Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Ms. Wootten. Thank you. I am an unabashed, chauvinist Idahoan. I have lived here most of my life and I love it. The great part of loving Idaho for me is having access to wilderness areas. And like some other people have mentioned, I could make more money somewhere else. But the quality of life in Idaho is important to me. Like a lot of other Idahoans, I naively assumed we had enough wilderness areas because there is a lot of beautiful area around for me to hike and hunt and camp and fish in. So I was really shocked to find out that we really have no wilderness area in North Idaho. Nothing north of the Selway. All of—which to me is the most beautiful part of the State, naturally. All of that is not protected. And it was really a saddening day to me to hear that they wanted to log Mallard-Larkins. This area is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, I think. And it would really be a miserable thing to log it. The reason some of these areas have never been logged is not because they're so beautiful but because they're so inaccessible. Nobody wants to build a road in there who has to pay for it. Timber companies want the taxpayers to build a road in because as Doug Shepherd was saying, most of the timber sales we get for these lands is much less than it costs the taxpayers to build the road. So it's not economical. It encourages wasteful use of the land. Eventually, the loggers are telling us they're going to run out of timber anyway. So if they're not going to open the roadless areas, they're not going to have logs to cut. Eventually, if we open up the roadless areas, they're going to cut all that, too. And then where do they go? I think they have to learn what the farmers learned about the dust bowls in the thirties. That you can't keep taking and taking and taking from the land without putting something back. So the answer is not to give them more lands to log but for them to learn how to replace what they've already taken so they can harvest it again in 60 years. I also think that we don't really know enough to say right now that 1983 is the year that we can decide exactly what we need to do with all our land. It may turn out that in this galaxy, this is the only planet with any kind of life on it. And maybe some of the life forms that we haven't even cataloged yet in the wilderness area will turn out to be ones that we can transplant to the moons of Jupiter for food for settlers. I think we really need to understand the balance before we can make any hard-and-fast decisions. Thank you.