consumption, not stability. If present trends in population growth and resource use continue, it's only a matter of time before the sheer press of human numbers make things like wilderness, as we know it today, will be viewed as luxuries our society cannot afford as every corner of nature will be pressed into the service of mankind to meet neeeds, real or otherwise.

 

It's the same deal with urban sprawl. The real issue is too many people. Those relocating to the new tract homes blighting the landscape aren't leaving ghost towns behind them. And the third world is even worse; you think it's just human greed responible for clearing the rain forests? Only in Europe does there seem to be some stability, and this news is greeted with ominous dreed by proponents of the "expand of expire" economic model, the people who really run things. And of course, Americans vote with their pocketbooks, so maybe what we're seeing is really what the majority wants. Certainly most of the people I know are more concerned with accumulating every greater amounts of stuff and consuming more resources, than they are with wilderness preservation.

 

I think Ellis is correct. Afterall, what have future generations ever done for us anyway?

 

RJ

scott, you consistently amaze by your capacity to turn delicate complicated issues into really ignorant, inhumane, bland statements, blame immigrants, hitler did that, think about it.

There is a delicate balance. If all the worlds oil/power companies and chemical companies suddenly stopped operations, half of the world's population would die of starvation within a year. Hate corporations as much as you like, we depend on them.

Blame it on Manifest Destiny.

Robert, you make an interesting point about population increase. In fact, ignoring US population increase from immigration, our rate of population growth is essentially flat, if not in the negative. However, that is not a convenient excuse to blame immigrants for our environmental mess, as some are apt to do. Also, we'll just conveniently ignore the environmental mess in other lands, such as post-Soviet Russia/Siberia, and the Balkans, etc.

 

Another interesting observation is the disconnect between population growth and development in the US. Given that our population growth is essentially flat, its amazing to see the rate of urbanization and suburbanization of our land being out of bounds in comparison. The real issue, rather than being population growth's effect on the environment, is our standard of living's effect on the environment.

 

I would rather see the recent trend of re-urbanization continue. This is where the burned out cores of inner cities are reclaimed as living/shopping/recreation/leasure areas, and leave the rurul areas free from the sprawl of suburban housing and fleets of SUV's.

 

Finally, lest anyone think I am advocating a return to primitive roots (or, for you conspiracy theorists, herding into population centers where they can be more easily controlled), one must note also the abysmal environmental record in most third world nations. Some of this is from first-world corporate industry, but much more is just an outgrowth of the effects of poverty and corrupt governments' inadequate management. Ultimately, the answers to these issues are much more complex than the plethora of liberal vs conservative, socialist vs capitalist arguments that kept us busy throughout the 20th century as we slaughtered 50 million lives. There's got to be a new sense of wisdom and intellect applied to these problems, not the usual pablum.

One answer is for the STATES to become responsible for these lands. If you feel strongly about this issue, I'd suggest talking with your state government representatives, bureaus, etc. You can't drill, mine, or log without a state permit. Why look to the federal government for all control? One of the problems with the wilderness designation is that in many cases it doesn't just preserve the land - it precludes you from accessing it!

 

Lastly, I'd suggest looking into some of the "nature" groups like the Nature Conservancy - a billion dollar affair that has promoted development of wilderness areas that it owns... now, isn't that just a little disingenuous?

 

And Ellis, the reason for this change is specifically in reaction to Bruce (the babbling idiot) Babbit and his land grab policies fomented by the Clinton administration. If you're familiar with the entire complaint by the State of Utah, you'd understand why some of us think losing was a good thing.