[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Lost in Space

[michael at intrafi.com]

The article below from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by michael at intrafi.com.



/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\

GARDEN STATE: IN NY & LA WEDNESDAY & SELECT THEATERS AUGUST 6

GARDEN STATE stars Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard
and Ian Holm.  NEWSWEEK's David Ansen says "Writer-Director Zach
Braff has a genuine filmmaker's eye and is loaded with talent."
Watch the teaser trailer that has all of America buzzing and
talk back with Zach Braff on the Garden State Blog at:

http://www.foxsearchlight.com/gardenstate/index_nyt.html

\----------------------------------------------------------/


Lost in Space

July 24, 2004
 By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF 



 

SOMEWHERE IN THREE SISTERS WILDERNESS, Oregon - As I
scribble these words in my notebook, I'm totally lost. 

My two sons and I are backpacking on the Pacific Crest
Trail, but the trail disappeared under three feet of snow
several miles ago. So we set out cross-country, camping
last night on a patch of green surrounded by snow. 

At the moment it's dawn at our bivouac, right about
timberline, and my sons are still sleeping, blithely
confident that we'll find our way again. And, truth be
told, so long as one has food, shelter and a compass, it's
gloriously liberating to be lost in a snowy wilderness. 

That was a couple of weeks ago, and we eventually hiked
beyond the snow and stumbled across a trail again. But I
strongly recommend the practice of getting lost in the
wilderness, and our government should give us more
opportunities to do so. 

A focus of the American environmental movement has been
conservation, and that's why there is such rage at the Bush
administration's efforts to log, mine or drill patches of
wilderness from the Arctic to Florida. President Bush has
done more than any other recent president to shift our
environmental balance away from conservation and toward
development. 

Mr. Bush's Healthy Forests initiative, in its harsh early
version, allowed logging companies to pillage federal land.
The latest assault is President Bush's decision to overturn
the Clinton administration's "roadless rule," protecting
nearly 60 million acres of national forests from road
building and development. 

Presidential fingerprints on a country usually fade
quickly, but an exception is the decision to preserve or
develop the wilderness. Teddy Roosevelt's imprint on
21st-century America is enormous because he preserved wild
spaces for future generations, while Mr. Bush's
22nd-century legacy may be the permanent scarring of those
same spaces. 

Yet the environmental movement is wrong to emphasize
preservation for the sake of the wolves and the moose
alone. We should preserve wilderness for our sake - to
remind us of our scale on this planet, to humble us, to
soothe us. Nothing so civilizes humans as the wild. 

That means that we not only have to preserve wilderness,
but we also must get more people into it. It's great that
we have managed to save the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge. But virtually the only visitors who get to enjoy it
are superwealthy tourists who charter airplanes to fly into
remote airstrips. 

So how about a hiking trail from Arctic Village going north
to the Brooks Range, allowing many more people to enjoy the
refuge? How about polar bear ecotourism in Kaktovik? Why
not democratize the chance to hear wolves howl or be
menaced by grizzlies? 

The greatest opportunity for a conservation legacy, just
waiting for some politician to grab it, is a proposed
east-west hiking trail across America. The 7,700-mile
sea-to-sea route, as sketched on maps, runs from Cape Alava
in Washington State to Cape Gaspé in Quebec (see <a
href="http://www.c2c-route.org/C2C/about_C2C.htm"
target=new>www.c2c-route.org/C2C/about_C2C.htm). 

The U.S. already has three great long-distance hiking
trails: the Appalachian Trail in the East, the Continental
Divide Trail in the Rockies and the Pacific Crest Trail on
the West Coast. They are steadily getting more users, and
the trend toward ultralite backpacking is making trail
hiking more appealing. 

At a time when America is struggling with obesity and fewer
Americans have daily contact with the outdoors, we should
not be sealing off the wilderness but rather increasing
access to it for those on foot or horseback. Canada is
building the world's longest hiking trail, a 11,000-mile
path called the Trans Canada Trail, and Europe is building
a dazzling collection of distance trails, including the
6,500-mile E4 European Long Distance Path, from Portugal to
Cyprus. But the U.S. is dozing on the couch. 

I wish that Mr. Bush's environmental policy wasn't rooted
in rapine. But I also wish that the green movement fought
as hard for interactions between humans and our environment
as it did against blind development. If environmentalists
applied a small fraction of the energy they devoted to
fighting snowmobiles in Yellowstone to push for the
coast-to-coast trail, we would now have one. 

We should give our descendants every chance to show their
children how puny we humans are in a wilderness, by taking
them hiking and getting them bitten by mosquitoes,
hopelessly lost and totally exhilarated. 

E-mail: nicholas at nytimes.com


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/24/opinion/24kristof.html?ex=1091688102&ei=1&en=d2651f9e99db9161


---------------------------------

Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine
reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like!
Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy
now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here:

http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF



HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters 
or other creative advertising opportunities with The 
New York Times on the Web, please contact
onlinesales at nytimes.com or visit our online media 
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

For general information about NYTimes.com, write to 
help at nytimes.com.  

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company