this opinion piece kind of flies in the face of your idea of wilderness, perhaps you should reconsider your idea before Carole King gets her way with shutting off a vast area of the northern Rockies with her bill that Congress will be taking up in the next few weeks.
from SOS forests
Wilderness Designation Leads To Catastrophic Megafires
October 11th, 2007
Wilderness designation is not ?protection.? Wilderness designation is guaranteed destruction.
When Congress declares a parcel of land to be official Wilderness, invariably that land is consumed in a megafire shortly thereafter. Overlay a map of the megafires of the last 20 years on a map of our National Wilderness Areas. You will see how close they line up. Very few Wilderness Areas have escaped catastrophic, 100 percent mortality, ?stand replacement? fires.
The forests, wildlife, scenic beauty, water quality, and general ambiance of our Wilderness Areas, prior to designation, has been turned into wastelands, devoid of trees, wildlife, beauty, and ambiance.
Charred and rotting snags dot the landscape like ugly pins in a pincushion, one that stretches as far as the eye can see in every direction. The ground is blackened, with drifts of choking ash. Here and there a sprig of brush struggles in the alkali. The silence is complete and deathly, because there are no birds chirping, no squirrels chattering, no mice scurrying, no deer leaping, no elk crashing.
Wastelands. Scorched earth. Mega-death zones. No Man?s Land. Nuked Land. Chernobylized.
That?s what wilderness designation means.
The landscapes so designated are not ?wildernesses? in any rational, informed, historically-accurate context. In every case, our Wilderness Areas were in fact populated with resident human beings over the past 10,000 years or more. They are no more wilderness than Scranton, Birmingham, or the ironically named Indianapolis.
And everybody knows this! Everybody knows there were Indians.
Apparently, many have not yet accepted that Indians, like human beings everywhere in all the Ages of Man, had enormous impact and influence over the vegetation, wildlife, beauty, water, and general ambiance of the entire landscape, excluding only the highest peaks scalable only with modern climbing tools. Those are the facts, however.
So-called Roadless Areas are in fact roaded, and have been roaded for thousands of years. Extensive foot-road networks were woven across every watershed in the America?s long before Columbus landed. The land has been occupied and used by resident human beings who produced diverse goods and traded them via far-reaching trade routes.
But for some reason we choose to ignore what we know, and instead paint a fairy tale mythos at total odds with the facts!
Somehow the Indians had zero impact, because either they didn?t exist, or else they were sub-human and must have flitted from bush to bush like butterflies, doing no ?trammmeling? and leaving ?no imprint of man.? That?s a racist and dehumanizing mindset, to be truthful. It smacks of conquest and dismissal of the vanquished to the dustbin of history.
Somehow Mother Nature, in all her pagan glory, really steered the ship. That?s what the myth says. The mythologizers want you to worship Mother Nature.
Mother Nature has not been steering the ship because she does not exist. She is a false god, a painted idol, and not real. Nature, or Life, is not a sentient being and is not fragile, having persevered for more than a billion years on this planet.
Come what may, the rat, the cockroach, and the pond scum will survive.
Our job is to be good stewards of our landscapes. That is the legacy left to us by the First Residents. It is our birthright to care for the land, and indeed it is our birth-responsibility.
Abandoning millions of acres of priceless, heritage forests to catastrophic incineration and extinction is not good stewardship. It violates the fundamental core of our role as human beings.
The new wilderness proposals in Congress are more than wrong-headed, they are destructive of our heritage, legacy, and of our birthrights and responsibilities, which are owed to our ancestors, to each other, to our children?s children, and to our planet.
end
whoever this guy is, he seems to be speaking my language
we are either a part of our environment and therefore charged to use it or we came here on alien ships and should return home, it's just that simple
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