Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Mr. Reinheimer. Senator McClure, my name is Karen Reinheimer. I'd like to say that I'm from Blaine County, and as a concerned voter and taxpayer of Idaho, I urge you to protect the specified en dangered lands under consideration today. Oftentimes the land developers, both in mining and logging, do not live in Idaho. These operations are here only as long as busi ness proves to be lucrative. Then they are gone, leaving behind our once untouched and beloved mountains and lakes, an unnatural wasteland no longer fit for hiking, camping, hunting or fishing. 367 And I'm afraid most of the 1 million visitors to the Sawtooth Na tional Recreational Area may be well long gone, too. Having hailed from New York City, I carry the clear memory of masses of poverty stricken areas, physically polluted lands, and a psychologically lost people. Lauded as the true backbone of Amer ica, this is the product of our financial Mecca's, both east and west. And will this then be the beginning of our true poverty in Idaho? I think that the magnitude of this tragedy of our diminishing unroaded lands will someday warrant its being named the Second Cruxification. There was once a different time. But now gone are the bear and elk, fresh waters and clear horizons. Why would anyone want to take away our last small legacy of land that speaks of a natural order so rapidly disappearing in our lands? I will graduate as a grade school teacher next year. I know that the monetary return on potential mining and logging operations in these endangered areas will directly rob the heritage of our chil dren. I pray that someday I will not stand before these children and tell them of a once noble land that was thrown away under the false guise of economic progress. I ask you to designate these lands as wilderness areas and not continue to hammer nails into the environmental coffin; for, as in all premature deaths, it will be a deep tragedy, and irreconcilable.