Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston
Globe
April 17, 2000, Monday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A17
LENGTH: 723 words
HEADLINE:
BILL MCKIBBEN Bill McKibben is the author of "The End of Nature.";
THE
LEGACY OF THE WILDERNESS
BYLINE: By Bill McKibben
BODY:
How will we remember President Clinton?
"Legacy" is a word that comes up only at the end of political lives. Which is
too bad. Policy would look a lot different if our leaders - and voters - spent
more time worrying about what the future might think of us.
But how do
you really see a legacy? The best way I know is by plane. Start out West, in the
vast forests of the Rockies, the Sierra, the Cascades. For most of the last
century, the US Forest Service ruled its vast fiefdom as if it were a timber
company. The evidence spreads out below you: 400,000 miles of road; millions of
acres of clearcuts, leaving the checkerboard patches visible at every point of
the compass; eroded hillsides; silted streams; a string of declining
single-industry communities on the borders of the national
forests. With any luck, that view may not get any worse. The
Clinton administration last year proposed that most of the remaining large
roadless areas in the forest system be closed to future logging
- that they be left for solitude, hiking, evolution; that they support a more
complex and lasting economy of fishing guides and canoe outfitters; that they
serve the interests of the entire nation that owns them. Half a million people
have now testified on the plan, by letter or at 190 public hearings. Most favor
protection - one poll found that 76 percent of Americans wanted no more roads in
these last precious wildernesses. But the political pressure to wreck the last
40 million acres in the name of short-term profit is large; it will take real
political courage to buck the phalanx of Western senators who labor in the
service of timber, mining, and grazing interests. In 10 years, from the window
of that airplane, it will be simple to see who prevailed.
Useful as the
Forest Service plan is out West, though, it does less for New England, mainly
because less of the Northeast is federally owned. About 235,000 New Hampshire
acres would be protected under the plan, compared with 9 million in Idaho. In
the other states of the region, the impact would be negligible.
That's
especially true in Maine, the state that from the air looks most like the
Pacific Northwest. If you fly the land around Baxter State Park, you see
gorgeous lakes and the thin ribbon of wilderness that lines the Allagash - but
mostly you see clear-cuts and logging roads, and the plumes of dust behind the
trucks that carry the trees off to Canada for milling.
In this case,
though, it is private industry, not the federal government, that has overseen
the endless logging. And that industry is in turmoil - 20 percent of the state
of Maine has changed hands in the last two years as huge multinationals trade
land like schoolkids trade Pokemon cards.
The eagle-eye view of Maine
could change too, though, if some of the region's environmentalists are able to
pull off the creation of a new Maine Woods National Park. The proposed park
would cover 3.2 million acres, making it the second-largest in the lower 48
states. Land where the lynx still roams and the wolf might return, land that
could gradually recover into not virgin wilderness but something even more
inspiring: second-chance wilderness, land that has been allowed to recover.
Restore the North Woods, the environmental group backing a proposal to
study the park's feasibility, recently released the names of a hundred or more
prominent Americans who favored such preliminary work, including E.O. Wilson and
Robert Redford. But those names count less than the thousands of Mainers who
have signed petitions, from Kate Barnes, the state's first poet laureate, to
Will LaPage, an Orono professor who served on President Reagan's Commission on
Americans Outdoors, to the owner of an auto body in Waterville. They realize
that if the region can diversify, its economic future will be much brighter.
In the end, though, most people don't make these decisions with a
calculator in hand. We make them at a much deeper level, a gut level. We try to
peer into the future and imagine its shape and imagine what the future will make
of us. That view may not be as crystal clear as the one from a Cessna banking
over Chesuncook Lake on a sun-drenched morning, but it's clear enough to act on.
We've done much to cause trouble for those who come after us, but we can leave
them glories too.
LOAD-DATE: April 17, 2000
