42 Years since the passing of Howard Zahniser and the coming to fruition of his sustained hard work.
Recognize that the 1964 Wilderness Act was, of necessity, a compromise forged (hey, 8 long years is a lot of banging on the anvil) with anti wilderness forces such as Rep. Wayne Aspinall and most of the senior staff of the Forest Service and the National Park Service. Every 'voice of reason' fought to maintain that late 20th century version of manifest destiny and the euphoric rush of post WWII population growth. Stop Development??!!?? Blasphemy!
All of us old farts (aka Baby Boomers) are Exhibit A, the poster children, for why the Wilderness Act is needed. We're the most motorized, mechanized generation in the Planet's history and we've proved it by erecting three car garages adjacent to our trophy homes, buying snowmobiles so we can tele the 'backcountry' and empty nesting into Motor Homes with a vengance.
Are we committed to keeping the already lowered bar from hitting the ground? Or are we going to continue to aid and abet the eggregious giveaways in the most recent wilderness bills with our knowing use of a myriad administrative shortcuts for our convenience (masked by the absolute worst self rationalizations a public servant could entertain).
Yes, it's Woody's annual rant about trashing wilderness via 'organizational Chinese Water Torture' has arrived in your inbox. Beware, you could chip away at those youthful wilderness management ethics such that you could end up like the current Chief... selling us down the road to the commercial recreation interests after working so hard to rise up in the ranks to reach the post. Ask not what convenience can do for you.. Ask instead what you can do against the Katrina like tide to leave an enduring resource of Wilderness.
No excuses :-)
Woody
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/opinion/04mon2.html
September 4, 2006
NY TIMES EDITORIAL:
True Wilderness, and False
Under the radar, Congress has been quietly adding to the nation’s
inventory of protected wilderness. In three bills approved by both
houses and signed by President Bush, the 109th Congress has awarded
wilderness designation to 11,000 acres of canyonland and desert in New
Mexico, 10,000 acres of rain forest in Puerto Rico and 100,000 acres in
the Cedar Mountains of Utah. Four more wilderness bills have cleared
one house or the other, and when approved will add another 750,000
acres of wilderness in California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. More
such bills are waiting in the Congressional wings.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 prohibits all commercial activity — roads,
buildings, logging, drilling — in areas designated as wilderness, the
highest level of protection given to any public lands, including the
national parks. Congress has designated roughly 106 million acres as
permanent wilderness, more than half of it in Alaska.
Measured against this number, the latest designations may seem like
small change. Yet they reflect rare moments of bipartisan cooperation
at a time when Congress seems polarized on just about everything, not
least conservation issues. They also reflect well on local groups that
have worked long and hard to find common ground between
environmentalists and commercial interests. And while Mr. Bush seems as
determined as ever to open up chunks of the public estate to commerce,
especially for oil and gas drilling, like other presidents before him
he finds it impossible to resist grass-roots ideas that have been so
thoroughly debated in advance. This is not to say that all wilderness
bills are free of low motives and commercial intent. One particularly
distasteful example is a bill introduced by Senator Robert Bennett and
Representative Jim Matheson of Utah. It would sell off 40 square miles
of federal land to private developers in Washington County, the
fifth-fastest-growing county in the country and already something of a
monument to suburban sprawl and strip development. In exchange, it
offers wilderness protection to about 220,000 acres.
Wilderness bills often involve land swaps — small amounts of land for
commercial purposes in exchange for lots more permanent wilderness —
and the Utah deal would seem to fit the pattern. It doesn’t. First,
about half the proposed wilderness is already protected. Second, some
of the proceeds would go not for local conservation projects but for
off-road vehicle trails and, most alarming, for a 120-mile pipeline to
draw water from Lake Powell, which is already stressed by undisciplined
development. Third, there has been little public input. Finally, there
appears to be plenty of private land available to satisfy the county’s
insatiable needs. This is, in short, a raid on national resources aimed
at helping private developers. It is the worst sort of Congressional
earmarking. And it gives true wilderness bills a reputation they do not
deserve.
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