> Residents in the community of King Cove want to exchange land to build a gravel road through the refuge to provide access to an all-weather airport in nearby Cold Bay for medical transports.
I live five miles from pavement, an hour from a hospital, so I understand these concerns.
I would be absolutely disgusted if they paved through my local national forest for some quicker access to... Anything. Literally anything.
Those people all have the choice to leave. Living in remote places comes with many, many tradeoffs and inconveniences. There's no safety in the wilderness.
Keep the wild places wild. There's so little left.
It's about power and control if you go by this part:
“The split panel decision would allow the secretary, without any public process or without compliance with any other laws, to engage in a backroom land exchange,”
I wouldn't do those things either, though. People get to choose where and how to raise their children. Children don't get a say so in virtually anything that affects them.
"Think of the children" is not a good argument.
Also the whole population is like 1200 people. We're talking about a relative handful of kids. Like one very small elementary school (edit: Google search says there's 87 kids in PK-12th grade. Combined.)
Is patently false. It's not "think of the children." It's pointing out that statement was a vicious lie. I'm pointing out they've simply ignored the people who were born there.
We're talking about a road connecting two closest communities. You've said yourelf you wouldn't do the things to remove these residents from these communities. I would find it hypocritical for someone to take advantages of roads in their own community while denying this community a single road to the closest airport to the kind of medical services that those in the lower 48 can drive to (even if it takes them awhile).
People can do things until they can't, I don't know what you're claiming otherwise.
I bought 40 acres adjacent to national forest service land and I keep about 38 acres of it wild. I try to improve the forest and provide good habitat, and I've been rewarded with a lot of wildlife.
I've said in another comment, I'm an hour from a hospital.
I am both doing a lot for my local ecosystems, and also demanding that a national forest owned by the national government thousands of miles away be preserved as wild.
You can change the phrasing to attack the idea, but that's my idea as I intend it.
The people there can serve their own interests just fine. I think a whole lot of us can help keep wild places wild, and that's equally important as you working locally.
Do we even know what the locals think, by the way? Like actual normal people who live there? I would bet it's not a one-sided issue.
I'm directing it at myself as much as anyone else. Like yeah, it's shitty that a gravel road could very well spiral into further ecological destruction and sprawl. It's also shitty to assume that it'll do so and use that assumption to actively hinder the quality of life for a community - especially when in all likelihood the vast majority of people wanting to impose such a hindrance do so from the comfort of lifestyles built upon far greater degrees of ecological destruction. It's great that you're making a positive difference (and if I had the funds to buy 40 acres of land I'd be thrilled to do something similar), but among those condemning a gravel road in a national forest, you're almost certainly the exception, not the rule - and even if I was such an exception, it still wouldn't be my place to judge them for that.
Put differently:
> Do we even know what the locals think, by the way? Like actual normal people who live there? I would bet it's not a one-sided issue.
No. We don't. That's exactly my point. Humans need to choose to be good stewards of the world they inherited. We lack the context, the moral high ground, and the ability to make that choice on anyone else's behalf.
> We lack the context, the moral high ground, and the ability to make that choice on anyone else's behalf.
I don't disagree with these sentiments. I feel the same.
But I don't think I'm deciding for them. I'm not part of the deciding body. I'm voicing my opinion in opposition, and in defense of our wild lands. We all have different motivations, and some of them are bad for our planet. I think it's fine to stand against them, and still accept the different viewpoint of others. I don't consider people with different opinions to be my enemies. Nearly every belief I can hold is disbelieved by another human, and that's okay--truly. I think we need to be experimenting with many ways of life.
But we're pissed on others for wanting a single gravel road, so that they don't die if some emergency happens...
As the old Serbian saying goes: "it's easy to beat hawthorns with someone else's penis"...
It's a really weird argument, you're basically saying that people shouldn't be allowed to upgrade their infrastructure ever? Imagine saying that for some poor country: "Oh, well, they either had no running water before, or they knew the situation before moving there, so screw them, they can just continue walking 5 miles every day to bring water from the spring".
Also they've been without that road a lot longer than 40 years, King Cove exists since at least 1930s. Population is dropping so I doubt many people have been moving there, most of people live there their whole life....and if they get sick or injured and planes can't land, they're screwed without that road.
In a wilderness area? No.
I'm sure there are plenty of wonderful places to live in Alaska that have access to a hospital. If one chooses to live in a wilderness area with no road service, one accepts no road service.
It isn't unusual for elderly people to move to a place that is easier to maintain and is in close proximity to a hospital.
I cannot come up with any motivations besides the guy actually just wants to protect the wild.
He grew up close to the land, so that makes sense to me.
I can't find a single occurrence of "alaska" in his Wikipedia article. Got any ref?
Edit: I don't mind the downvote, but could someone explain if I missed something obvious?
Thanks for your kind explanation. This is the part I didn't know.
In my defence, I did check the dictionary [1] but didn't find anything to suggest land means nature/rural/etc.
The people there are welcome to enjoy the wilderness. Not pave it.
I don't have any claim whatsoever to the lands of my ancestors, either. Nor do I have any claim on the land my neighbors live on, or the nearby park.