The 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.
He is not without some critical words for the environmental movement.
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.
That's right, make preservation more important to more people, that's the way to gain support. This issue is like many other progressive issues, no real attempt has been made to sell it to people outside the movement. That is why progressives are seen as not representing the common man. The republicans have taken advantage of this. Progressives must become sales people or else we will continue to look like the pointy head intellectuals that the Republicans paint us to be.
More on the roadless area rule change from Mark Fiore: Everything Must Go
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