The U.S. House passed a bill today (March 25, 2009) to be sent along to Barack Obama to put aside over two million acres of wilderness land across nine states. The bill would confer the government's highest level of protection to land in California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia.
While that may sound wonderful and progressive to most Americans on it's face, the truth is that wilderness areas present huge liabilities that no one seems willing to acknowledge or discuss.
Many existing wilderness areas have, for instance, already become nothing more than insect-infested fire hazards supporting elevated concentrations of predators, invasive species, noxious weeds, rotting vegetation and choked ecosystems. I've personally seen them crash and burn.
The only thing they preserve is a type of biological anarchy.
Most special interest groups, lobbyists and legislators envision a 'wilderness' as some kind of ubiquitous national park. A place where the deer and the antelope play. Where harmonious little plants and animals live peacefully in their protected and serene environment, estranged from human contact or intervention.
But that fantasy couldn't be farther from the truth. Natural Utopia doesn't exist and never has. In fact it is quite the opposite.
A wilderness area is a pseudo environment; an aggrandized botanical garden; a designated wild animal zoo. There is nothing natural about arbitrary lines drawn on maps and nature certainly pays no respect to such silly man-made boundaries.
This is not to say that endangered species and resources should be wholly without protection. Of course they should be protected. But locking up vast tracts of land, destroying road access and forsaking intelligent management protects nothing. If there is an undeniable truth about nature it is that when left alone, it is inherently destructive, brutally relentless and infinitely dynamic.
On Capitol Hill and throughout the nation, proponents of wilderness have adopted a standard policy of hiding behind a manufactured curtain composed of highly questionable scientific studies, purely academic postulations and outrageous propaganda. Empirical proofs have been abandoned in favor of a vague, disconnected, super-scientific consensus. In short, it is scientific fraud of the worst kind.
It should surprise no one then, that the scientists who produce such wildly erroneous studies do so at the behest of those who fund their research, namely the very same political activists who seek to hold it up as proof in order to support their narrow goals and objectives. But that's what is driving the American public.
Today, 83 percent of (over 3 million) Americans currently live in cities with a population of 50,000 or more. What they understand about wilderness areas comes largely from mainstream media and well-heeled political activists - all of whom are uniformly oblivious and remote from the landscapes they wish to control. And if it were ignorance alone, I could handle it.
However the latest wave of wilderness promoters have become genuinely twisted.
Perhaps what I find most disturbing is that they constantly insist upon personifying nature (yet define the perfect environment as a place without people in it). In other words, they actually assign imaginary human characteristics to animals (and plants) and then proceed to claim that they can somehow relate to them. It is patently absurd.
The whole idea of establishing a bond of understanding with, say, a polar bear, cougar, wolf, sea lion or anything else outside the realm of humanity is so ridiculous that it would be laughable if not for the unprecedented damage that radicals have caused through legislation and litigation. That these people are even taken seriously is beyond any reasonable explanation.
I haven't even touched upon the enormous number of natural resources that wilderness areas take off the table, forever. Nor the devastation of rural economies, the displacement of working populations, the dangers of shrinking national resource reserves and all the other vile consequences that arise from whimsical wilderness declarations.
Thornton Wilder once said (that the Readers Digest was) written by bores, for bores, about bores. Likewise, this new legislation is exclusively written by, for and about environmental activists. It certainly has nothing to do with those of us who actually live and work near wilderness areas and who know far more than our political representatives can possibly fathom.
I can only pray that some sudden strain of pandemic sanity infects the nation long enough to halt the death of wise land use policy.
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