[pct-l] Scary bear story & not hanging food

[dude at fastmail.ca (dude)]

Jon - that story is really nice and it does illustrate a great point.  
However, it doesn't fit the scenario pertaining to bears in the Sierra.

Problem bears in the Sierra are not a vanishing resource that nature 
created like the flowers in your analogy; problem bears are a nuisance 
created by man.

A better analogy would be garbage in the national parks.  Your RV-going 
public comes to the parks and litters all over the place, so a small 
groupd of nature-lovers flee the popular camping destinations to get 
away from the garbage, but when they get to their remote camping spots, 
they are disappointed because there is so much garbage brought up by 
the tourists that the wind has blown the garbage even to the remote 
places so that the small group of nature-lovers have nowhere to go that 
is not contaminated by garbage.  Pretty soon there is so much garbage 
in the popular destinations that the park service actually picks up 
giant loads of garbage and dumps it in the remote places to get rid of 
it.  This is just like they take problem bears and relocate them in the 
back country, except with bears its even worse because the habituated 
bears teach the nonhabituated bears their tricks, so the problem 
multiplies.




> A little story....
> 
> Lets say there's a meadow of really pretty flowers up in the Sierras. 
> There's a rule that says nobody can pick the flowers because the
> flowers almost were wiped out in the area because everybody was
> picking them.  Nonetheless, there are thousands of nasty tourists who
> come in RV's (driving 15 MPH below the speed limit on mountain passes)
> and pick the flowers each of them saying "Oh, it won't hurt to pick
> just one."
> 
> Then there are a small, dedicated group of nature lovers who love the
> outdoors.  They trek trough the moutains, enduring great hardship in
> order to see wonderful things the tourists in the RV's are too lazy to
> go and see.  They come upon the lovely flower meadow and say "Oh, it
> won't hurt to pick just one.  I can really appreciate it more than
> those lazy ass RVers.  So wise in the ways of the mountains, I can
> even do it undetected: stealth picking."
> 
> The meadow eventually dies.  In the end, who's really to blame?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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