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[pct-l] wilderness "museums"



    Blister's got a point about our wild-areas becoming museums (or
zoos), but how else can we maintain them? It's obvious what generations
of humans doing-their-own-thing have done to the once-vast expanses of
natural wilderness - surely we can't continue along that path. The best
way we've found to slow extinction of once-pristine environments is to
build legalistic walls around them and try to minimize the "interaction"
that Blister espouses. What's created is not Wilderness anymore in the
strictest sense, but at least it's a decent semblance, and far better
than the unprotected alternative.
   The wild-museums we have now already get plenty of interaction from
us: from our general planetary polution, and from our merely passing
through them as tourists. There are so many of us now, and the wild areas
have so shrunken from what they were (and what they need to be); our
total combined "minimal" impact is enormous and costly. The absolute
*most* we can do is, from a practical POV, not enough anymore; why worsen
that sad scenario by quibbling over "rights" to grab souvenirs, leave
toilet-paper burial pits/charred or flattened campsites, ignore quotas,
and the whole "lighten up" agenda. 
   This gloomy plea isn't aimed at you personally, Blister, only at the
sentiment you conveyed in your post. To specifically address your
museum-analogy (which made me wince, since such things tend to confuse
issues - just because some folks find museums "stuffy" is no reason to
get careless in the backcountry, for instance...): 1) there are good
reasons, having to do with not interfering with others' enjoyment, for
not getting grubby handprints on the display-glass. 2) do you honestly
expect to be able to handle,  deface, or pocket the exhibited artifacts?
A museum setting is an awkward, sometimes uncomfortable, and certainly
unnatural way of viewing treasures, but history has shown us ample
evidence of the alternative: Egyptian tombs, aboriginal petroglyphs,
ancient frescos, the once wildlife-rich African (and North American!)
plains, the forests of Asia, and so on.
   All this nit-picking pro-environment rhetoric can be enormously 
annoying, and when "all you want to do" is relax and get away from urban
stresses, it can seem that you, the lone good-hearted hiker, is unfairly
being held responsible for generations of selfish/ignorant/careless
predecessors. It's all-too easy to compare your backcountry camp with the
city you came from and think: "Nothing I could do could possibly alter
this vast and untouched [even as you are "touching" it :-/' ) Wild land!"
- but you know in your heart that's not true. Pretty much all we have
left now are museums, in the form of designated Wilderness-areas,
National Parks, wildlife refuges, and their existance is precarious,
depending on such non-"natural" exigencies as human-population
growth/expansion, economic fluctuations, and shifts in
political/philosophical thinking. The "wilderness" we can visit today is
no longer what true wilderness once was. Can we really afford to add to
the compromise?               bj                                         
                                                                  

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