Dear HCN,
When Jon Christensen
writes about the new lord of the West who will replace the old
lords of extraction (HCN, 12/23/96), it is clear what the name of
this new lord is: Midas! Under the magic touch of the recreation
industry, public lands will turn to gold. Nature as ATV
commercials, ecosystems as theme parks, landscapes as blurry
backdrops for high-speed challenge sports: this – not protection –
will be the result of inviting the 800-pound gorilla of the
recreation industry into the public-lands
arena.
Both Jon Christensen’s and Ed Marston’s
articles gloss over a basic fact. Recreation, at projected levels
of use and mechanizations, is not compatible with public-lands
protection.
We can squeeze $130.7 billion in
recreation revenues from national forests, or we can protect them.
We cannot do both. Already the recreation industry is helping fund
both a rafting industry which is saturating our rivers and
mechanized trail systems which are fragmenting backcountry habitat
beyond repair.
Inviting the recreation industry
to market the Forest Service “brand” to recreational customers is
merely replacing the timber-grazing-mining hegemony with another.
Nowhere is anyone speaking for the land itself. Nowhere is anyone
talking about non-use, non-management, trail and road downgrades
not upgrades – what we used to call
wilderness.
Nowhere is anyone “thinking like a
mountain,” as Aldo Leopold said, seeing ourselves as nature sees
us. Under this rubric we would know that increasing our access to
nature through recreational expansion decreases the seclusion of
wild things. And that increasing our own mobility across the
landscape through trail development decreases the mobility of other
species.
Now the public lands are mined for gold.
But will we be better off when, under the magic touch of the
recreation industry, pine needles are turned to gold, birds fly on
gilded wings, and streams run with liquid gold? Finally, all of the
above is also the other rebuttal to Thomas Power’s arguments, which
I would add to Ed Marston’s
article.
Roz
McClellan
Nederland,
Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Don’t hail this new lord.
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