Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Mr. Greenleaf. Good morning, Senator. My name is Kevin Greenleaf, and I'm representing Louisiana-Pacific here this morning from Moyie Springs. Seemingly, however, over hundreds of years in this country re source management through confrontation has been the means by which each particular interest has obtained some part of our natural resources for their own use. Ignoring other's rights to a voice in that management has led to a system today through which objective decisions from unbiased parties are sought. The system of relying, in our case, on Congress for decisions as to the disposition of our local public natural resources, at best, places our congressional leaders in an adversary position with whoever loses the greater amount of the resource by their decision. In respect to the resource, the worst-case decision is one leading to the degredation of the resource or its potential to rejuvenate whether it be due to natural causes or to man's intervention. The disadvantageous position of being 2,000 miles removed from the community and its economic, spiritual and recreational needs only increases the possibility of unwittingly relying on unsubstantiated information or biased fact which increases the chance of reaching a damaging decision with regard to the resource of a community's stability. In the case of Boundary County, as with many rural areas which depend upon their natural resource both private and public for a means of tax support and employment, any decision concerning those resources is deliberated by a greater number of people per capita than in larger or more industrially diverse communities. A decision adversely affecting a single industry can have disastrous effects on not only the people directly employed, but also on the supporting businesses as well.