Creating a beautiful environment is no problem once we are rich. And what makes us rich is paving the forests over to produce lots of products. It’s really wrong to think of it as recreating something that is ‘destroyed’. We bring about the state of affairs that has the greatest utility for us at the moment. When you have no other way to heat your home, you’d rather have firewood than the ability to look at a beautiful forest. But when you have an electric stove you don’t need firewood so you rather want a nice forest to look at. It’s always a trade-off for the greater marginal utility. Does it really make sense to say "let’s not have firewood now because in the future when we have electric stoves it will be really expensive to recreate this forest "?
Hey WILL SANKEY, great photos. I wonder if you know a couple of my friends who are climbers, Crazy Timmy O’____, or Clay W? I also had the pleasuring of knowing Chuck Kroger, who made the FA of the Heart route in 1970 (http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=474787)
You need a government permit to float many of the western rivers, but our royalty–members of congress and the administration, for example–can get a permit by virtue of their status as courtians. Political influence has profound impact and effective control of all government property.
The Bureau of Reclamation (aka, wreck-the-nation) and those notorious dam builders, the Army Corp of Engineers, were set with all the necessary political backing to put two more dams on the Colorado River in the GRAND CANYON, of all places. You can still see where they did some preliminary dynamiting on the lovely walls of Marble Canyon. Fortunately, the Sierra Club took the fight to the public and the dam builders backed down. Before that happened, however, the pols sicked the IRS on the Sierra Club to shut them up. At the time the Club was a 501c3 organization and not allowed “to engage in politics.” But the Sierra Club said, literally, “to hell with that,” surrendered their 501c3 status and beat the dam buggers.
Unfortunately, the government dam-building forces did manage to build the Glen Canyon dam on the Colorado at the head of the Grand Canyon, and in the process buried under water what was once one of the most beautiful spots on the face of the earth, different but comparable for its beauty with the Grand, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier, Zion and all those other magnificent places. Anyone who trusts the State to preserve the lands it owns doesn’t understand the vicissitudes of political control and the fact that it can and in the right circumstanceswill sacrifice anything for some political expedient. In time of a serious war, the pols might decide to use Camp 4 as a troop-training base and El Cap would make a nice bombing target.
I think there are plently of people who would be willing to donate to national parks or by shares in order to vote on certian issues.