Friday, July 2, 2004

The problem with compromise

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Thanks, but no thanks.

That was the message Rep. Mike Simpson delivered to a room packed with wilderness advocates who had testified on proposed boundaries for a Boulder White Clouds Wilderness.

Simpson chided the 150 to 200 people who showed up to listen and testify with a self-righteous lecture on compromise.

He said that early in his congressional career, people would come up to him and say, "Don’t compromise, Mike." He said he learned quickly that to refuse to compromise is to get nothing done. He cited the U.S. Constitution as a "great compromise."

Sure was. The problem is that there are compromises, and there are sellouts that masquerade as compromises. If President Abraham Lincoln had sold out in the name of constitutional compromise, black Americans would still be slaves.

The problem with any so-called compromise on wilderness lands is that the chance for a real compromise was consumed long ago by America’s torrid love affair with the gasoline engine. Areas today that have not felt the peel of a spinning wheel are tiny, tiny remnants of what was once wild and untouched country.

The Boulder-White Clouds area is one of those remnants. It’s like the last piece of pie in the dish. Most of the pie is long gone, consumed by industrial appetites. But industrial appetites are not easily sated, and they now covet the last piece of pie—the high lakes and the rocky ridges.

Consider. Of 192 million acres of National Forest Lands, 35 million acres are wilderness, and 6 million are proposed wilderness. Just 33 million are unroaded. Yet, in the name of compromise, Rep. Simpson would have us hand over large chunks of the last piece of pie—the last 6 million acres—and call it fair.

It’s not fair.

Nor is it reasonable compromise to call for Boulder-White Clouds boundaries that don’t even include the Boulder Mountains.

It’s not fair to treat as truth the argument that motorized users are being locked out of most wild places.

It’s not fair to the bear, deer and elk that live in peace in the Champion Lakes area to be annexed into a new national Mecca for meddlesome machines.

It’s not fair to give $1 million to a state agency devoted to motorized uses, while converting the easiest family hiking trails to speedways.

Simpson warned that nothing but finding common ground between hikers and motorized users will fly in Idaho.

That should be easy, Congressman. The only real common ground is under everyone’s feet. Anything else is a sellout to political convenience.

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