response 1 of 19:

Sep 6 05:41 UTC 1994

The National Audubon Society celebrates 30 years of the WILDERNESS ACT
in their Sept-Oct 1994 issue of AUDUBON magazine. The following are
selections from one article: 

From _Toward Wild Heartlands_ by John Daniel ("The Wilderness Act was
only a beginning. Before we can truly save the last wild places, we
must reexamine the way we live.") 

.........

"No wild place will be safe from us until we reconsider our devout
belief that economic growth is always and limitlessly good, and
examine our equally devote belief in the unlimited use of technology.
Taken together, these two articles of faith compose a modern secular
orthodoxy that pervades our culture. The object of its worship is the
future - a future, we are told, in which lives will be made safer,
longer, healthier, better informed, and far more pleasurable. A new
and improved future. And a future _ this isn't in the advertising _
that threatens not only the wild places of our continent but the very
quality of wildness itself. 

.........

"We tend to revere technological inventors and interveners as heroes,
as modern woodsmen penetrating the frontiers of human knowledge. I
think we need a new kind of hero, one whose mission is not to breach
limits but to understand them and to show us how to abide by those
that are necessary and just _ a hero capable of restraining what he
can do in favor of what he ought to do for the good of the entire
community. Some scientists, some corporate executives, and all
members in good standing of the economic-technological orthodoxy will
characterize this idea as a travesty, a capitulation of the questing
human spirit. I call it growing up. As a child matures, he learns he
is but one rightful member of a human community that sets limits on
the satisfaction of his wishes. He then learns, I hope, what Aldo
Leopold sketched as the 'land ethic' _ that his community extends
beyond the human and includes other forms of life. And he also needs
to learn that his known community opens around him into mysteries
both beautiful and sacred to which he belongs, mysteries which do not
belong to him. 

"There is something in us deeply intolerant of mystery, something that
drives us to prod and probe the natural world and crack open more and
more of its secrets and tinker with its deepest workings. We open
darkness to the light of rationality as relentlessly as the early
settlers once opened the eastern forests. We do this in the name of
knowledge, but our knowledge is too often a knife - cuts the world
into pieces, wonders where its life and spirit have gone, and cuts
again. 

.........

"The same reasoning is evident in our seemingly boundless interest in
a kind of pseudoknowledge its devotees call information. The
'Information Superhighway' is being readied to convey us into our
future, and to travel it, evidently, we need only buy the right
machines and connections to machines. I hear little news about where
the Superhighway is expected to lead us, and why. Apparently it will
take us by means of information into a condition of more information
for the reason that information is good for us. 

"We will have 500 channels of interactive television, it seems. A few
of those channels will feed us 'information' about weather and
animals and natural landscapes, for which some of us will be hungry.
Old proclivities die hard. But if we travel the highway far enough,
we are bound to arrive at the condition for which television has been
preparing us for decades - the electronic image of a redwood will
replace the natural experience of a redwood, and so the real tree
with roots in the ground will logically become expendable. In the
ever-more-real-seeming ghosts that haunt our screens, in the
video-game sensory immersion of virtual reality, the new technology
promises to complete the procedure of controlling nature, finally, by
becoming it."

.........

"The Wilderness Acts was a beginning, a momentous first step, but it
accepts the premise of our unhealthy culture, fencing off only a few
scraps of unspoiled land. The next step is to redefine wilderness
according to the premise of nature's health _ as entire, vigorous
ecosystems and landscapes in the full array of their diversity. To define
wilderness, in other words, as wilderness defines itself, and in that
way restore and perpetuate the biotic will-being of our homeland."

.........

response 3 of 19:

Oct 23 03:09 UTC 1994

I think it would be a very useful use of federal funds to up farmland 
along the Missouri River for a linear buffulo run.  I believe some groups are
working along these lines, but I don't know who.
When I was twenty-ish I had a dream of cities consisting of tree houses 
connected by cable-hung trams.  Pretty far out.  More reasonalble might be
settlements of 1000 people in a mega-building with everything within walking
and escaltor distance.  These could be embedded in gardens surrounded by 
wilderness, and connected only by buses and trains.  Those who feel that this
would be claustrophobic probably haven't lived in a workable city.

response 5 of 19:

Nov 9 18:08 UTC 1994

Fair enough, if one does not know enough about ecology to know the
difference between an original diverse ecosystem, and one that has been
filtered through urban conversion and reversion. Most don't know, much
less care. Things are probably better ecologically in the suburbs
than they were, but if you have spent time travelling in "original"
wilderness, the experience is enormously different than anything that
can be experienced in suburbia. Not to mention "technical" matters, such
as preserving diversity, etc.

response 7 of 19:

Aug 26 12:11 UTC 1995

That's true. And also consider the fact that most "environmentalists" do more
harm to the wild beasts it trying to learn about their habitat. I think that
the existing wildlife should be considered sacrosanct, and should not be
meddled with, even to protect them. If we leave the beasts to themselves,
nature will find a way to keep them alive, I'm sure.
And lets face it, whatever the starting article says, we cannot do without
technology. It has become an integral part of human life. The only way we can
develop is to develop technology that is friendly to the ecosystem, possible
be complimentary.
With the schedule urbanites have these days (the daily "grind"), environmental
concern often is limited to such talks... 

response 9 of 19:

Aug 30 09:08 UTC 1995

You've got a point there. We're part of nature too, and if we leave the beasts
to themselves, I'm not sure they would leave us to ourselves...
My concern was in the way we don't leave them to themselves. I heard about
the 
death of quite a few wild animals in a zoo nearby, not long ago, and that
statement was just me wondering aloud whether the anilams would have died if
they had not
been brought up in a zoo...

response 11 of 19:

Aug 31 08:11 UTC 1995

exactly!! animals are better of in zoos if their natural environment is very
degraded... The animal in question here was a giraffe, for which this
environment was *very* foreign. I often wonder as to what the idea is, behind
bringing animals whose natural habitat is a lot different from this place,
to be bred in zoos...
Preserving animals in the wild *is* the best way- but a lot difficult all the
same... And how good (ethical?) is the idea behind opening zoos to the
public?... It sounds absurd, but look at it from the animal's point of view...

response 13 of 19:

Aug 31 21:39 UTC 1995

I think that is one reason that zookeepers have begun to participate
in the efforts to preserve endangered species - it seems more
valuable, than being jailors of captive animals that did nothing wrong.

response 15 of 19:

Oct 1 01:01 UTC 1995

I can't speak for that park, but generally "artificial parks" are closest
to biological deserts, due to lacks of biological diversity, multiple
habitats, variety of animals from earthworms to insects to birds, etc. I
think you are mistaking a scene pleasant to *your* eye for a natural
place. Many people make this mistake in not realizing the devestation that
golf courses are visiting upon natural habitats. Whole suites of species
are being driven to extinction in wide areas because of the creation of
"artificial nature" like these. Humans have *never* been able to emulate
nature, because they do not have the knowledge, the wisdom - or the time.
It has never been done. A few areas not too badly destroyed have been
allowed to revert to their "natural" state by leaving them alone, but
there is not one that is undamaged and whole with respect to the complex
biological contents and interactions that existed originally. 

response 17 of 19:

Oct 10 14:09 UTC 1995

I agree with #15.  When you're in an unspoiled area you know it 
right away.  It might not be as picture-pretty as a landscaped 
park, but its beauty grows on you.  Falling in love with such an 
area and seeing it replaced one day by bulldozers and mud is an 
experience everyone should go through.  Reading about it or 
hearing others complain about it isn't enough.  You have to stand 
there, stunned, thinking, "It's gone.  It will never come back." 

Like most "outdoors" people, in which category I include not only 
professional and amateur naturalists and ecologists but also such 
maligned groups as hunters and fishermen, I have had this 
experience several times.  The first time is when I was still a 
teenager.  The city I grew up in had a big park, much of which 
remained in the undeveloped state in which it had been given to 
the city a century earlier.  I crossed one of these areas on foot 
every day on my way to school: ancient conifers and hardwoods, a 
series of deep ravines draining into a series of ponds and 
streams that drained into the Connecticut river.  Skunk cabbage, 
trillium and and jack-in-the-pulpit each spring.  Impassable 
thickets.  Butterflies, dragonflies, robber flies, spider webs.  
The song of the wood thrush, an impossibly lucky (as I now know) 
surprise in the middle of any city.  

The city drained, cleared and filled it in, and built a hundred 
or so cookie-cutter residences for impoverished senior citizens 
on the site.  It was the first time I felt that a group of 
politicians -- self-important nobodies nodding solemnly in 
agreement over some cretinous scheme they want to impose on us 
for our own good -- had gotten together and destroyed something 
irreplaceable and put something ugly and common in its place.  My 
loathing for such people has been absolutely implacable ever 
since.  

There is something profoundly unhealthy about such "development" 
of unspoiled lands.  Robert Frost expresses this in his poem "A 
Brook in the City," which is about a natural area similarly paved 
over.  What to do with the brook, an "immortal force"?  The 
brook, which he had known in prior years, was thrown down into a 
sewer dungeon, not for anything it had ever done, says Frost, 
"except forget to go in fear perhaps."  He wonders if from this 
brook imprisoned under ground, "The thoughts might not have risen 
which so keep This new-built city from both work and sleep."

response 19 of 19:

Dec 25 13:07 UTC 1995

        Start a Grex Monkeywrencher's chapter ...