At 03:55 PM 6/2/01 +0200 J. van Baardwijk wrote:
>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".
>
[snip]
>I am not saying that this will absolutely definitely certainly happen, but
>there is also no guarantee that it *won't* happen.
Actually, there is. In the United States we have a designated Wilderness
Area program, that sets aside tracks of land to be left "untouched by the
hand of man" for all time. In Alaska, we have already set aside areas as
designated wilderness areas that equal to the size of several mid-sized
States. The wilderness section of the ANWR alone is nearly the size of
South Carolina. (The North Slope area of the ANWR where the drilling is
proposed is not designated wilderness, in part to leave open the
possibility of drilling for oil there, and in part because there is already
a Native American Village there with an airstrip and few oil wells.)
Yet, the ANWR wilderness area is positively dwarfed in size by the
wilderness section of the Gates of the Arctic National Park. There are
many other wilderness areas in Alaska.
There is, for all intents and purposes, *zero* chance of there not being
significant amounts of wilderness available in Alaska for future generations
JDG
__________________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - ICQ #3527685
"Compassionate conservatism is the way to reconcile the two most vital
conservative intellectual traditions: libertarianism and Catholic social
thought."
-Michael Gerson, advisor to George W. Bush
