At 22:09 1-6-01 -0400, John Giorgis wrote:
>At 08:12 PM 5/29/01 -0700 Doug Pensinger wrote:
> > And no,
> >John, I'm not trying to say it's the only piece or even the best piece. But
> >of all the land in all the world very little of it survives unscathed and we
> >ought to save as much of it as is practicable. The cost: 6 months to two
> >years worth of oil for the United States. Max. Now that is truly no big
> deal
> >in the grand scheme of things.
>
>All I'm saying is that in Alaska we have a superabundence of wilderness
>preserved as designated "Wilderness Areas" for all time. (Or at least as
>long as the USA endures.) Our failure to add a few thousand acres to that
>designated wilderness area will have a negligible effect upon the amount of
>preserved Alaskan wilderness available to future generations.
The danger with this is the probability of it happening again. When you
start with 1 million acres of wilderness and someone wants to use 1,000
acres for industrial purposes, the argument will be made that it is "only
0.1% of the total area".
Sometime later, someone wants to use another 2,000 acres of the remaining
999,000 acres, and will use the argument "it's only 0.2% of the total
area". It's only a small area at a time, but if and when it happens
repeatedly, it really adds up -- especially once companies want more than
just 1,000 or 2,000 acres. For instance, after a while a company may want
another 10,000 acres to build a town for all those people working on those
n-thousand acres already taken from the wilderness.
I am not saying that this will absolutely definitely certainly happen, but
there is also no guarantee that it *won't* happen.
Jeroen
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