United States Has Enough Wilderness, Thank You
http://forests.org/-- Forest Conservation Archives
12/17/98
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: United States Has Enough Wilderness, Thank You
Source: PRNewswire
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 12/17/98
CHICAGO, Dec. 17 /PRNewswire/-- Though roughly one-third of
the land area of the United States could be defined as
"wilderness," environmentalists clamor for additions to the
National Wilderness Preservation System, the federal
government's wilderness set-aside program. A new study from
The Heartland Institute contends that enough is enough.
In addition to the NWPS' 104 million acres, hundreds of
millions of acres of remote lands, backcountry, parks,
forests, and nature preserves are available to wilderness
enthusiasts-- plenty to serve not only recreation, but other
values as well.
"The U.S. has enormous resources of wildlands," write James
Patric and Raymond Harbin, authors of the new study, "and
each kind can provide somebody's version of a wilderness
experience."
Patric, retired after a nationwide career in research with
the U.S. Forest Service, and Harbin, a lumber
importer/exporter in Atlanta, note that "much of the
National Wilderness Preservation System is too remote from
population centers or too foreboding for consistently heavy
use. The NWPS lands best suit the purists; far greater
numbers of people resort to less pristine recreational
facilities located fairly close to roads and home."
"Given the 11-fold expansion of the NWPS since its founding
in 1964, is there evidence that nature worshipers find 11
times more satisfaction in it?" ask Patric and Harbin.
The debate over wilderness set-asides has important
implications for taxpayers and the economy. The
administration of NWPS lands costs taxpayers roughly $110
million a year-- a figure that excludes many hundreds of
millions of dollars earmarked for land acquisition.
Setting aside land as wilderness also means a loss of jobs,
tax revenues, and commodity values for affected communities.
Such losses, note Patric and Harbin, can be especially acute
in western states, where vast areas of publicly owned timber
are already off-limits to harvest. Nearly half of the
forests of the Pacific northwest, and half of California's
redwood forests, are off-limits to harvest. Twenty-seven
percent of Washington state's total timber base, and 60
percent of Oregon's, is in some form of preserved status. Of
the 490 sawmill, pulp, plywood, panel, and veneer mills that
operated in those two states in 1988, well over half (350)
are now closed for lack of timber.
"Uninformed emotion, standards of urban esthetics, and
polarized opinion have superceded science, professional
expertise, and economics as guides to our uses of
wildlands," warn Patric and Harbin.