Yet more wilderness

[jimfoo]

Another group wanting to create yet more wilderness areas in Colorado. http://www.whiteriverwild.org/

[Red_Chili]

Signed up for their bulletin.
FWIW, a club member met one of the principals of the group yesterday and had a nice talk with her. She was interested to hear the concerns of 4x4ers who also highly prized wild country and were concerned about environmental issues - as well as access issues.

Stay tuned.

[GPP33]

?We are actively involved in open discussions with local citizens to solidify the boundaries of this proposal?

This comment leads one to believe that they may actually be open to public input. So do your part and let them know your thoughts. Please don?t send them a full on red neck white trash email saying you deserve somewhere to tear up the land. If you have something somewhat intelligent to add make it a point to do it. This appears to be for real based on the members of the steering committee. ( http://www.whiteriverwild.org/p-about-us-8.html )

I do find it ironic though that they have a whole page dedicated to logging roads, basically all boiling down to

?The Congressional Budget Office reports that in 2002 alone the Forest Service spent $146 million more on timber sales than it made.?

Keep in mind this is used to support the wilderness designation.

Then they go on to say that?..

?The impact Wilderness has on the availability of commercial timber is insignificant.?

So which one is it? Does wilderness affect the situation or is it insignificant?

[jimfoo]

Well, even if they take us into consideration, I really don't think we need to keep on creating wilderness, locking up our resources so that we have to rely more and more on things imported from other countries. Every place is special and beautiful in it's own way. Animals don't need protection from our encroachment, as minimal as it would be in those areas. They adapt, just like they have done for millions of years. Up here, there are elk and deer right by the road every day. They don't give a crap if cars go by or not. I guess I'm just fed up with the whole "if we don't save the earth, it will be destroyed" BS that keeps on going around.

[GPP33]

Something else that would be an interesting point of argument.

On the website they state:

Myth: America already has plenty of designated Wilderness areas.
Fact: Only about 2% of the contiguous United States is currently wilderness. Even adding the Wilderness acerage in the vastness of the state of Alaska only brings that up to 4.4% of the entire United States.

I wonder what percentage of the contiguous United States is currently non paved Forest Service and BLM roads. I?m guessing less than .00000001% but it would be interesting to add up. Also of interest would be what the percentage of public land within the US is. Quite frankly the % of total land is irrelevant.

That said I do support additional wilderness if designated properly.

On a side note, yes, they did misspell ?acreage?.