SOS Forests

Trophy Wilderness Is a Cruel Joke

Ken Salazar and Bob Abbey planted an eco-terrorist bomb last week. They are undertaking a massive crime by circumventing the US Constitution, the law, and rational stewardship of Federal lands [here]. Other observers are now weighing in:

Wilderness reinventory a cruel joke

By Sen. Steve Urquhart, the Deseret News, Dec. 31, 2010 [here]

“Wilderness” is a joke. Worse, it is a cruel joke to Utah’s education funding and to Utah’s rural economies. “Wilderness” is defined by Congress to mean 5,000 acres of roadless land and … well, the rest doesn’t matter. Although wilderness designation originally was intended for unique, pristine areas offering outstanding opportunities for solitude, it now merely means any 5,000-acre chunk of public land where roads can be ignored or red-lined. The quality of the land or the experience is irrelevant. It is strictly a numbers thing.

The continuous theme of Western public lands is excess. The only thing that changes is the trophy-of-the-day (e.g., land, bison, grazing, timber, and, now, wilderness for the Green Barons). In the West, enough is never enough.

Special interest groups first wanted 3 million acres of wilderness in Utah. Then, 5 million. Now, 9 million acres — which means every other acre in Utah that is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In a serious case of grade inflation, every other acre is now the best. Although Congress never changed the standards, protection of unique, pristine areas has morphed into capture of average areas. Why? The argument is that the land is imperiled by use. Imperiled when, without wilderness protection, the amount of wilderness is metastasizing? Hardly.

“Wilderness” is about politics. Sparsely populated areas in the West are Republican. Democratic administrations have nothing to lose in those areas by savaging the local economy. But, they do stand to gain urban votes by protecting the West from yahoos who, well, yahoos who have apparently grown wilderness 300 percent over the past 30 years. … [more]

What is wilderness? According to the law:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which: (a) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprints of man’s work substantially unnoticed; (b) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (c) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (d) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.

Note that “generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable” is a perceptive gloss. It has to do with appearances, not scientific fact. In order to identify an area as wilderness, one must first blind one’s eyes to the imprint that humanity has made over the last 10,000+ years.

Wilderness is a myth because humanity has left substantial imprint everywhere. In order to codify that myth, blindness is necessary. Science must be perverted. The facts must be thrown out the window. Rational inquiry must be squelched and rational findings of fact must be denied. People must be led down a path of increasing stupidity and superstition by “scientists” who are doing little more than alchemy.

The human beings who made substantial impacts on the environment must be dehumanized, ignored, and erased from history and from science. That revisionism is fundamentally racist at its core.

The putative “protectionism” of wilderness designation is patently false as well. Wilderness policy leads to catastrophic fire. Virtually every wilderness area in America has either burned catastrophically in the last 20 years or is primed to do so by dint of accumulated fuels and the stated intent of the Federal land management agencies.

Those fires destroy or seriously degrade every natural resource out there including but not limited to vegetation, wildlife, water, air, soil, recreation, and scenery. Wilderness designation is destruction, not protection. As with history, fundamental ecology must be perverted and/or denied for the protection myth to hold sway.

That is more than “politics”. Such blindness is religious at its core. It requires a fanaticism that shuts down common sense and acceptance of plain fact. The perpetrators are not priests, however. Their manipulations are cynical and self-serving. They do not themselves believe the myths that they herald. They disdain the intelligence of the citizenry and treat you like fools.

The extent to which they are successful in dumbing you down is your fault.

The situation we find ourselves in is very frustrating. Our political leaders are cynical manipulators whose goals are destructive of human intelligence, human rights, freedom, history, rationality, and science, as well as our environment. There does not seem to be any way to stop the onslaught.

Your thoughts on these matters are welcome. Please comment.