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Charlotte Wiggins, who works for the U.S. Forest Service in Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest, offers a succinct summary of the state of play: "The environmentalists want to see the land untouched by humans, whereas those who live on the land want to use it. There is no common ground, no way to compromise."
Black helicopters flicker at the edge of the mind. In Missouri, Marge Welch, a field director for the antiroadless organization People for the USA, sees the proposal as a small but evil step "on the way to total federal control over the land for elitist uses. First they will block timber, then mining and then agriculture. Then the land will be worthless and people would be forced to leave. They are more concerned with wildlife than with people."
Al Gore is in favor of the President's roadless-lands plan. He would take it a step further, forbidding all logging on the lands and including the Tongass National Forest in the ban. George W. Bush is against it. He vows "to put the national forests back to work." In the West, politicians argue the issue bitterly. When Clinton visited Idaho in August, Republican Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage's spokeswoman was unmoved. "President Clinton came to Idaho to watch Idaho burn and tell us he felt our pain," she said. "Clinton felt our pain because he caused it"--in her mind, with earlier Administration policies that cut logging by more than 85%, chiefly for environmental reasons, to protect the spotted owl and other endangered species.
Irreconcilable differences, two incompatible American faiths.
On one side is a vigorous entrepreneurialism that regards the natural bounty of America as a resource to be enjoyed in a robustly material way--to be organized, exploited, developed and tamed with chain saws and hotels and jet skis and snowmobiles. It is a proprietary faith: no one better tell me what to do with my own land.
On the other side is the conservationist faith, an essentially spiritual longing that comes to the sacred American landscape as to a paradise that can only be dirtied by the enterprise of man. Of this faith there was no greater prophet than John Muir, the Scottish-born bard of American grandeurs and of what he called "the Godful wilderness."
To follow Muir in his western travels is to see America with the dew still on it--and to understand the environmentalist longing, almost a Jungian nostalgia for what the world was...before. Muir writes in the Yosemite, "And so the beauty of the lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees, but as far as I have seen, man alone, and the animals he tames, destroys these gardens." Muir is the American mystic of trees, the rhapsodist of the intention behind the idea of roadless forests. Muir writes, "The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted...broad, exuberant, mantling forests, with the largest, most varied, most fruitful and most beautiful trees in the world."