Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

COUNTY COMMUNITY EDUCATION Ms. Blanchard. Thank you, Senator. Last year I was the project director of a symposium called Man, Wildlife and the Public Land, which was held in Boise in the fall. During the course of this project, I learned a great deal about the people and the wild land and wildlife of Idaho. Based on what I learned I would encourage you to designate the maximum numbers of acres possible as wilderness in Idaho. De spite our 33 million acres of public land, the quality of our recre ational opportunities has actually diminished. According to 1980 projections by the U.S. Soil Conservation Serv ice, merely 18,000 acres a year are converted from brush to irrigat ed cropland in Idaho. About 6,000 acres are added to urban development and another 14,000 acres are going into recreational development and summer homesites. Also in the past 10 years the population of Idaho has grown 32 percent, from 712,000 to over 944,000. Every field, every open space, every vacant lot that is developed, puts more and more pressure on our Federal and State recreation al areas. The situation is much worse in other States where wilder ness areas have been adversely impacted by urban growth. We sometimes forget, too, that this is a shared habitat, and if we don't expand our wilderness system we will lose threatened species such as the bobcat, grizzly bear, white sturgeon, caribou, peregrine falcon, and salmon and steelhead, probably by the year 2000. In the future, yes, we might have shortages of gas, oil, coal, ura nium, but that is partially the result of our own waste and short sightedness. But let's not be shortsighted about wilderness. Even worse than a lack of these natural resources would be the lack of enough wilderness. Let Pennsylvania be known for its coal, California for its sun shine and Idaho for its wilderness.