Frankenstein wilderness?
With his proposal for a White Clouds
Wilderness Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson has created a blueprint for a new
Frankenstein that could threaten all of the nation’s wilderness areas.
His plan is a three-headed monster, a
creature energized by hope, but deformed by committee engineering.
His call for three separate wilderness
areas, each surrounded by roads or trails for all terrain vehicles, bears no
resemblance to the primitive places described in the 1964 Wilderness Act.
The act calls for wilderness areas to be
"untrammeled by man" and of "primeval character." Simpson’s proposal would
ensure that trammeling is the rule, not the exception, in the White Clouds.
The act says wilderness is an area that
"generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with
the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable. Wilderness also "has
outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of
recreation."
That’s hardly what Simpson’s proposal
provides. While slicing and dicing the area with motorized trails, it also calls
for opening the pristine Champion Lakes and Washington Basin to ATVs. Places
where the deer and antelope now play could instead become inhabited by hordes of
noisy machines that can inflict great damage.
Simpson’s plan is an Orwellian attempt to
make wilderness synonymous with machines. That’s like trying to make English
gardens synonymous with the Los Angeles Freeway.
When Congress approved the Wilderness Act,
it wanted to secure wilderness areas "to assure that an increasing population,
accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy
and modify, all areas within the United States and its possessions."
Simpson’s plan does just what Congress
wanted to prevent.
The White Clouds could become a national
magnet for motorized recreation, which would destroy the very solitude the
Wilderness Act should protect. The Forest Service and the BLM don’t have enough
money or people to police trails today, let alone enough to handle an area that
could attract thousands of dirt bikes and four-wheelers.
The price of this folly would be to open
the nation’s door to more legislative shenanigans. There would be nothing to
prevent putting the Indianapolis 500 Speedway around an area and then claiming
it to be wilderness.
Definitional problems aside, the real
mystery to be pondered at the end of the day is why anyone—even people who
worship at the altar of the god of the combustion engine—would willingly give
over one of the last sacred wild places in America to industrial tyranny and
destruction.