The Master Plan. . . and Wildlands

No man is an island, but if some rabid environmentalists have their way, we could soon be crammed together in human enclaves while half of the North American continent is preserved or restored to wilderness solely for the purpose of protecting biological diversity.

That’s the goal of the Wildlands project, an ambitious proposal to expand and connect wildlife refuges so that they do not become “islands” ravaged by development from all sides.

The vision is simple, according to Chairman David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First! “We live for the day when grizzlies in Chihuahua have an unbroken connection to grizzlies in Alaska; when grey wolf populations are continuous from Durango to Labrador; when vast unbroken forests and flowing plans again thrive and support pre-Colombian populations of plants and animals.”

The goal is to turn the clock back to 1491. And that begs the question; does all this mean the end of industrialized civilization? You bet, according to another supporter of the project. “Most assuredly. Everything civilized must go . . .”

Bruce Babbitt, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, has expressed support for the project, as have numerous environmental groups and corporate foundations. The Turner Foundation is reported to be the single largest underwriter. And bits and pieces of the master plan are already working their way into local land-planning exercises.

The Yellowstone to Yukon project (Y2Y) in British Columbia is a component of the Wildlands project. The goal here is to preserve wilderness along 1,800 miles of the Rocky Mountains from Yellowstone to the Mackenzie Mountains in the Yukon. Roughly half the total landmass of the province would be affected, along with numerous rural communities. The pricetag in lost gross domestic product has been estimated at $5.4 billion.

As usual, the groups advocating removal of half of British Columbia from human activity are American. They are the same people who convinced the B.C. government to lock up the Windy Craggy copper project by making it a park. And they are the same people now opposing Redfern Resources’ Tulsequah Chief mine project, near the Alaskan Panhandle.

It doesn’t matter to these groups that British Columbians have engaged in years and years of land-planning ostensibly aimed at ending valley-by-valley disputes over resource development. The province’s citizens were told to hang in there because there would be “peace in the valley” at the end of the exercise.

Well, peace never came and the exercise never ended. Land-use battles still rage in the province, which some green groups now view as their private wilderness preserve.

And don’t think such wilderness is merely scenic terrain suitable for backpacking and tourism. The proponents of Wildlands reject that notion. They see wilderness as “the home for unfettered life, free from industrial human intervention.”

Preserving wildlife and wildlands are admirable goals. But what about people? The fundamental flaw of the Wildlands proposal is that it does not address where and how humans fit into the master plan, other than some fuzzy rhetoric about us dwelling “with respect, harmony and affection for the land.”

Rural people live in wilderness areas for those reasons already. People who make their living from the land understand it far better than most city-dwellers. It is an insult to suggest they are all crass exploiters, incapable of protecting bird and beast.

Another flaw in the Wildlands master plan is that it is impossible to turn the clock back to pre-Colombian times . . . at least not without getting rid of millions of people first. And they would have to go, because present populations could not be maintained. There would be insufficient land for agriculture and for the extraction of the resource products necessary for a civilized society.

Until humans voluntarily give up civilization to live in unheated caves, the Wildlands plan, as envisioned, will never work. The social and economic consequences would simply be too horrific. Yet architects of the program will continue to push their agenda to sympathetic politicians, who in turn fail to take into account the real-world costs to be borne by their constituents.

It’s frightening to think that government bureaucrats might one day forbid us to venture into the wilderness for fear that we might step on an endangered plant or disturb a rare bird or insect. Yet if the people behind Wildlands have their way, such a day will come soon enough. Canada’s environment minister, David Anderson, is already drawing up plans to make such activities a crime, even on private land.

The time has come to take a stand against the portrayal of humans as invaders and a cancer on the land. We’re part of nature and the evolutionary process . . . part of Mother Nature’s master plan. We belong here too.